Bon Jovi represent the respectable face of American rock. Patrick Dutch is impressed.

Bon Jovi are the sort of band that make you really sick. As I walk into the Holiday Inn in Swiss Cottage looking somewhat dishevelled I espy in the coffee shop Ritchie Sambora, guitarist with Bon Jovi, one of America's most successful young Rock bands. Successful being 750,000 copies of the band's new LP Slippery When Wet selling within 11 days of release. Young, attractive, successful — it makes you sick doesn' it?

The band are here to do some thawing out after some European dates, and surprising though it may seem, the long cold, wet season known to us natives as the English summer is preferable to the weather on the European festival circuit.

"Out in Germany at the Monsters of Rock festival it was so damn cold I had to watch my hands to see what my fingers were doing for the first couple of numbers. It wasn't so bad when we went to Mannheim because we were the only band it didn't rain on. It rained so hard on Michael Schenker that all his wireless units went to shit!"

Ritchie Sambora is every inch the Rock star. In a sweat shirt and jeans he makes me look very scruffy indeed and I'm wearing a shirt and jacket. The band's single — You Give Love A Bad Name — is the first to chart in the UK, and as they are not already known as a Rock band here, it's possible that they will get a stab at the pop stakes. But they're not too happy about being labelled so early in their career.

"I don't see us as a Rock band, I just see us as Bon Jovi. We have had problems in the past with people categorising us, saying we're Rock or Metal or whatever, but we don't want to be put into a category. Y'see Jon (Bon Jovi, singer, songwriter and geezer that they took their name from) is a good looking guy and a lot of women are attracted to him but apart from that he's a great singer and frontman. If he wasn't I wouldn't be here, but these days the image gets in front of the music and that pisses me off. That's why the new LP is black because people label us because of our image and don't give our music a chance."

Ritchie is the proud owner of a collection of some very nice guitars but unlike a lot of collectors these guitars are not boxed up and labelled 'Do Not Touch'.

"I have about 30 guitars and I use all of them for getting different sounds on different tracks. One of my main guitars is a custom built Les Paul-type guitar I had made for me. It's really ornate with loads of inlays and stuff. It's great — it's got a couple of Seymour Duncan '59 humbuckers in it. I tried a lot of other hot pickups in it but they just squealed all over the place. These ones are still hot but not quite so much, just toned down a little. I also have a lot of Strats. Strats are good because with a five way toggle switch you can get a lot of variation from them. I used to use them a lot when I was doing sessions. I've got a couple of Kramers that I use quite a lot and a Jackson Charvel."

Guitar synths have also left their mark within the band, the evidence of which can be heard on the new LP.

"I have an IVL guitar pickup and rackmounted MIDI link, which is great because I can have, say, 30 different guitar sounds without having to keep changing guitars. The time thing is good too it's almost as good as an ordinary pickup! I think it's important to keep up with modern technology. I think that you should always be progressing. I'm a Led Zeppelin freak and the reason that they were so good was that they were always trying new things and each album was different from the last. That's great because people don't want to listen to the same old sounds. I mean, who wants to listen to Runaway (the band's first single and now their standard) in five years time?"

Ritchie has also learned from other people's mistakes and it looks as if the band are making a conscious effort not to make the same ones themselves. While all three of their LPs are in the same vein they all have distinctly different styles. The latest is a bit more anthemic, fists in the air and more sing-a-long-a-Jon than the previous releases, but even the most die-hard misery-type Smiths fan will find themselves involuntarily tapping their foot and maybe murmering the odd chorus or two.

Enter Jon Bon Jovi. Very tight trousers, long blond hair and a hairy chest. Jon is also a guitar player as well as a singer and contributes some of his playing live. At the Dominion theatre last year the PA packed in and he ran on stage with his Ovation acoustic and rendered a good if fairly inaudible version of a Tom Petty song. Guitars don't seem as important to him as they do to Ritchie.

"I just put it on the back pickup, crank it up and let it rip! I use a couple of Kramers and I've got a lovely Ovation I use a lot. It's a great advantage being a player because I can record and play a song into a tape player rather than just sing it. I was a guitar player before I was a singer but I was the only guy in the band who could sing and play guitar at the same time, so I got the job!"

At this point a porter struggles across the foyer with a trolley laden with guitars and flight cases.

"We brought a few things with us when we came," smiled Ritchie. So do the band actually sit in the hotel at night and practise in their hotel rooms?

"Well I don't. I am the laziest sonovabitch ever! I'm so lazy that I don't even like reaching down to take a guitar out of the case. I have to leave them in strategic places around the room. Then I pick them up and jam around a bit."

"I do sing scales and stuff but I think it's more important to mean what you sing"

Both Jon and Ritchie have exercises to warm up by as well, which is going to be useful for their November visit to England.

"I see a teacher in the States and sort of brush upon things with him. He came along to one of our shows to see what we do because when I'm singing I don't stand still, I have to run around and entertain the audience. I do sing scales and stuff but I think it's more important to mean what you sing. When I was listening to people sing I didn't like singers who had an 18-octave range — I liked singers like Tom Petty who sounded good and wrote great songs. I mean Tom Petty is no singer but his songs say something to me. If he sang "go out and buy a new pair of sneakers" the next day I'd go out and buy a new pair of sneakers!"

"I usually sit and jam around a bit," he says flexing an impressively large set of digits. "I practise scales and stuff too. After these two your fingers should be really loosened up," he said demonstrating on his white Jackson. (See elsewhere demo of exercises). And in fact he kept on demonstrating as we walked down the various corridors and lifts of the Holiday Inn, much to the great disturbance of its fellow occupants. After all, it's not many days you lookup over your lunch and see a real live Rock star axe-wielding his way towards his hotel room.

Another of Mr Sambora's talents is inventing. At the moment he's working on a fretless guitar and has also perfected a tremolo system for acoustic guitars.

"Everyone seems to play within the confines of the instrument and they don't try anything new. I'm working on a fretless guitar which has just ivory fretmarkers instead and I've come up with a tremolo for an acoustic guitar. I was given an acoustic guitar and they said I could try out things on it so I worked on it and came up with this tremolo and support strut system for it and it works. I'm just trying to sell it at the moment."

If he's not recognised for his guitar playing in years to come, maybe his name will go down with the Floyd Roses and Kahlers of this world. The rest of the band are also into trying new ideas and gear, especially keyboard player Dave Bryan.

Jon continues: "He's got so much junk, just loads of junk, though he's trying to cut it down now. He's absolutely MIDI mad! He MIDIs this to that and that to something else."

"The other day we were in a Taxi and he was telling me 'Ritchie, when we get back I'm going to MIDI up my keyboards over the wireless system so I can have another keyboard on the other side of the stage!' And I said to him that this is going to cost a fortune, but he didn't care. He's got total MIDI madness," Ritchie laughs.

It seems that MIDI is a fairly familiar subject to the band.

"It's good that he's up with the latest technology, but he has got a lot of rubbish."

Bass player Alec John Sutch is also fairly enthusiastic about playing...

"When we were in Germany the other day at one of our shows, because it had been so cold it had been a really physical show. We were running around to keep warm! At the end of the show we were taking a bow and I looked around but I couldn't see John, then I saw him at the front of the stage handing out one of his new Peavey basses to the crowd! So I ran over to him and said 'Do you realise what you've done?' and he said 'I don't care man, I couldn't help it — I just went crazy' So we sent the bouncers out to get the wireless system back because it cost a few thousand dollars, but all the kids had grabbed a bit so we lost it and all he could say was I couldn't help it, I went crazy. I'm sorry but I just couldn't help it."

Will Bon Jovi last as long as some of the Rock bands that came out of the seventies?

"Err... Bon Jovi is leading to five solo careers and my debut in acting" Jon says sarcastically in his best 'serious musician' voice. "No, I think that with Bon Jovi we are trying to aim for the sort of longevity that the Stone's had."

I wander away from the Holiday Inn pondering on the injustices of life, ie they're rich and famous and I'm not. It does seem pretty unfair to me that they should be rich and famous just because they're young talented songwriters who are also great players. I mean just because I don't play in a band and can't write songs...