Bon Jovi close their Forever Tour in London next month, and the last of the three Wembley Stadium nights, Wednesday 9 September, is currently the final announced date of the entire run. New York got nine nights at Madison Square Garden in July, Edinburgh gets Murrayfield on 28 August, Dublin gets Croke Park on 30 August, and then it finishes under the arch in northwest London.
James Bay was confirmed on 4 August as support for both the Edinburgh and London shows. Dublin gets The Boomtown Rats instead, which is a very deliberate bit of booking for Croke Park.
These are the band’s first UK shows since June 2019, and the first tour of any kind since Jon Bon Jovi had surgery on a torn and atrophied vocal cord in 2022. He spent years relearning how to speak properly, never mind sing to 80,000 people. That is the whole emotional weight behind a tour called Forever, and it is why the London run sold the way it did, one date announced, then a second, then a third after demand kept coming.
The Three Wembley Nights Will Not Be the Same Show
Jon has said openly that he took advice from Lars Ulrich about how to handle multiple nights in one city, which in practice means rotating the setlist rather than repeating it. His words on it were that he is having a lot of fun putting together shows that are multiple night kind of shows.
So if you are going to two of the three, you are not paying twice for the same evening. And if you are only going to one, the night you picked will have something the other two do not.
What They Have Actually Been Playing
The Madison Square Garden dates give you a real answer rather than a guess. The July 26 show opened with Beautiful Drug, then We Weren’t Born to Follow, Lost Highway, You Give Love a Bad Name, Born to Be My Baby, Legendary, Whole Lot of Leavin’ and In These Arms.
Note where You Give Love a Bad Name sits there. Fourth song. They are not saving the big ones for the end, which matters if you were planning to stroll in at half eight.
That New York show ran doors at 6:30pm, band on at 7:35pm, finished 9:35pm. Two hours on stage.
Doors, Curfew, and Why Sunday 6 September Is the Awkward One
Wembley opens its doors at 17:00 on all three dates. The curfews are not identical though.
| Date | Curfew |
|---|---|
| Friday 4 September | 22:30 |
| Sunday 6 September | 22:00 |
| Wednesday 9 September | 22:30 |
Half an hour is not nothing when eighty thousand people leave at once, and the Sunday show has the additional problem of Sunday night on the Underground, which is a different service pattern from a Friday. If you have a train to catch out of Euston or King’s Cross afterwards, the Sunday is the date to be careful with.
One ticket site lists gates at 16:00 for the 4 September show while the stadium says doors 17:00, so give yourself the earlier of the two and check your own ticket.
Getting to Wembley Stadium From Central London
The Jubilee and Metropolitan lines both run to Wembley Park, and it is roughly a ten minute walk down Olympic Way from there to the stadium. That is the route most of the crowd takes and it is the reason the walk feels like a slow moving river by half four.
Faster and much less obvious: Marylebone to Wembley Stadium station takes nine minutes on a mainline train.
The other options:
- Wembley Central, about a twenty minute walk, served by the Bakerloo line and London Overground.
- North Wembley, a thirty four minute walk, also Bakerloo and the Overground Lioness line.
- National Express run direct coaches from 56 destinations around the UK, adult returns from £30, arriving at the Pink Parking area by 15:00 and leaving at 23:15.
- Parking around Wembley Park starts around £40, though driving on an event night is a fairly miserable idea.
Fares from Zone 1 to Wembley Park sit at £4.80 peak and £3.60 off peak.
Coming out is the part people underestimate. Queues at Wembley Park after a stadium event have been running anywhere from fifteen minutes to a full hour. Walking to Wembley Central or North Wembley instead is the standard local workaround, and on a warm September night it is not a bad twenty minutes.
What the Tickets Cost and What Is Left
At announcement, face value ran from around £45 to £135 for seated, £75 to £80 for general admission on the pitch, and £125 to £135 for the Gold Circle directly in front of the stage. Each of those included a £3 venue facility fee.
Almost all of that has gone. What remains is scraps of standard stock, verified resale, and hospitality.
Wembley’s own packages, sold through the stadium:
- Gold Package, £549 per person. Lounge style hospitality with early access, buffet, and drinks included.
- Diamond Package, £699 per person. Cocktail reception, private lounge, four course meal, champagne and spirits.
- Private box, £749 per person, booked in groups of eight, twelve or twenty, with a host and a private chef.
On resale, use Ticketmaster or Twickets and nothing else. Wembley operates strict resale conditions and a six ticket limit per person, and tickets bought through unauthorised sites can be cancelled outright, which means you find out at the turnstile with a two hour queue behind you.
The Wembley Rules That Get People Stopped at the Gate
The bag policy is the one that catches out anyone who has not been recently. One bag per person, maximum 297mm tall by 210mm wide by 210mm deep. That is A4 size. A normal day rucksack fails.
Wembley is fully cashless. No kiosk inside takes notes or coins, so it is card or phone for food, drink and merch.
Age rules split by ticket type:
- No under fives in the stadium at all.
- Pitch standing is 14 and over, strictly.
- Any under 14 must be with someone 18 or over.
- Some VIP tickets require under 16s to be accompanied, with a maximum of four under 16s per adult.
You can take in an empty crushable plastic bottle and fill it at the free water points, but not glass. And if you buy merch from the stalls outside, the clear bag they hand it to you in has to stay sealed until you are through the gates.
BOXPARK Is Running a Fanpark on All Three Nights
BOXPARK Wembley is hosting a Bon Jovi Fanpark on 4, 6 and 9 September, running from 11am to 11pm each day, with DJs, live performances and drinks offers. Doors at the stadium are not until five, so that is where the afternoon goes for most people.
Around it, Wembley Park has more than fifty places to eat now. Nanny Bill’s for burgers inside BOXPARK, Meat & Social for something more substantial, Masalchi for pan Asian, Remoli for pasta, and The White Horse if you just want a pub before a gig rather than an experience.
Hotels close to the ground get booked out early on event dates. Premier Inn Wembley Stadium and Premier Inn Wembley Park are both around a five minute walk and are the cheapest of the walkable options, with the Hilton and Novotel sitting at the higher end.
Which of the Three Nights I Would Pick
Wednesday 9 September. It is the final announced date of the Forever Tour, the crowd on a last night behaves differently, and a Wednesday curfew of 22:30 with a normal weekday tube service is a far easier way home than Sunday’s 22:00 finish.
Friday 4 is the one that will feel biggest, because a Friday London crowd always does, and because it is the date the whole run was built out from.
Sunday 6 is the one to take only if the other two are impossible, and if you do take it, plan the journey home before you plan anything else.