Tour Memories (and occasional musings)

I Got to Go Back to the Island I was last on the island in 2020 - it was my sixth stint as an ‘islander’ and my fifth time in Jamaica. You can see where this is going: a few weeks after we got home, the Covid pandemic hit and travelling became a distant dream.  Before Covid was even a thing, though, I was all set for skipping 2021: as I wrote in this blog post , BTTI 2020 had left me a little cold. I found the resort run down, the activities uninspiring and the concerts phoned-in. Little did I know that in less than a month, the whole world was going to shut down for a long, long time. Even when things began to reopen and BTTI 2022 was announced, I still found travel too daunting, and seeing pictures of people wearing masks at the resort stopped any possible FOMO in its tracks. I let the presale for 2023 come and go and focused instead on planning for Hanson’s extensive UK tour that summer. It was there, whilst doing what Hanson fans do best, i.e. sitting outside a venue, that I fo...

[Apologies for the tiny font - I've tried everything and it keeps reverting to tiny. Hit CTRL and + or CMD and + on your browser to increase the page size] We woke up to, guess what, more rain. The outlook was bleak. Technically, it was Day 2 and BTTI had not even started. Hanson had tweeted a revised schedule which pretty much packed four days’ worth of events in three days, so out went my plans to have more beach time this year. Not that the beach looked like much of an option, anyway. The first event of the day would be Zac’s solo set (the location still to be confirmed at that point) so Howra and I decided to try the yoga class, which another friend had taken the day before. I figured the class would probably be geared towards beginners - enough for me to keep up. What could possibly go wrong?* (*this became the mantra of BTTI 2018 for me) We walked up the stair to the gym only to discover, to our dismay, that there was absolutely no designated floor space for a single...

CH-CH-CHANGES The programme landed in our inboxes in mid-December to a mixed reaction. The schedule was substantially different from previous years: the shows (with the exception of the welcoming show) would start a lot earlier, and two out of three ‘activities with the band’ would take place afterwards. The activities would be Cards Against Humanity and Family Feud - i.e. different kind of party games to what some fans had been hoping for: sack races, egg and spoon races and other such games of the type I’d endured at church group trips in my childhood*. As we already knew, there would only be one ‘craft’ type of activity, tie dye, with a notable change: all three Hanson would take part at the same time. [*I believe these games, when forced upon an adult in the captive-like conditions of a youth camp or, equally, of all-inclusive vacation, openly contravene the Geneva Conventio n: Convention I: the Convention prohibits [...] assaults upon personal dignity.] The news about the ga...

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” - Bob Marley “Rock’n’Roll stops the traffic.” - Bono In my 30-odd years of being a music fan - I’ve had many of those moments when music punched me in the guts, when something told me to listen up and pay attention. One such moment was probably in 1991 or early 1992 - in a clothes shop, of all places. A song that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before came on the radio. “What is this?” I asked the shop assistant. “It’s a band called Nirvana .” she said. I’m not ashamed to say that something similar happened when a friend of mine introduced me to Hanson back in 2012, when she handed me that unmarked DVD which we subsequently jokingly referred to as ‘The White Album’ (to preserve my reputation), and which contained a couple of gigabytes’ worth of Hanson discography. Age is no obstacle when you’re a music fan and the magic can strike again at any time. Only last week, in fact, my fi...