Tour Memories (and occasional musings)

“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...

It all started in 2012, when a friend sheepishly admitted to liking the band Hanson. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I have one their albums too!’. My friend, who had braced herself for a negative reaction, was stunned. When I told her that the album in question was the indie release ‘Underneath’ and not the 1997 multi-platinum success ‘Middle of Nowhere’, my friend was ready to faint. Soon, the evangelisation process began, and by April 2012 I had become a legitimate member of the Hanson.net fanclub. Initially, I kept things quiet. But in January 2013 friends convinced me to join the Street Team, which involved a lot of sharing on social media: it was the equivalent of standing in a community hall in front of a bunch of strangers and announcing ‘Hi, my name is Paola, and I’m a Hanson fan’. And then, BANG . I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t think that, all of a sudden, even long-standing Facebook friends would act so outraged at the sight of Hanson cropping up on their feed...