Tour Memories (and occasional musings)

December 2013 My first Hanson tour. I was only going to go to one show - just the one, an easy trip to London, no big deal. I booked tickets for myself and for the friend who had got me into Hanson but who wasn’t a fan club member. She didn’t know any other fans. By then, I knew a few members of the UK & Ireland Street Team. I’ll be fine , I thought. Things snowballed a little, and next thing I was boarding a plane to Scotland on a freezing December morning: I was en route to my first ever Hanson show, and the first one of six. Yes, six* . (*a friend of mine argues that because two of those six shows had a members’ only ‘mini’ concert prior to the main event, the number of shows should actually be eight. However, I think that’s cheating so I stick to my figures.) Already in the queue in Glasgow I met people I knew from the Street Team meet-ups and from social media; ‘Hey, I know you from Twitter!’, someone said to me that very day. As the tour progressed and...

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...

It’s not often that a song actually inspires me the way 'World's on Fire' does, but the reason for it is quite simple: this is a song about making a stand and letting your voice speak out. 'WoF' encourages you to ‘stand up, stand up’ and it’s interesting how that phrase is repeated, as if to try and punch through the wall of apathy and reluctance in which we have retreated.  “Time is a price we can't afford” is a particularly poignant lyric because it’s so simple: we think we have it all mapped out, and then something happens and our plans are changed forever. It’s not just an exhortation to live by carpe diem (I believe the kids call it YOLO) - it’s also a reminder that if you have a chance to do the right thing, to stand up for what you believe, you’d better do it now because you just don’t know what’s in store.  The chorus keeps asking, "do they know that the world’s on fire?" , "do they know that it’s time?" . Here you...

A few days ago, I posted a review of the new EP on the HNET forum - this is a slightly edited version, saved for posterity, because the world needs my opinions, of course… Dance Like You Don't Care This is the song I should not like because it's synth-tastic and a nonsensical dance track. But it's really catchy and it actually makes you want to dance (I don't dance, so that says something). And am I the only one who mentally substitutes the lyric ‘jump in the air like a wild man’ with ‘wild mare’ or ‘wild bear’?  Give Me Your Best Shot This is my 'skip it’ track. It's just not a style of music I like at all - kind of dancey late 70s funky something? I don’t have the musical terminology for it but it’s this year's answer to MMFH's 'Show Me The Way’. Although I get it that that kind of music belongs to Hanson's roots and inspiration, it doesn't speak to me at all and actually it’s the only song that bor...

DAY 1 The first day of the shows finally came and people began to gather by the pool area to watch the soundcheck, which was due to start at 6:00 PM. But of course, this band run on Hanson time and the guys didn’t turn up until after 7:00.  It was a bit strange at first - the guys had to do the soundcheck with all their fans there, watching their every move. But after a few minutes, they relaxed and soon began to jam together and play it up to the crowd. It was like a mini-show before the show. It was a slightly surreal experience for me - I’d only seen the band in Europe up until that point, and there they were, in Mexico, on a beach. And there I was, on that same beach, while some of my friends only a couple of feet away from me were watching the same thing from a jacuzzi. Yes, it was kind of weird. Predictably, the actual concert started late - Hanson time striking twice in the same day, with the band arriving almost half an hour late. There were a lot of f...

We’d heard via the Italian promoter, who is a member of one of the Facebook groups dedicated to Hanson, that more tickets had been sold for the Milan show and friends who had been to the venue had said that it was smaller and more welcoming than the Atlantico in Rome. By the time we arrived there - at around lunchtime, having just got straight off our train from Rome, there were already a few fans there, all of whom we either knew in person or via Facebook - a few had managed to get on an earlier train from Rome. A friend of mine, with whom I’d gone to the UK shows, had flown in from the U.K. to join me and my Italian friends for the last date of the tour. It was lovely to see a familiar face from my other ‘home’.  After getting our number and saying hello to everybody, we got a taxi to hotel to check in and get changed. We were back at the venue within the hour and the tour bus had just arrived. The walk was scheduled for 4 PM but as usual, it was pretty late when the guys em...

The venue in Rome was in the most desolate depressing place in the outskirts of the city, and I was glad that there were 5 of us together because queuing there in the early hours of the morning on my own would have not been an option. The venue is inside this really big gated area and there is quite a long walk then to the actual building itself. So you can imagine how we’d all been worrying about having to run to the doors once the gates opened. We were all really hoping that security would do something to prevent this as the path was wide - it was basically a long driveway wide enough for lorries, tour buses etc, and it would have taken at least a couple of minutes to get to the doors - none of us is a sprinter and besides, it’s not a very dignified way to do it - we really didn’t want to have to run like a herd of bison! MOE was a much more civilised affair than the one I had attended in Birmingham. This time, Rebecca (who works for Hanson) came out to cross our names of the li...