Tour Memories (and occasional musings)

Old Hat. It was only a couple of days ago when my membership pin flashed up as I logged on to HNET, reminding me that I was about to enter my fifth year in the fan club. Five years. Who would have known? I joined in late April 2012, as a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, lured by a 'members only' video blog Zac had just posted and that I couldn't watch. $50 didn’t seem much - little did I know that, over the course of four years, I would give the band the equivalent of several months’ salary for the privilege of joining them on a tropical beach. Signing up at the end of April - so close to MOE - turned out to be a stroke of luck. I didn’t know what MOE was, of course, but I soon found out via all the stories that were floating around on Tumblr, and which were epic tales of destruction, through which I learned that the first Mmmhops beer tasting had swiftly turned into chaos and that Taylor had to run for his life, nearly losing his beloved Indy hat in the com

“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