It’s been a long time – almost 3 months!! – and I still haven’t reported from the five Hanson shows in London! I’m ashamed. But now’s the time! The first report is from the first night: Middle of Nowhere.
My arrival to London was without trouble. We were a big group of girls from Sweden who travelled together and checked in together on the same hostel – Generator Hostel London. That’s a place where I could stay again. Me, my sister and two friends slept together in a four-bed room, and it was quite okay with regards to the relatively cheap price.
The day of the concert has both positive and negative sides. We were some girls who went on a Harry Potter-sightseeing before noon (how could we not do that while being in London?) and then we arrived at King’s College right before half past noon. There was a queueing system and I got the number 50 – the last person to get a number. But, not unexpected, the queueing system didn’t work very well during the day…
Soon after we arrived, a group of 10-15 other Swedish Hanson fans arrived in the line and we had a spontaneous TBS dance practice. I hadn’t practiced very much prior to my arrival in London, but it turned out some of us were total newbies to the dance, but we were all having fun! And we had good leaders. 😉 Most fun of all was that while we were dancing there in the street with Thinking ‘Bout Something loud in the speakers, Isaac arrived in a taxi! He laughed when he stepped out… Haha!
We were to get our tickets there, at 1 pm. Hanson time, again… The new time announced was 4 pm. Right after 5 pm it was my group’s turn to pick up our tickets. The two oldest Hanson sisters were handing out tickets and The Story-passes. What a feeling to finally hold the tickets and hang the pass around my neck! Amazing!
Then we just had to wait for a couple more hours. We were let inside some 15 minutes before 6 pm, only 45 minutes too late… We were let inside in groups and had to go through several ticket controls and got a stamp on our hand. We took the elevator to the fourth floor (which was actually six floors up) where the club was, and ended up on the fifth row from the stage. We stood right in the centre in front of the stage. I had a good view during The Story, but it got worse during the show when there was much more pushing (there were a lot more fans then…).
The Story was amazing to be at. I’m so happy that I bought those tickets! It started at 7 pm and ended after almost an hour – which felt like 15 minutes. To see Hanson up close like that and hear them talking to us in that way felt so surreal! I’d already heard many of the stories they told us – how they started with music, recorded their first demo albums, their first gig, etc. But this was still special, because it was live, and spiced up with extra details and lots of jokes… I particularly remember when they told about the department story incident and Zac told us how he fell behind on the way out and ended up on the floor with a lot of girls on top of him – the audience said “Aww!” and he answered “That’s not an ‘aww’, that’s an ‘aargh, I don’t wanna go yet!’”
They also sang a little of Boomerang, Rain and Lonely Boy, and the audience sang along but Taylor tried to hush us so that they would get to sing by themselves… We also got a long exposition on how Yearbook was created through a reaction against an idea of a hippie song, Free Girl, which they didn’t want to write.
The club was almost too crowded when the show started at 9 pm. I mostly saw arms and heads in front of me, which resulted in not so good photos and very short videos, not a single complete song even though I’d planned it. Instead, I tried to enjoy the show as much as I could.
And it was a fantastic show. Just the feeling of finally getting to hear these songs live; the songs that I grew up with, the songs that made me love music (and Hanson) in the way I do. An incredible feeling. And to be so close to the guys that you can see the emotions running across their faces while they’re singing, and knowing that it’s not a DVD, it’s for real, live!
It’s quite difficult to choose a highlight from the show, partly because I’d looked forward to each and every song and I like all the songs so much, and partly because the whole show was great. But my eyes filled with tears during With You In Your Dreams and I Will Come To You, I cried during Weird (which was very expected, as that song always stirs up so much emotions inside of me), and Gimme Some Lovin’ as an encore was really fun!
After the show we waited for a long time to get to the merchandise table where I bought the 5 of 5 t-shirt, and then we went back to the hostel in the pouring rain – we almost found the right bus to go by…
This was show number 1 out of 5! More reports will follow – and also some videos if I manage to get them up on YouTube.
