Be a fan of every band who ever made you want to move your feet.
(We Shall Not Overcome ~ Frank Turner, 2013)
I had my share of “doing crazy stuff because of a band I love” in my youth. Nothing as crazy as spending a night and day in front of the doors of a concert venue. Nothing as crazy as booking a room in a 5-star-hotel for the off chance to ride in the same elevator either. Spending a summer vacation in Halmstad, Sweden because I was a huge fan of Roxette, who were sort of based there, might be considered the extent of crazy back then, almost 20 years ago. I learned a lot about what kind of fan I did NOT want to be that summer as well, but that’s quite another story.
Gig-wise that summer might have been the craziest I’ve done so far. We had tickets for two shows (Malmö and Göteburg) of Roxette-singer Per Gessle’s Swedish band Gyllene Tider, who had just reunited after a 10 year break and had been on a glorious comeback tour all across Sweden. After the Göteburg show we decided on a whim to get tickets for the 2nd show in Göteburg the next day, which added up to 3 gigs in 5 days. Totally worth it back then. My love for Roxette diminished after a few years, other bands came and went and I went to quite a few gigs of some of those bands. Sunrise Avenue, Livingston to name a few. But other than that summer in Sweden I’ve never been one to necessarily see more than one show of any band’s tour. Maybe two shows if they were spaced some time apart and the locations weren’t more than one hour drive away.
And then Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls entered “the stage” and my life and… the rest was history. I won’t recount all the stuff I’ve done and the miles I’ve travelled for them in the past two years, because it seems like I haven’t been writing about much else on this blog in the past year anyway. (At least it feels like it). When it became clear that there would be a German Tour in the first half of 2016, I knew quite early on that I had to go to more than just one or two shows, because… Well,
- because his music and his lyrics mean so much to me
- because it’s so much fun to dance/jump/rock out to his songs
- because it’s such an exhilarating feeling to sing these words, that mean so much to me, from the top of my lungs with hundreds of other like-minded people
- because it’s impressive and inspiring to see Frank and the Souls do their job with the same enthusiasm and joy night after night
- because plain and simple all of the above just let’s me forget about crappy stuff and makes me feel good and happy and gives me so many nice memories to store up for future crappy days !
So…
3 weeks. 4 towns. 5 shows.
2 overnight stays (3 nights actually).
300 km by car, 1255 km by train.
114 days to go till gig #1 and I can’t freaking wait!