Hanson @ Enmore Theatre

If you weren’t ready for the sheer hysteria that these three brothers induce, you should’ve been: the fandom for Hanson is still very much alive, and a sold-out crowd of like-minded Hanson diehards indulged in their normally clandestine guilty pleasure.

I’d heard that Hanson now take themselves very seriously, spending a whole career trying to prove that they’re not a one trick pony. Striding onstage purposefully and dressed in all black, brothers Isaac, Zac and Taylor had the largely female audience in the palms of their boyish hands as they opened with ‘Fired Up’ from their newest release, Anthem. Playing a number of songs from that album as well as diving into their deep back catalogue, they started the show at a helter skelter pace.

Then came the acoustic sensitive middle bit, where they stripped that shit back, brought out three steel string guitars and sat at the front of the stage on boxes. Zac took out his hair tie so that his flowing golden locks would catch the spotlight, and threw back his hair à la Flashdance, much to the arousal of the Fansons. We were treated to an acoustic version of ‘On And On’, the brothers took it in turns to do solo songs, and then they earned a bit of local kudos with an a capella cover of The Bee Gees’ ‘Too Much Heaven’.

The pop culture heavyweight that is ‘MMMBop’ was revealed as their fourth-last song, which unfortunately felt like if they revealed the culprit in an SVU episode 15 minutes before the end – the rest of the show became kinda pointless. However, seeing a crowd of fully grown adults literally crying and screaming during this three-minute dose of bubblegum nostalgia was a truly wonderful musical moment.