Despite the reasonably severe disability of not being a musician, I’ve managed to get into a singles-of-the-year radio airplay chart. Which, I have to say, kind of confirms most of what I think of such things…

Peter McLennan, who is a real musician (and writes too much), has written to inform me that I have made the 2004 New Zealand top 100 alternative charts – in at #14.

Peter turns up at #62. There’s no justice.

To be honest – and for the sake of clarity – it’s not actually me as such that’s at #14. It’s Strawpeople.

Strawpeople is a highly regarded, multi-award-winning, multi-platinum selling pop band made up of one person – Paul Casserly – and his many collaborators.

On this one occasion, I was one of those collaborators. This involved showing up once a week, drinking Paul’s wine, pressing buttons on a keyboard and watching Paul turn my keyboard noodlings into something resembling music.

We made more than one track. The others were deemed too odd, or too incomplete to go onto a real album – or at least, onto a Strawpeople CD. The one that made it was still sufficiently odd to go onto student radio – an arena Strawpeople tracks usually don’t inhabit (though Paul regularly does. It’s complicated).

The track ‘The Andy Warhol Effect’ (Casserly/Dubber), which references McLuhan fairly heavily, and plays on the whole ‘anaesthetising nature of the media‘ idea, is the source of the album’s title, ‘Count Backwards From 10’.

Click to hear a short sample (only 30 seconds. This being a major label release, it comes with a general panic approach to all things ‘online music‘).

Here’s the cool bit: Dimmer came top – and I (okay, we) beat Betchadupa – that has to be some sort of karma.

Oh, those Finns. New Zealand’s answer to the Gallaghers.

Trivia: that’s me singing the word ‘widescreen’ into a vocoder, which has to be Paul’s greatest feat in turning something that clearly isn’t music into something that really works.

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Particularly poor telly night. Celebrity Big Brother. I’d been sent a bunch of CDs from a New York avant-garde jazz label (my first batch of CD promos for 2005), so I took the opportunity to do a fair bit of listening… with a couple of CDs to warm up.

20. Trinity Roots – Home, Land and Sea Trinity Roots (2004)

21. Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited Columbia (1965)

22. DDYGG – Live at Joan’s NCM East (2004)

23. BIFT (Wildman, Glassmeyer, Moran) – BIFT NCM East (2004)

24. The Four Bags – Off Shore NCM East (2004)