Chatterbox: Fans vote band off the island

And the winner is ... well, on paper it's Blindspott but in reality it's Air New Zealand and EMI Music. You recall the Air NZ Zephyrs Competition in association with EMI's Capitol Records, in which the public voted for their "favourite emerging band"? The kicker was that all the six bands on the shortlist - Salmonella Dub, Blindspott, Goldenhorse, goodshirt, Tadpole and the Brunettes - were already signed or distributed through Capitol Records' parent label EMI. And none was actually "emerging".

Gee, even a record company guy said, "The six we've chosen are New Zealand's biggest bands." Anyway, it's a win-win, with each party getting excellent mileage and useful publicity - and the favourite of Capitol's favoured is Blindspott, who of course can sound like a jet engine when the mood takes them.

So it's congrats to them and haere ra on Air NZ, we guess, as they use the $30,000 worth of travel they get.

Also big-ups to Malcolm Anderson of Oamaru who, merely by voting, gets to have the winning band play in his backyard. Let's hope Andy voted for Blindspott, huh?

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WIN-WIN PART DEUX: New Zealand music month is over so it's safe to pull out your Midnight Oil albums again.

But this annual profiling of our noise was highly successful as radio and television tripped over themselves to be seen to be supportive and patriotic. Loyal, as we say.

Still, we take our tongue out of our cheeks and put our hand on our heart and say a genuine cheers to Channel Z, which became the first commercial station in history to devote its airtime 100 per cent to New Zealand music last week, and to the seven b.net stations which celebrated their own long-running all-Kiwi music weeks earlier in May.

Overall, the amount of New Zealand music on pop, adult-contemporary and easy-listening stations has more than tripled since RadioScope monitoring was established just four years ago. And that's got to be good.

Everybody sing, "It's a slice of heaven, dah dah dah ... "

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LOOK OUT! THUMP! There are too many awards ceremonies these days but here's one we particularly like: the Taurus World Stunt awards for those who risk life and limb so stars don't have to.

This year's awards had celeb presenters and guests like Arnie, Vin Diesel, Harrison Ford and others, and included categories for best work with a vehicle (winners, those maniac drivers in The Bourne Identity), best fight (Clayton Barber and Clay Fontenot in Blade II), best specialty stunt (Tim Rigby, XXX), best high work, best fire work and so on.

Best overall stunt, stuntwoman, was won by three gals in Die Another Day, and best overall stunt, stuntman was awarded to XXX Harry O'Connor. Posthumously.

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OCKER TALK: Disney's new animated flick Finding Nemo had a huge box-office opening weekend and with saturation advertising Stateside, tourism operators in Australia are hoping it will entice Americans to see the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney Harbour which are portrayed beautifully in the film. Let's hope the reef is still there for them. Ecologists are predicting doom and gloom because of damage by commercial and recreational fishers, global warming and, you guessed it, too many tourists.