Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. The main motive for the Flying Nun Moments competition that's been running the past week and a half was really to flush out some popular memory and get it forever on the Interweb, but I'm delighted to be able to offer some prizes for the best of your moments.
We had a quite a range of entries, both humorous and heartfelt. We had players and punters alike. We even deviated off into a discussion about mid-80s electronica. I wish I could give everyone a prize, but clearly, that would be political correctness gone mad.
So …
I was much taken with Grant MacDougall's fanboy tale of his bag catching fire amid the fury of a Bailter Space gig. He gets a Flying Nun t-shirt from Little Brother.
Michael Ribas' story from California of a pilgrimage here and a magic moment when The Terminals did something solely because he asked them to made me proud to be a Kiwi. He gets a t-shirt too.
And the final garment goes to Tim Darlington, for twin stories of The Clean playing in Cathedral Square and the Tall Dwarfs engaging in a legendary bit of banter. It was the banter that did it …
And now [drum roll] the big prize: the limited-edition 4CD Flying Nun 25 Years box set. Only a handful of these have been made available for giveaways, and I'm most grateful to Warners that one came to us.
Our winning entry was not one of the longer ones, or the most lyrical, but I decided that it fulfilled the criterion of momentness so brilliantly that it had to take the prize. Here it is, in full:
Favourite Flying Nun moment:
Sneaking a copy of The Skeptics 'AFFCO' music vid into a conference presentation organised and attended by meat industry bigwigs. A small revenge for making half my whanau redundant in 1986 at Whakatu, and the other half redundant in '94 at Tomoana. It was 1996, so I must've been about 15 I think.
I just loved that, and I'm sure the Skeptics would have too. If you're not familiar with that particular piece of work, there's a backgrounder by the director, Stuart Page. Any chance of a little YouTube action, Stu?
The winning author, Manakura, explained in a subsequent post that 'A.F.F.C.O.' "replaced the national anthem in our household for quite some time," after the works shut down.
So congratulations everyone. Winners, get in touch with your shipping details and we'll get your prizes out to you.
And now, moving on to the big 2006 Word of the Year vote, which is being sponsored by Michael Fraser Milne and the other fine folk at Whisky Galore, the brilliant Christchurch-based whisky specialist (great web store and they deliver promptly - be sure to tell 'em who sent you …). So go ahead and vote now - and remember to scroll down and give us your email address to go in the draw for a fine bottle of single malt whisky (NZ delivery only). We'll have a specially-trained otter draw the winner next week, just in time for Christmas ...
PS: Peter M at DubDotDash has done a nice job of asking a bunch of people involved in music and thereabouts to name their favourite local releases of 2006, and make some predictions for 2007. And Simon Grigg ably reviews the local iTunes Store.