NTR on 3D Radio

Yesterday Matt and I went in to 3D because we were number 60 in their hottest 100+1 thing. They had the lists for the last couple of years. We were number one last year, so we were standing around reminiscing about that. Then we were looking at the positions of all the old bands we’ve been in. I was, as a solo performer, number 24 one year, and 53 another and my old band was in the sixties and fifties a couple of times. So I was remembering being up at the lofty heights. Then Matt pointed out his old band, 5! Now You’re Talking, were in there as well. 5!NYT were one of the reasons I used to dislike Matt Banham. Back before I met him I, along with nearly everyone else in Adelaide, used to be on their mailing list, whether we liked it or not. Yesterday, however, I disliked him for an entirely different reason. When we were getting interviewed he quickly hijacked the conversation to make it about the time he almost got to work as a clown at the Christmas Pageant. He went on and on about how his “big break” was thwarted by his “hateful” band mates and their “jealous attempts” to frustrate his career as a professional clown. He got quite worked up about it. One thing I will say for Matt, he doesn’t go at things half hearted. As he himself said at the end of the interview, “There ain’t so such thing as a half way clown.”

We also spent a lot of time talking about how we once cruelly nicknamed Nic ‘Mapey’ on account of his inability to read maps whilst we were in Perth. To be fair, he was almost unbelievably drunk at the time. He tested his blood alcohol level at a breath tester situated, oddly enough, inside a fish and chip shop and, if I remember the figure correctly, he shouldn’t have been capable of standing up, let alone making sense of complex cartography. We assume he didn’t listen to the interview because he hates being called Mapey and if he knew we were calling him that we would have got outraged text messages.

Later I had lunch with Steph and Matt. We discussed potential titles and cover art for our new album. I suggested we have a picture of a human skull with a snake slithering through the eye sockets, and the album would be called, “Skull with a snake in it.” My suggestion was cruelling dismissed. Then I mentioned that my new bike was the smallest frame size available (it’s a 51) and was cruelly mocked some more for riding a ‘ladies size’ frame.