25 Jan Bressa Creeting Cake: Palm Singing

Quarter acre sections; a sky tower that doesn’t really go all the way to the sky; spotlessly clean suburbs; rolling, semi-green, semi-bald hills covered in sheep and mountain bikers; speedos for fashion rather than the beach; xylophones; a calypso beat, and druids in a city where almost nothing is older than 150 years—just some of the eccentricity galore in this irrepressibly happy, undeniably strange music video from Auckland, New Zealand band Bressa Creeting Cake—the only group with a truly awful pun for a name to win a national music award.

Or to describe Palm Singing in the words of the band:

“A very happy holiday song full of gaiety, summer, and love for one’s fellows.”

Strange backyard rituals around a bonfire aside, who on earth could possibly bad-mouth that?

My friend “Krazy Karl” was once a member of this band—before he made a stand for sanity. I need no longer wonder where the “Krazy” came from…

In New Zealand, the concept of “six degrees of separation” may not have been invented, but it always applies, and my crazy musician friend and Bressa Creeting Cake are just one example:

• I work with the guitarist from semi-famous rock band Garageland;
• I went to school with semi-notorious rock band Shihad;
• Jemaine of HBO comedy show Flight of the Conchords was in my film classes at university;
• A workmate was trying to sell a concept for a board game named based on this very concept—that you can connect one person to another through six degrees of separation or less.

Here in the land of four million people and forty million sheep, everybody really does know everybody…