Sinead's final song, X Factor unknowns and movie night. It was a good week for New Zealand on the international stage.

I know this because yesterday morning, as I browsed The Guardian website while juggling a cup of tea and fending off cats, I found no fewer than three Kiwi stories on the front page.

The Musos Club 2013 diptych oil on canvas.

This is not usual. Not at all. More regularly there's no stories about New Zealand, not since England's rapid departure from the Cricket World Cup.

There were – briefly – quite a few stories then, but it seems to have gone remarkably quiet in the days since.

But, indeed, one of yesterday's stories was announcing the imminent start of the quarter finals. It sounds like the English, much like everyone else, are a bit surprised that a world cup with quite so few teams – 14 to be exact – is still going on.
The Football World Cup is shorter and has 32 teams. Anyway, it allows more time to revel in the Black Caps' success.

No more comparisons

The second story was about Sinead O'Connor and in all honesty was only tangentially about New Zealand.

It centred on her announcement that she will no longer sing her, arguably, most famous song, the tune written for her by Prince, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U', not only a damn fine bit of writing (dig that repeat of 'guess what he told me/guess what he told me”) but one of the earliest songs to feature texting language in its title.

This was back in 1990, when the iPhone was barely a glint in Steve Jobs' eye, not to emerge for another 17 years.

Anyhoo...after 25 years of singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U' Sinead reckons she's lost her emotional connection to the song and, rather than present fake emotion, will drop it from concerts.

Waterfowl interruption

The New Zealand link is this decision makes her performance at WOMAD the final time the song will be presented live. And it was interrupted by a duck.

Yep, as is the way in New Plymouth, there's a small body of water between performer and audience and, right on the line 'It's been so lonely without u here/Like a bird without a song”, an attendant waterfowl, obviously delighted at the avian reference, burst into full quack.

Sinead started laughing and was unable to finish the song. And thus the concert finished, not with a bang but with a giggle.

The story from here, however, that garnered most press inches was – no surprises – ‘The X-Factor' NZ show's sacking of husband and wife judges Natalia Kills and Willy Moon. It generated not only headlines but opinion pieces, to such a degree that opinion piece writers were actively baffled at why they were writing opinion pieces.

X Factor kills writers

Allow me to quote my favourite, a not atypical example: 'Until this week, there's every chance that you didn't know who Natalia Kills and Willy Moon were, nor that they happened to be judges on the New Zealand version of ‘The X Factor'. You might not even have known that there was a New Zealand version of ‘The X Factor', because life is short and time is precious and even retaining the knowledge that they've got ‘The X Factor' in New Zealand seems like a profound reinforcement of all the better things you could be doing with your existence.”

At least it clears up the question everyone's been asking since the show began. The answer: no, nobody else knows who they are either.

Okay. Let's get back to something local.

The Tauranga Film Society kicks off the 2015 season of exotic film with ‘Purple Noon', an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel ‘The Talented Mr Ripley', directed by Frenchman Rene Clement.

It screens at Rialto Tauranga on Wednesday, March 25 at 6.15pm. Joining is cheap and easy – find details and check out the rest of the film schedule at www.nzfilmsociety.org.nz/tauranga.html

And much-heralded soul singer Bella Kalolo is coming to Tauranga Art Gallery on Thursday, March 26 from 7.30pm. Entry is $25. She usually has a full-on soul band, which will most likely rattle the gallery's refined space, but she's a great singer and well worth hearing.

It'll certainly be a fine match for Ewan McDougall's fantastically colourful Fun and Fury exhibition. Hear her music at www.bellakalolo.com