What music am I talking about? And if I intend to talk, what can I say? Some personal background as introduction perhaps... (Everyone seems to have a story about how they found their favourite music, so here's a bit of mine...) 

Once upon a time... 

only mid-96 in fact, I was introduced to an album called Body Blow, by (the?) Headless Chickens. It quickly established itself as compulsive listening, it would not be resigned to being background music and generally displayed symptoms that no other albums had.  
(By abusing these mysterious powers, I was able to greatly increase my university marks by buying a new pair of earphones and playing Body Blow through the CD-ROM of the computer through which I was working. Lacking the will to easily break the hold of the music, it became quite difficult to leave the machine. I had to work instead :-) 
Probably the greatest asset of the album were the great female vocals, (a quick look at the credits revealed `Fiona McDonald') but even the tracks lacking these were very good. I was surprised (that's a euphimism :) to discover that Headless Chickens were a New Zealand group (I'd never liked any NZ music before). The search was on for another Headless Chickens album and another was found; Stuntclown, consisting of earlier works than Body Blow. It was good, but with the exception of a couple of songs, not a patch on Body Blow (what is?). The biggest difference, and biggest loss, was the absence of the female vocals. The search was on for more recent works. (I was new to Headless Chickens' type of music and looking forward to exploring this wonderful new world). New information came to light; Fiona McDonald had left Headless Chickens - everything they had done together was on that one CD (other than different mixes of the songs on the CD). There was no more and there would be no more.  
Cosmic jokes are nice, from a distance...  

With my near-complete lack of 'following' the music scene (or whatever), and the bizzare near-complete lack of related information on the 'net, it wasn't until I saw a song called Taller than God on TV one day that it occured to me that the vocals sounded familiar. The video clip didn't help though; my only idea of what McDonald looked like came from having once seen the end of one of the Headless Chickens video clips, and it took a bit of imagination to construe the woman in this clip to be the same person. I would have discarded the thought, but the timely appearance of a "NZ on air" logo recarded the thought in the "remotely possible" slot, in the dusty and rarely disturbed "look into it when you have the time" mental shelf. 
To cut a long story short, I'll cut it out alltogether and get to the point: Fiona McDonald was doing vocals for Strawpeople (Taller than God being one of the resulting songs). Once again, while different to Headless Chickens, the difference between the songs I liked and the ones I really liked, was almost always McDonald. (Thus Vicarious would be my preferred Strawpeople album; it isn't like Body Blow, and didn't grab me as quickly, but is very good and very close... besides which, I'm judging them completely subjectively anyway... :-) (Incidentally, I should mention that her talents extend beyond vocals, but as I havn't the faintest idea how much/when/where these have contributing to what, it would probably be a good idea to leave this sentence hanging... :-) 
And everyone lived happily ever after?  

It's too early to say...  
 

(Hey, you have to make a nice "The End", even if it doesn't quite fit :-) 
Ok, we have established that I like this music, currently however I just don't know enough about the background of any of this to provide much information (and in case you didn't read the previous page, you should treat the information that I do provide with Extreme Caution :-) But lack of something to say has never stopped anyone saying it on the web before... At any rate, I would like to provide more information, (and build this page into a decent "site") so if you have any, please mail me, or leave a note in my guestbook. (Or view the guestbook in case someone else has left a note...) At this stage, the purpose of this page is not so much to inform, but to collect info from people browsing though (while I collect info from other sources), so that in time, the purpose of the page can successfully be to inform :-) At the moment, this news is the best I can do: 
(At least, it was news at the time of writing - the frequency with which I update this page is directly proportional to the frequency with which I gain information, which is in turn, roughly proportional to the frequency with which readers drop me a note or whatever if they have any info to share. In case you're absolutely blind, that was a Subtle Hint :-) 

News: 

• Fiona McDonald is hosting @XTRA, a weekly television program about (funnily enough) the internet. For those of you in New Zealand, @XTRA screens on Sunday, at 2:30pm*, and as you can see, the program also has a web site. And at the site is Fiona's webpage. (Now I don't need to worry about the lack of bio on this page :-)

*As of August, '97. 
• Strawpeople have released a new album; 100 Street Transistors [The remix album]. It contains remixes of some of Strawpeople's best work. And obviously, a collection of their best work must include a lot of Fiona McDonald :-)

I can't comment on the album though, as I have only heard one track from it as yet... 
• Fiona McDonald is singing `in guest capacity on a couple of tracks' in the upcoming Headless Chickens album Greedy! (This really made my week. Headless Chickens + Fiona McDonald has to be the ultimate music combination... If only it were more than a couple of the tracks... 

I guess you can't have everything. 
• Fiona was at the Burning in the Light concert with Headless Chickens. (Which isn't really news, it's just the first time I've seen her performing live, so I thought I'd stick it in here :-)

Because I seem to be starting so many paragraphs with "As", I thought I'd make this one different. 

As I was saying, (and saying, and saying... ) that's pretty much all the (vaguely useful) info I've got at this time, so I'll have to wrap up this page prematurely. Once again, if you have any useful info, please mail me. (I'll even stick your name in the Sources and Thanks list at the end. Oh the honour... :-) 
 

T

his picture (I scanned it off the Worldservice CD slip) was (at the time of putting it here), the only picture of Fiona McDonald on the entire internet...  At least I'm fairly sure it's a picture of her... :-)  (She falls into the catagory of people TCM refers to as the "Faceless Ones" - those who seem (or manage) to look vastly different with each appearance. (Johnny Depp being another.)  Anyway, as I said, was the only picture. Now you have heaps to choose from:  the photos at Headless Chicken Stuff by Tony Stott, or the various presenter shots on the @XTRA site.