Dub dot dash

Mint Chicks faked their move to Portland?
Early this morning I was checking out my RSS feeds to see what was happening round my favourite music blogs, and stumbled upon this rather odd story.

Remember how The Mint Chicks cleaned up at the NZ Music Awards in 2007? After winning their umpteenth award that night they jumped onstage and said thanks, then leaned into the mic and said 'fix'. And then they lost a member, and upped sticks and moved to Portland, Oregon in the USA.

Sure, they have a history of being wily pranksters, but this one is a doozy. Turns out they may have been hiding out up north for the past three years.

I spied this odd story on indie music blog cheeseontoast.co.nz this morning, suggesting that the Mint Chicks had mysteriously moved to the West Coast of the South Island in early 2008, and had relocated in December last year to the far North, and have been holed up in a beach property near Kaitaia - no link , as the story has disappeared form their website, will try Google cache and see if I can find it.

There's never been a gap of more than three months between NZ gigs for them since they claim to have moved 7,000 miles away. When they left NZ in December 2007 after final shows, they were back here a month later in January 2008 for the Big Day Out. Then back a few months later to play with Shihad. Then they did the same thing again for the following year's BDO, Vodafone Homegrown, and so on. And what band can afford repeated trans-Pacific airfares? And strangely, none of the shows they claim to have played in Portland show up on a Google search.

Anyone know what the Mint Chicks are up to?
ADDED: Can't find that on cheeseontoast.co.nz, maybe it was on Under The Radar...