I am congenitally unable to perform musically in front of people.
Something happens when eyes and ears turn my way, and I morph into a fumbling witless snail.
I played the piano with a degree of verve as a child when the house was empty, but in front of parents, friends or Royal Schools of Music examiners, only disaster ensued.
My one wretched performance in a band, in standard four, was both my debut and my farewell.
All of which is neither here nor there.
I have made a career out of inability, swimming in it like the happiest of fishes.
But last week when my sister fronted up with a DVD of her singing Fleetwood Mac's Loved Another Woman with some workmates in a performance for their bosses, and singing it really well, I turned from being someone unable to perform, into The Only Colbert Child Who Hasn't Cut It As A Rock Star.
Inability is one thing, but being the last cab off the rank, indeed, a cab that doesn't even know how to get off the rank, is far far worse.
My brother sings around the traps.
Exceedingly well.
Back in the early '70s he was in a local hard rock/metal band called Shotgun.
His pulse beat to Smoke On The Water.
Then he unaccountably stopped.
Twenty-five years later, he decided he would become a singer again.
He got himself a pile of karaoke discs to practice with, wired a microphone up over the kitchen sink so he could sing while he was doing the dishes, and assembled a repertoire of astonishing breadth, from the Doors to Louis Armstrong, from Cat Stevens to Jimi Hendrix.
The last time I heard him, he went from Riders On The Storm to Moon River.
Uncanny.
My brother is a great performer.
Fearless.
My sister, happy to have been just a fan, last year, out of nowhere, bought a guitar.
And when her workplace, decimated by ownership changes and job losses, decided to put on a performance for the visiting bosses, rewriting lyrics to well-known songs to underline their plight, my sister whanged her contralto voice on to the early Fleetwood Mac blues song.
She sounded fine, Randy Jackson would not have found a whit of pitchy.
And what was particularly mesmerising was her slow writhing stage act.
I would go as far as to call this a potential calling card.
She told me after the DVD finished that the microphone had been sliding slowly down the stand, she was just trying to stay in line.
Which left me with a rock performer's CV as empty as an Act MP's head.
I lay on the couch after watching the DVD and desperately tried to think of something I must have done to exempt me from being the musical black sheep of the Colbert children.
I came up with three.
In 1991, when doing promotion for the Otago Nuggets basketball team, I wrote a rap song for them which the team reshaped and slapped on a 4XO cassette.
It sold 500 copies.
They made a video and it was played on Radio With Pictures.
That was probably the peak.
Straitjacket Fits were on the same show that night.
I'm also counting Chris Knox sitting on my lap at the Bar Bodega in Wellington, singing Not Given Lightly into the whites of my eyes and imploring me to sing along.
I didn't, but at least I learned what it was like to have a rock audience staring at me.
The third was when I found myself in a local recording studio in the 1970s and they needed someone to noodle faux harpsichord for an RHE Refrigeration ad.
I did the business, badly, because people were watching and listening, and then returned the next day to hear RHE Refrigeration had rejected the ad.
Because of the music.
Who cares.
I've met Tom Petty.
My brother and sister can only dream of such a thing.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
