Pauly Fuemana captured the imagination of the music world with How Bizarre. (NZ Herald Archive)
Pauly Fuemana captured the imagination of the music world with How Bizarre. (NZ Herald Archive)
Pauly Fuemana of OMC - the Otara Millionaires Club - is our New Zealander of the Year for the song How Bizarre which hit number one in New Zealand early in 1996.
Before too long the catchy tune had made the charts in just about every country thathas them: Australia, Britain, the US, Portugal, Israel, Canada, Ireland and South Africa.
It is the biggest-selling New Zealand single; New Zealand History online estimates sales at between three and four million in the last five years of the 20th century.
Fuemana died in 2010 at the age of just 40 and, though he never repeated the huge success of How Bizarre, he was remembered as a man who broke down barriers and put South Auckland on the map for the right reasons.
"Just the fact that he was there, the fact that kids had already seen him out on the streets and then the next minute he was on Top of the Pops," writer/director Oscar Kightley told the Herald's Vaimoana Tapaleao.
