The Big Read: Pauly Fuemana: The whole Bizarre story

"When Pauly died it was the end of a really unique thing happening in New Zealand." - Simon Grigg. Photo / Supplied

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OMC's How Bizarre is one of the biggest hits ever to come out of New Zealand. TimeOut editor Russell Baillie looks at a new book about the phenomenal hit and the rise and fall of frontman Pauly Fuemana.

Once again, Pauly Fuemana is playing frontman.

There he is, all big black eyebrows and pout, cheekbones and facial scar, glowering from the cover of a book that bears his name and the song which changed his life and our pop culture: How Bizarre.

Fuemana died five years ago of a rare neurological disorder. It's now 20 years since the track - sung by him and written with Auckland producer Alan Jansson - was first released and became the biggest song to emerge from these shores until Lorde's Royals.

A still from the video for OMC's hit How Bizarre. Photo / YouTube

The book, How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the Song that Stormed the World is written by Simon Grigg, whose label Huh! released the song.

How Bizarre's bitter aftermath has also become part of our music folklore - Fuemana's sad decline into bankruptcy within a year and his family's strongly held belief that the music industry took most of the money he should have made from the song.

Grigg says the urge to record his own take on the Bizarre story came after attending Fuemana's funeral, where, as the book recounts, he and Jansson had been threatened by fellow mourners and told to "pay up".

He thought it was time he told his and Jansson's side of the story. He didn't have a book in mind when he first started writing.

A keen blogger over the years, he just wanted to write something that ensured this strange, brilliant, sad, tragic chapter of New Zealand pop history was recorded. And something that - despite the eventual book cover - would remind people that OMC wasn't just Fuemana.

It might have started off as the Otara Millionaires Club, a South Auckland hip-hop outfit centred on Fuemana. But the OMC behind the four million-selling multiple number one How Bizarre was the studio duo of Fuemana, and Jansson - who had earlier recorded the 1994 compilation of emerging South Auckland acts Proud, which featured a track by the early OMC ...

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