How Bizarre is a new documentary about the late Pauly Fuemana, leader of the Otara Millionaires Club, in which I appear as an interview subject. Named after the act’s huge 1995 single “How Bizarre,” the film premiered on Maori TV in New Zealand on August 25, and might be viewable on-demand here
It wasn’t till the film’s director Stuart Page got in touch with me in 2013 that I fully appreciated the small role I played in the rise of the OMC and the propulsion of “How Bizarre” to become a worldwide smash, the biggest-ever record to come out of New Zealand with sales of over a million. Of course, I’d been shocked to hear about the death of Pauly Fuemana in 2010, when he was still only 41, but I had no idea what had happened in between that and “How Bizarre.” Which is what this fine film fills in for me. Back in the day in ’95, when I was still writing for Rolling Stone, I heard “How Bizarre” on pre-release and instantly loved it, and was convinced it would be a hit. It’s not often in the music game that you can pick ’em, but I picked this one! I met and interviewed Pauly Fuemana in Sydney, and in short, he was a star, I thought, a total natural. I wrote a feature on these new sounds coming out of New Zealand which you can read here, the pdf Stuart Page sent me. As the single first hit Number One in New Zealand and then Australia, and then the act set its sights overseas, it turned out, as Page told me, that that Rolling Stone tearsheet served as something of a calling card for what became a juggernaut. I was delighted to discover that I’d actually done my little bit for the cause; and that it was then one of my heroes, British writer/broadcaster Charlie Gillett, who picked up on the whole thing and spruiked it to the rest of the world. Less delighted, perhaps, to find out – as the film illustrates – that “How Bizarre” could virtually stand as an object illustration of how hard it can sometimes be to survive in the shadow such an overarching hit… And yet, maybe the thing is, every time I put that track on, to this day, it never fails to bring a smile to my face…
