The Otara Millionaires Club took their sound from South Auckland to the world’s top ten music chart, beginning in 1995. Despite being shunned by local radio stations at the time, ‘How Bizarre’ went number one in South Africa, Canada, Germany, Australia and New Zealand; selling more than four million copies worldwide.
The band is now the subject of a new documentary aired on Maori Television; shot by TV producer Stuart Page.
Simon Grigg from Huh Records, which released the How Bizarre album, says he liked the late Pauly Fuemana because he wasn’t a “cliché hip hop guy”. When the co-writer of the documentary, Alan Jansson, came to Grigg around 1995 to say they needed money to produce the album which featured ‘How Bizarre’, Grigg just gave it.
Initially radio stations would turn their noses up at the single – which eventually went platinum in Australia and three times platinum in New Zealand. Grigg says radio “wouldn’t play New Zealand music as such – they’d play a bit of Split Ends, a bit of Crowded House and maybe the odd Dave Dobbyn record, but they wouldn’t play most New Zealand records and especially a New Zealand hip hop record and a New Zealand Polynesian record for example”.
But it was Ross Goodwin, who in 1996 had just started Mai FM, who “jumped on the record”, Grigg remembers, “Mai FM started playing it and it went ballistic”.
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