In 1995, OMC’s Pauly Fuemana and Alan Jansson pulled an allnighter and wrote ‘How Bizarre’, a song that would come to dominate the global charts and make history as Aotearoa’s first hip hop beat to go truly global.

Pauly Fuemana’s wife, Kirstine Fuemana, still has “books and books” of his songwriting and remembers him writing “endlessly” when he came up with the track that would go on to irrevocably change his life in 1993.

The Ōtara Millionaires Club, or OMC, was still an emerging group on New Zealand’s hip hop scene when vocalist Pauly Fuemana and producer Alan Jansson were tinkering away writing late into the night.

On that night, right before the group’s debut appearance at the Big Day Out, Alan remembers him and Pauly working into the early morning with the pair having written eight tracks in one sitting — one of which became How Bizarre.

Alan added that the song’s instantly recognisable hook came from Pauly’s father who used to play it to him as a child. With a relaxed mix of guitar and trumpet, the song became the “perfect mix of rap and pop melody”.

Setting out without many expectations, success for OMC came hard and fast. How Bizarre went to number one in at least 13 overseas pop charts. This was before the internet age and the track took months to reach overseas markets but instantly blew up on release in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K.

Over the following years, OMC toured the world on the back of the enormous success of How Bizarre. The track was introduced as “the biggest song in the history of New Zealand music” on the BBC series Top of the Pops and Pauly became one of the country’s music globetrotters.

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