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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“HOW BIZARRE” by
Simon Grigg (Awa Press, $NZ38)
Do you like
watching car crashes?
Perhaps you like
watching car crashes in slow motion?
If so, then How Bizarre, subtitled “Pauly Fuemana
and the Song that Stormed the World” is the book for you. Its woeful tale is
one long, slow car crash.
Somebody asked
me if I was “going out of my comfort zone” is reading this book. Nearly all
books are within my “comfort zone” (horrible, cliché phrase!), and there was
very little in this book that made me feel uncomfortable. But it certainly is
outside my general range of interest, as I am no follower of pop music (or
hip-hop or rap or rock or what-have-you). I certainly have little knowledge of,
or interest in, the New Zealand recording industry.
On the other
hand, the tiny amount I knew about Pauly Fuemana’s one-hit wonder “How Bizarre”
piqued my interest. It came out of South Auckland’s Polynesian and Maori
culture, with Pauly (of mixed Nuiean and Maori descent) having originally been
part of his brother Philip’s combo, ironically named the Otara Millionaire’s
Club (OMC). “How Bizarre” managed to gain a big following. Between 1995 and
1997 the single was successively No. 1 in New Zealand’s pop charts, No. 1 in Oz
and finally, and most lucratively, No.1 in the USA. No New Zealand recording replicated this feat
until Lorde’s Royals seventeen years
later.
I’m not under
the illusion that popularity means quality and (pardon me) my own repeated listening
to “How Bizarre” revealed nothing but a harmless pop with a simple rhythm and a
mildly ironical lyric and a reedy and slightly off-key voice out front. (The
thin, reedy, wobbly voice was even worse in the follow-up “Land of Plenty”,
even if it had a better lyric.) On the
other hand, massive sales say something about public taste – even if that taste
is ephemeral – so into Simon Grigg’s book I plunged.
Simon Grigg is
an industry insider who ran youth-oriented nightclubs and dance-clubs in Auckland
and owned some recording labels. He had a hand in developing the career of the
excellent jazzman Nathan Haines. At various times he was Pauly Fuemana’s
promoter, mentor and adviser; and though he was never formally Fuemana’s
manager, he sometimes took on that role too.
Grigg lays out
his attitude to Fuemana’s story from the start, remarking in his introduction:
“Pauly, born Paul Lawrence Fuemana, had
in 1995 found himself at the beginning of a tumultuous rollercoaster ride for
which he was neither mentally nor emotionally equipped, and in which his worst
enemy was often himself.” (p.4)
We know at once that
this is going to end in tears.
Perhaps we
should also be warned that we are not going to get the whole story, either, even if Grigg is an insider. There is
virtually nothing in this book about Fuemana’s childhood and adolescence, which
are covered in two pages. Hints that Fuemana might have been involved in youthful
crime are kept vague and general. In fact there isn’t a great deal about
Fuemana’s family. There are only a few snippets about the singer’s relationship
with his older brother Philip; and very occasional mentions of his wife Kirstine
who was, eventually, the mother of his six children. One has to assume that a
number of people chose not to speak to Grigg.
Grigg’s focus is
on the making of the single “How Bizarre”, how it affected the local music
industry and how it affected Pauly. His take is that the record’s success was
as much the work of its producer Alan Jansson and his recording techniques as
it was of anything Fuemana contributed. Often writing like a promoter, Grigg
talks up the importance and cultural impact of the (pop) music industry and has
the alarming habit of referring to every second musician he names as “legendary”. Sometimes Pauly gets
completely lost in this narrative, as when Grigg devotes all of Chapter 8 to the
music publishing and recording companies in Australia whom he hustled.
There is much
detail on attempting to secure lucrative contracts for Pauly with major
international recording companies. There is much detail on how the eponymous
song was recorded, re-recorded, refined, improved, targeted to its audience and
finally released. This involves the following interesting observation:
“A great single, a killer pop record –
which is what a musician and producer are invariably trying to create, even
if they position it as underground and alternative – almost always needs to
be carefully nurtured and slowly matured, over a long period.” (pp.34-35)
There might be
(and there are) great claims for “How Bizarre” as representing an underdog
Polynesian culture, but in the end there is the admission that the real aim was
always to produce a big-selling pop song.
I admit to
finding some of the tale both fascinating and tatty. As Simon Grigg earnestly
discusses how he hustled up appearance for Pauly on Australian TV’s “Hey, Hey
It’s Saturday” show, or on Britain’s “Top of the Pops”, I realise at once how
important this was for the promotion and sales of the record, but also how
tawdry such (mimed) appearances always were.
I also, of course,
take a bitchy pleasure in the unflattering thumb sketches Grigg sometimes gives
of NZ showbiz people who cross his and Pauly’s path, as in the following,
wherein Grigg adopts a give-with-one-hand, take-away-with-the-other approach:
“ Standing on our left was the Maori
entertainer Howard Morrison. Notorious for his crankiness and slightly
unpleasant attitude towards those he regarded as lesser beings, the ageing and
recently knighted Morrison was still indisputably one of the greatest
entertainers New Zealand had ever produced.” (p.183). After which, Grigg
tells us that Morrison snubbed their proffered handshakes and insisted they
call him “Sir Howard”.
Two things are
painfully clear to me from this book, and they both contribute to my judgment
that we are watching a prolonged car crash.
First, Pauly Fuemana
simply could not handle his sudden (and brief) fame. The book comes close to
saying that he was mentally unbalanced. He had a very short fuse and was prone
to outbursts of anger. More than once he is reported as threatening people with
physical violence should they cross him in even the most minor ways. While
Grigg regards “Stole My Car”, the cheeky parody of “How Bizarre”, as amusing
and as something which ultimately promoted the sales of “How Bizarre”, Pauly
Fuemana flies into a rage, seeing the parody as an affront to his dignity.
(p.99)
Pauly was also a
fantasist who had the imagination of a boastful little boy. He frequently made
up extravagant and silly stories about himself to impress gullible journalists.
At one point he claimed to have been a hitman for the mafia, the better to
build up his image as a hard man. To an Aussie journo, he said that when he
toured the South Island, the Third Reich and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses
outside his motel (p.33). Obviously the fantasy here was that he was some sort
of pioneering bearer of Pasifika culture. He had barely established a recording
career when he was demanding huge sums of money, as he clearly thought he
should now be earning it like Elvis. At his first signing with a major label,
he demanded money up front and a BMW (p.62). He also had the habit of making
big plans for a touring career that he wasn’t able to sustain. We see him
talking big with unimpressed studio musicians – who had been hired simply to
mime to one of his TV appearances – about how he is going to offer them a huge
salary to become his regular backing group. Inevitably the sums Pauly did earn
were quickly burnt up in big-ticket items the singer couldn’t really afford.
Then there was
the matter of sex and drugs. Grigg is very, very discreet in how he reports
these things, but he does retail an anecdote of Pauly being impressed by the
prostitutes’ business cards that are pasted in London telephone boxes, and
ordering up a bedraggled old hooker to his hotel room, because he thought she
would look like the glamorous studio photo on the card (pp.147-148). As for
drugs, Grigg presents himself as the forbearing and wise person who steered
Pauly away from the stuff. He tells a story of trying to prevent Pauly from snorting
cocaine on a launch cruise which affluent recording industry trash took on the
Waitemata (pp.83-85). When eventually Pauly dies in 2010 (in his fortieth year),
Grigg refutes rumours that drugs had anything to do with it and ascribes Pauly’s
death to a complicated auto-immune disorder.
There are also
tales of Pauly, after making a scene or indulging a fantasy, crawling back to
Grigg or to other industry people and tearfully asking forgiveness for his bad
behaviour. But this simply reinforces the impression of an immature kid out of
his depth, and the car crash proceeds to take its course.
Second, when all is said
and done, this book comes as close as the author dares to saying that Pauly
Fuemana had a pitifully small talent in the first place, even as pop singers
go. This may sound an extravagant claim on my part, but I beg you to read the
following passages in which Grigg talks about how the recordings were produced:
“Sina Saipaia, who appeared in the revised
lyrics as Sister Sina, sang the backing vocals and was a dominant voice
in the chorus’s duet. This had proved necessary. Pauly had a brilliant and
distinctive, almost nasal rapping style, and he could talk-sing in an
infectious and quite charming way, but his singing voice was not strong
enough to stand on its own. In truth he was never able to sing a lyric in tune.
His vocals needed to be carefully placed in the mix to hide their weakness:
they were flat unless almost spoken or mixed in with another, stronger voice.
This would remain a serious and vexing problem, which Alan [Janssen, the
producer] had to repeatedly battle and
overcome in the recording and mixing process. For some songs on the album he
quietly brought in a session vocalist, whose vocals were mixed into Pauly’s to
bring them back into pitch. Pauly didn’t know and the vocalist was uncredited
and sworn to secrecy.” (pp.44-45)
Pauly’s delusion
that he was also a skilled drummer produced only “a formless bundle of random drum sounds …. Pauly could not play a drum
kit, keep a rhythm or produce a passable beat. Despite this he looked pleased
with himself and seemed to think he’d done well. This was an illusion he would
suffer from often. He was simply unable to see something he’d created for what
it was, convincing himself of its artistic and commercial worth even if it had
little or none.” (p.75)
Pauly claimed
credit for a dance-mix version of “How Bizarre”, in the production of which he
was not even involved. Pauly, in other words, believed that the image of
himself, created by studio wizardry, really was himself.
Grigg notes
briefly that after Pauly and Alan Janssen finally parted “Pauly would never again replicate, or come close to replicating, the
success of his first hit song. Without Alan he was unable to write or produce a
record that would enter the charts or gain radio play anywhere in the world.”
(p.211)
Grigg does note
a couple of occasions when Pauly produced passable performances in front of
live audiences. But running through the book is the promoter’s FEAR that Pauly
will get too many chances to perform live and inevitably disappoint listeners,
because he was, on his own and outside the recording studio, clearly a woefully
inadequate performer.
I emphasize that
in noting all this, I am not being a grumpy old anti-pop-music sod, but am recording
faithfully the things that Grigg says and the tone in which he says them.
Probably a book like
How Bizarre could have been written
about any number of pop performers who are really sold on their synthetic
image, and whose real singing abilities are merely incidental to the hype. One
still pities Pauly Fuemana for his delusions.
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