Peter McLennan has helpfully and correctly blogged here about the strange factual detachment that the popular media in New Zealand – or at least some of it – has developed over the past few days with regard to expat singer Kimbra’s guest spot on Gotye’s perhaps to be US number one single Somebody That I Used To Know.

Says Peter: A couple of NZ media outlets have got a little over-excited about the chart placing.

Setting aside the gratuitous reworking of a shortish guest spot to the status of a ‘duet’ by TVNZ, several outlets have now decided to anoint Kimbra (who I hope gets there – she deserves it) with a mythical status as, to quote Stuff:

the first New Zealand artist to be linked to a number one on the United States music charts.

or (TVNZ)

the first Kiwi to make it to number one on the US music charts.

both of which are factually incorrect statements of course.

The first New Zealander to make it to number one in the US music charts was OMC, featuring Pauly Fuemana, with How Bizarre, a record written in New Zealand, recorded in Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand and released worldwide on a New Zealand owned record label (distributed by the Dutch PolyGram company). It was, as anyone reasonably knows, quite a feat and something that Pauly and everyone else involved worked rather hard to achieve. We were told before that that it could not be done – and we did.

And Pauly was, as was I and others in the mix that got it there, rather proud of our achievement. It also reached number one in another 14 countries and was lifted from the US platinum (almost double platinum – that’s 2 million copies folks) album of the same name.

In the US the decision was made by Mercury, a US branch of PolyGram, to issue the single only to radio and use the airplay to drive album sales = more money. This was industry standard at the time and many acts did it. The Hot 100 was no longer regarded a reliable reference to what was truly hot as a huge percentage of records were, because there was no physical single, ineligible

But – I argued – we wanted a physical single so we could top the US Hot 100. Mercury came back and said the Pop Chart, based solely on airplay, had the same standing in the industry, and – more – was the thing that decided the other important charts, American Top 40, and Rick Dees, which most Americans heard as the US chart.

We agreed and waited – between June and August we totalled some 560,000 radio plays on US top40 radio (it passed a million later that year) and some 1o,000 video plays (most played US video of 1997 – 15,000) and finally I had a call from New York on August 16th, 1997. “You’re number one, number one!” screamed the woman from Mercury.

And so it seemed we were – we’d knocked off Meredith Brooks and we were number one, although ineligible for the Hot 100 (which is often seen as the premium chart by outsiders) because there was no physical single. We were also number one on American Top 40 and Rick Dees.

The irony was PolyGram Canada had taken advantage of the lack of a released single and shipped 300,000 across the border, which – if they’d been counted – would’ve allowed the record to top the Hot 100 too.

We had a fax later that day confirming the chart, and a few months later a plaque from Mercury for a number one.

The album was stickered with “Featuring the number one single “How Bizarre”.

The Billboard site records it this way:

Jump forward 15 years and how we forget. Pauly is no longer with us and reporters have decided that history needs a tweak to make a handy headline. After I saw the story linked above, I tweeted the Waikato Times reporter, Belinda Feek, and suggested that she was a cub reporter who was recycling a press release. She denied both – which of course made it worse: it was just very sloppy reporting.

Edit: Having talked with Belinda, I accept that her mistake was the result of misinformation on the net, not sloppy reporting.

The NZ Herald and TVNZ didn’t bother to reply, which is their usual style when called up, and the Entertainment Editor from Stuff emailed me trying furiously (albeit politely) to redefine what a “US Music Chart” is – and not doing that very well.

So, who to trust? Billboard, American Top 40 and Ricks Dees and the US record company, all of whom listed it as number one, or a lazy ill informed reporter or two desperate to create a story?

Dunno – you judge.

But either way, I think it’s beyond shabby to try and strip the credit for his achievement – something his family, friends and much of the nation was enormously proud of – from the late Pauly Fuemana. It’s completely wrong, which is why, I guess I’ve put finger to keyboard here.

In honour of New Zealand Music Month, from Otaki (and a huge hattip to Yvette Parsons, without whom we may never have seen these):

or the live version:

With the upload comment:

only thing the annoys me is the sound person did not know how to do the sound correctly, so…that’s why I was off pitch. sorry guys, but I did do the best I could under that situation.

In the mid 1970s I read and re-read a book about Phil Spector. It was a inspirational book for me at that age. Out of His Head by former (and later) Melody Maker editor, and one of the most important music journalists of his time, Richard Williams, was the first biography of Spector and indeed one of the very earliest serious biographies of a rock figure that wasn’t all PR puffery and gloss (I’m thinking of The Beatles by Hunter Davies for example, which looked at the good bits and completely ignored anything that wasn’t quite so, a little like the Beatles own Anthology too).

Williams wrote the book primarily about the man who made the music, and the music that the man made, the records that redefined what music production was (Williams revisits Spector here, post trial). He completely changed the way we create music and you hear his influence in almost every pop and rock record made to this day; and not only that, if it wasn’t enough, he also invented the concept of the producer as an artist, not just a man (or woman) who sits in the booth and works out the balance between instruments, and he did this from his very first recording with the post-doo woppers, The Teddy Bears, in 1958.

Joe Meek, in the UK, was a little later but did much the same, although he didn’t cause anything like the musical shockwaves that Spector did, even if he was arguably even crazier, and, yes, he took a life too.

When it came to The Beatles, neither Lennon nor Harrison had, by their own words, ever been produced as such as they were by Spector, a decade after his girl group period began, when he moulded what were for both, their finest solo records and radically different to those sixties pop symphonies but no less brilliant.

Spector’s life and the life he enforced on others seems most demented and harrowing when you look at the life of poor Ronnie Spector, who’s own book is pretty heavy reading. There is also a chapter in another book, Josh Alan Friedman’s Tell The Truth Until They Bleed, where a tragic Ronnie Spector, divorced from Phil, broken and still in her early twenties, is, with yet another of the endless stream of no-name rocker boyfriends that she tagged on to or vice versa, staggering from oldies gig to oldies gig for a pittance, when, it can be said with some confidence that she possessed and maybe still does, one of the greatest female voices of her generation. Few come close, and those records, every one, the hits, the flops and the ones that seem to have completely slipped through the cracks before they were even released, are majestic symphonic pop masterpieces that can tear at your soul, and in my case, aged 16 when I first heard them, very much did.

I’ve just finished another Spector book, Mick Brown’s Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound, which does just that, tears down the myth far more thoroughly than any of the earlier books, by making the story of creation of that music almost incidental to the monster that created it, as if the music was an inevitable by-product of the horror of his life. It’s the story of the human train-wreck that Phil Spector was from that very first record through to the murder that eventually ended the his own life as well (unless by some miracle the appeal due shortly allows him to walk, it is after all California). The overwhelming tragedy is that he caused pain for just about everyone he touched, he was in every way possible, a monster and a monster for some fifty years.

But amongst all that there are still those mind-boggling records and I remain as confused as ever as to how we treat things like this. Do we dismiss the music, wipe the tracks I’ve posted below from pop music’s historic record. No, I think not, it wasn’t even really a question for me as The Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica is still an album I would happily spend the rest of my days with, but it’s a question raised by one of the projects I’m working on at the moment (and, no, I’m not about to make a record with Ronnie..I wish) and thus I voiced it.

In the meantime, the music stands, I guess, and I’m happily, and without guilt, going to post these wonders:

The big hit from Ronnie etc:

A couple of (towering) non-hits from The Ronettes:

A song from The Checkmates Ltd, which was really no longer of its time when Spector released it in ’67, but sounds pretty fine 43 years on:

A snippet of Spector in the studio:

And this throughly bizarre video where the odious, convicted, and jailed for underage sex in a very predatory way, Jonathan King, pays tribute to the murderer Phil Spector, which is only really topped by the fact that Spector is, they say, in the same cellblock as Charles Manson, who so wanted to be a Beach Boy, a band who’s music centre was besotted with Spector, so much so he had trouble speaking in his presence for years.

This odd matchup does, as way of justifying its inclusion, use as audio, another wonderful Spector produced track, from The Checkmates Ltd (a band who’s one big hit, Black Pearl was also a big hit for the NZ band Moana & The Moa Hunters in the early 1990s), Love Is All I Have to Give:

It really is too odd….

Just a thought on media weirdness and the journey that erroneous data can take. In particular I’m thinking today of the reportage drivel that was the core of much of the reporting of Pauly Fuemana’s untimely death. I could write a book on the misreporting of the whole sad OMC saga, you never know where that thought might lead, and Peter Mclennan nailed it rather well here and here.

As he says: How does a one man band break up and reform?

And that’s the line in the recent bullshit that’s really got on my nerves.

Someone, and god knows who it is changed this more correct line in the OMC Wikipedia story:

By mid-1995, OMC had broken up but Fuemana used the group’s acronym as a solo artist.

which in itself, I admit, is confusing in the article’s context as it refers back to the original Otara Millionaire’s Club, as appeared on the 1994 Proud album, which featured Pauly and who did indeed break up at the end of 1994 (not 1995), Pauly turning up at Alan Jansson’s door afterwards saying he wanted to carry on and Alan telling him to use the OMC tag. The agreement they made that day, and in subsequent documents that I wrote on their behalf, was that OMC was both or either of them.

That wiki confusion would have been fixed by some smart and quick editing.

But it was not to be. The editing that took place by this person on 6 December, 2009 changed the article and invented a ‘breakup’ date in 2000, without anything approaching evidence, and completely changed the factual drift of the, admittedly half baked original.

That mistake was, when the Pauly Fuemana page was created on 31 January this year (rather than re-directing to the OMC page as had been the case), carried across to the new article and then used as research data by endless nonsense stories like this, created by thoroughly lazy reporters who don’t seemingly have access to telephone or email to check data. And that linked story is now used as the citation to back the erroneous data in the Pauly Fuemana page, taking it full circle. How Bizarre indeed.

The simple truth is that OMC could not and never did ‘break up’ as they were never a group….it was a studio concept put together by Alan Jansson and Pauly. When Alan and Pauly stopped working together in 1998 (until they found themselves in the studio again after I engineered it in early 2005, but that’s another whole story), Paul carried on using the name with Alan’s agreement. He recorded demos and more under the name. Nothing ever ‘broke up’.

That shitty Stuff story also tells the viewer that the shot of Paul in a black suit and polo neck, in a red European sports car (taken whilst we were in the UK) is:

A still from OMC’s music video

Which, in the real world, just happened to feature Paul in a gorgeous Polynesian styled shirt (man, he could dress) driving two others (Sina Siapaia and a  Filipino guy called Pil who was a last minute stand-in because brother Pele (DJ Soane Filitonga) hadn’t showed for the shoot) in a 1968 Impala. The video ain’t that hard to find.

But, myself I’ve always preferred this vid, which features half the High Street kids of the day and I helped script. Check out his smile (and the dude with the cellphone ….bricks rule):

Found down the the local pirate DVD emporium (I’m always bemused by the fuss over Pirate Bay when millions of dollars of high quality DVDs are openly sold in Pirate Megamarts with websites, online ordering and so on here in Indonesia every day without any noise. It’s not unusual for a family to wander back to Perth with 200 movies).

We the people:

The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), in its annual report issued in Washington on Thursday, said it had put Indonesia back on its “priority watch list” of intellectual property violators, prompting Jakarta to respond with claims of unfairness.

“I’m deeply disappointed,” said Andy Sommeng, director general of intellectual property rights at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. “It’s like our efforts in protecting intellectual property rights are ignored.”

[From Jakarta Globe]

You can buy pirated DVDs in the departure lounge at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport.