Waiata 100: The story behind New Zealand's number one song

It has been a long journey to the place 'Poi E' now holds in the hearts of this country’s listeners.

It began with a vision.

As a pre-teen growing up in Patea, Maui ’Dalvanius’ Prime was drawn to the contemporary sounds of black America: Motown, Stax, Phil Spector’s girl groups. A larger-than-life showman, he spent the 1970s in Sydney nightclubs singing funk and soul with his group, Dalvanius and the Fascinations.

It was Roger Davies – then managing Aussie hitmakers Sherbet, later the mastermind behind Tina Turner’s solo career – who gave him some life-changing advice.

“He told me to go for a Māori Pacific sound and leave the soulcabaret,” Dalvanius told Rip It Up’s Piripi Walker in 1983.

“He said we’d never get anywhere without an ethnic sound that came from our background.”

This was reinforced by conversations with international stars when Dalvanius and the Fascinations opened shows for the likes of the Pointer Sisters and Fleetwood Mac. “Get ethnic,” was Christine McVie’s advice.

So Dalvanius came home with a mission: to create a contemporary sound that would resonate with young Māori – the kids he’d seen breakdancing in the shopping malls – and reconnect them with their language and culture.

Confronted with his own lack of fluency in te reo, he took an intensive language course in Wellington. Then he made a pilgrimage to Tokomaru Bay to seek out Ngoi Pewhairangi (Ngāti Porou), a prolific composer and promoter of te reo Māori, whose talents had been nurtured by her aunt Tuini Ngawai, author of many famous waiata.

Returning to Pātea, where the recent closure of the local freezing works had left most of the town’s working-age population unemployed, he enlisted the local Māori cultural group, which he renamed Patea Māori Club, after current international hit groups Culture Club and Tom Tom Club.

He took them to Auckland where they recorded Ngoi’s song ‘Poi E’, giving it a bubbling contemporary backing, inspired by the American hip-hop he had heard blasting from boomboxes, and released it on his own label, Maui.

Radio resisted it. Local music received little airplay anyway, let alone a song sung entirely in te reo. Yet gradually, thanks to a feel-good video, a television news story, Dalvanius’s persistence and the resulting groundswell, it became a hit. It reached number one in New Zealand in early 1984, spending four weeks at the top and staying on the charts for almost half the year.

In 2001 APRA had polled their songwriter members to select the 100 best New Zealand songs of the past 75 years, which resulted in the top-selling Nature’s Best compilations.

‘Poi E’ came in 37th.

Music journalist Chris Bourke remembers seeing Dalvanius at the launch. He was in a wheelchair and had lost a lot of weight, though he still looked resplendent in his purple kaftan. But Chris felt for Dalvanius, thinking about his vision and all the industry hoops he had had to jump through to achieve it, and felt sad that it hadn’t ranked any higher.

Dalvanius died of cancer the following year, age 54.

But ‘Poi E’ had planted its roots and would rise again. Its original release had coincided almost exactly with the establishment of Te Kōhanga Reo, Māori language immersion preschools. A generation had grown up with it and would keep singing it.

‘Poi E’s recognition as the top song in Waiata 100 shows how deeply Dalvanius’s vision has embedded itself in this country.

In 2026 it is a vote of support for te reo, at a time when the Māori language has been under attack. It is an acknowledgement of the vital role Māori culture plays in the music of this country.

43 years ago Dalvanius made a record that connected young Māori to their language and their heritage, at the same time showing Pākehā that te reo was neither going away nor need be feared, but was something uniquely of this place that could contribute to everyone’s sense of belonging.

Today ‘Poi E’ is our song.

Sign up for RNZ's daily newsletter

Help

Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, is a curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.