Remember Kids of 88?
The year is 2009, and the Kids of 88 song My House can be heard blasting from cars, house parties and radio stations across the country.
‘‘I’m gonna take you back to my house / I love the feeling when you touch me, baby / It’s not as good when I’m by myself / You know you make me go woohoo-oo-oo-oo.’’
Picked up from their Myspace page as a theme for youth music television channel C4, one half of the duo, Jordan Arts, admits everything that followed that song went down ‘‘very quickly’’.
‘‘C4 [received] this unprecedented bout of phone calls asking what the song was, and it snowballed from there. Once that song was live things really started to pop off, which was amazing.’’
Experiencing a rapid ascent to fame on New Zealand shores, it’s a rise that turned heads across the globe, and soon saw the pair ‘‘completely leapfrog New Zealand’’.
‘‘I remember there was a two-week period where it turned into a bidding war between five different major labels who we all looked up to. We were flown around the world,’’ Arts says.
From there, the duo of Arts and Sam McCarthy released two hit albums, won two New Zealand Music Awards, toured the country multiple times, and played support to American pop star Ke$ha across Europe, before quietly disbanding in 2014.
But McCarthy and Arts didn’t disappear at all. Instead, they went on to make some of the most interesting, wide-reaching, and technically skilled music going, continuing to showcase that same kind of genius that first had heads turning with Kids of 88.