Dalvanius

Born January 16, 1948. Died October 3, 2002. Dalvanius was a mountain of a man physically and in achievement. One of New Zealand's pre-eminent Maori musicians, he had a massive national hit in the 1980s with 620659, where he took a group of recently unemployed locals from the town of Patea and took them to the top of the charts for over a month after every record company throughout Australia and NZ had turned them down. The same single was later Single Of The Month in NME. Much beloved by his people, he was a national institution in NZ, and he played a large part in the revitalisation of Maori music in the late 20th Century.