“Fair-dinkum” Kiwi tops the pops

NZ-born musician Daniel Bedingfield, 21, tops the UK pop charts with Gotta Get Thru This – recorded on rudimentary equipment and a computer in his south London bedroom. “The track is absurdly brilliant, as if Off the Wall-period Michael Jackson had been blasted forward 20 years, genius intact, to make an irresistibly danceable garage anthem,” says The Guardian. Bedingfield cities his antipodean roots as key to his success: “They gave me my pioneering spirit”.