[3] In the 1960s, the company was the largest locally owned record label in the South Pacific with its New Zealand head office in Wellington and a branch in Sydney.
The label recorded an extensive range of Pacific music from New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti and Tonga.
This record label was the largest supplier of Pacific Island and Māori music in New Zealand.
[citation needed] Its headquarters was in Wellington, New Zealand and owned by Ron Dalton and Murdoch Riley.
In this late 1960s this company merged with Viking Records to become Viking Sevenseas NZ Ltd.[3][5] In 1962 in an effort to branch out, Ron Dalton and Murdoch Riley were in New York conferring with Walter Hofer to distribute American Independent records in Australia and New Zealand.
At that time Viking's extensive catalogue was largely made up of recordings from Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti and New Zealand but they were looking to make a big move into the pop music genre as well.
[23] Nat Mara who played on Rarotonga Calling for Pepe and the Rarotongans[24] also had releases under his own name.
Evolving out of a rock & roll band Rudy & The Crystals who had recorded a song in the Surf genre, "Surf City",[33] the band was made up of German-Samoan brothers Rudy and Hugo Spemann, Eddie Eves and Horst Stunzner.
[36] They also appeared on the Viking compilations, Action Samoa, with Edison Heather and his Samoans, and The Grey Sisters,[37][38] and The Beat of the Pacific which included George Tumahai, Daphne Walker, Richard Santos, and Bill Sevesi's Islanders.
In 2015, 81 year old Rudy Spemann was pictured in a garden holding the electric guitar he custom built in the late 1950s or early 1960s.