Kiwi Pacific Records

ROCKHAPPENZ Public Collection

Kiwi Pacific Records  —  a New Zealand recording company active around the mid-1960s

Kiwi Records  —  the music and voices of New Zealand

What could be a more apt record label for New Zealand music than Kiwi Records?  This offshoot of publisher A.H. and A.W. Reed began producing records in 1957 to support the company's Maori language, physical education and folk-dancing school texts.  Now known as Kiwi Pacific Records International Ltd, the firm is no longer connected with Reed, but it still offers a catalogue of New Zealand and Pacific music.  The first disc from Kiwi Records was Maori action songs – 1 (1957) by the Putiki Maori Club.  Popular artists of the 1960s included the Amorangi Boys of Rotorua, Inia Te Wiata, and Harry Dansey and the Te Rangatahi Maori Group.  Maori records remained important, and from the 1970s they were complemented by the music of the Pacific on Kiwi’s Hibiscus Label.

Kiwi’s recordings of ballads and folk songs captured the past that the publisher's books celebrated.  Neil Colquhoun’s Group, the Song Spinners, put out Songs of the Whalers, Songs of the Gold-diggers and Songs of the Gumdiggers.  In 1972 Colquhoun produced the landmark collection Songs of a Young Country.  Other typically Kiwi Records artists were balladeer Peter Cape, songwriter Ken Avery, song collector Les Cleveland, the Kokatahi Band of Westland, the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band and Tony and The Initials.