Riley had a day job at Wellington's Lamphouse.
The EP was a minor hit in the lower half of the North Island but it was enough to encourage the label to keep on going.įor the first year, both Staples and Dalton continued to work at Autocrat, which in return, sold Viking records via their network. Formerly The Tawaru Trio, they had previously recorded for Tanza when Riley ran the label. The label's first release in July of that year was an EP by a band from Palmerston North called The Q-Tees, covering other hits of the day, recorded in that city's 2ZA studios by local DJ Wally Chamberlain who took the tapes to Viking. Viking Records Tory Street, Wellington, HQ in the 1960s The label's name came from Murdoch Riley's wife, who had Scandanavian blood. which both dominated and controlled access to record retail in New Zealand, although the latter was slowly changing. In 1957, Riley, and two salesmen from local radio manufacturer and retailer, Autocrat Radio Ltd., Jim Staples and Ron Dalton, formed the Viking label, sensing that the market was ready for a more ambitious young independent label than Tanza and the then dominant major His Master's Voice (NZ) Ltd.
Murdoch Riley was a former employee of both the NZBS and the earlier pioneering indie Tanza – he was the label’s manager between 19. One of the most important, plus one of the most prolific NZ-owned record labels of all-time, Viking was a part of the new wave of NZ independents that arrived in the late 1950s that also included Prestige, Zodiac and Kiwi.
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