Ray Columbus & The Invaders

New Zealand's biggest pop act of the early sixties. They came from Christchurch where they cut their teeth playing R&B for the US servicemen stationed in the city for operation Deep Freeze. They moved to Auckland in 1963 and signed to Eldred Stebbing's Zodiac (opens in a new tab) label and had a series of hits over the next few years, the biggest being She's A Mod (New Zealand 1964) (opens in a new tab) which went to number one in Australia as well as New Zealand, and Till We Kissed (New Zealand 1965) (opens in a new tab) which sold over 50,000 copies in 1965 (5 x Platinum in NZ terms). They split in late 1965, although reformed for a "farewell tour" in the 1990s.