Guitar Sounds

By the time he was seven, Posa had started playing the ukulele. While his mates were content with model planes and trains, Peter would scour the family vineyard for suitable pieces of wood to carve or cut into model guitar shapes. His father’s tools weren't safe and neither was his mother’s clothes line wire, which would be cut and unravelled for the strings, with nails banged in on the guitar head for tuning keys.

Posa received his first real guitar on his ninth birthday, a Galatone.

By the time he was 18, he had formed his own band The Peter Posa Combo, quickly a popular West Auckland band adept at playing most styles of music for any type of function.

As their local popularity grew, Posa was called aside by his boss at the New Lynn Public Service office and told in no uncertain terms that playing in bands wasn’t a good look for public servants. If he continued down that path then his chances of promotion would be very slim.

This was the motivation that Posa needed to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional musician and after auditioning for Eldred Stebbing, he was signed to Stebbing’s Zodiac record label in 1960.

Posa’s third single, released in 1961, was his version of ‘Wheels’ (originally by the American band The String-A-Longs), which reputedly went on to sell over 50,000 copies, making it the label’s biggest seller at the time.