Peter Nelson And The Castaways - Down In The Mine (1965)

Hong Kong, 1968: a 26-year-old former Christchurch schoolboy has a big choice to make. British pop superstar Cilla Black and her husband/manager, Bobby Willis, are in town. Always scouting for “the next big thing”, Willis popped in to the Scene Disco at the Peninsula Hotel, one of the city’s top venues. On stage, Peter Nelson is fronting a band of mainly local musicians, belting out covers of Lou Rawls, Wilson Pickett and James Brown in a voice that soared across three octaves.
It had already been quite a career for Nelson. With his early groups in Christchurch, the Diamonds and the Castaways, he followed in the footsteps of Ray Columbus and the Invaders, performing in the city’s many dance halls, coffee lounges and clubs. The Castaways spent years of hard gigging in New Zealand and Australia, and recorded several highly regarded R&B singles for HMV (NZ) Ltd; among them were ‘Down in the Mine’, ‘So Don’t Go’, and the standard ‘Down the Road Apiece’. Nelson’s departure from the Castaways gave Frankie Stevens an early career break.