Shona Laing's career started in 1972 at age 17, when she appeared on TV's New Faces singing '1905', which climbed to number four in the NZ Top Ten. Shona won several local music awards in 1973, including Best New Artist; she entered the Tokyo Song Festival before making a move to London that saw her performing regularly and working with Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Returning to NZ in 1985, she released the album Genre, with '(Glad I'm) Not A Kennedy', which also appeared along with 'Soviet Snow' on 1987's South, her most successful release.