Hindley Street Country Club: The biggest act in Australia … that nobody’s heard of
Inside the remarkable rise of a cover band – yes cover band – after one of Adelaide’s more infamous strips that just clocked up 340 million views on YouTube.
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Dennis Dunstan was once bashed by a gang of cricket bat-wielding thugs and now he’s the manager of Adelaide cover band phenomenon Hindley Street Country Club.
These two events are, in fact, connected – through a circuitous route that also takes in learning karate and guiding Fleetwood Mac through their famously volatile cocaine and divorce period.
Allow me to explain.
Or perhaps Dunstan can, because it’s a rather fun and adventurous rock ’n’ roll tale.
“I started as a self-taught drummer who played the march-in in high school,” Dunstan says from his Noosa home.
As a teenager in the ’60s, Dunstan joined quite a big band called Total Fire Band, who competed in the Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds against Adelaide’s own Zoot. “The only reason they (beat us) was because Gudinski was managing them and he put the show together. We laughed about it later when he desperately wanted to book Fleetwood Mac, but that’s another story.”
But it was that aforementioned incident with the bat that really put Dunstan on the road to doing what he does best, managing musicians.
“I was badly beaten up by three thugs in the Glenroy Housing Commission area where I grew up,” he recounts.
“Three guys beat me up with a cricket bat and I was in hospital for weeks. When you’re a pretty boy drummer growing up in Glenroy the thugs don’t like you much. But it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. After that I swore that I’d never allow anything like that to happen again and I started learning karate and joined the Bob Jones Organisation.”
Bob Jones is a name that will be familiar to acolytes of Aussie rock in the ’70s and ’80s. He was the hard man – a karate-chopping martial arts expert – who provided security for some of the biggest names in music.
Dunstan turned up at Jones’s gym and, many hard years later, earned a black belt.
“Bob worked security for people like The Stones and Joe Cocker and, eventually, Fleetwood Mac,” Dunstan says.
“Through him I ended up working on the Rumours tour as a kind of Aussie road manager. I was telling them which restaurants and clubs to go to – I was the Aussie connection.”
At the end of the Australian tour Mick Fleetwood and his road management team asked Dunstan if he’d be interested in continuing on with the band overseas. Of course he jumped at the chance, but didn’t think it would realistically happen.
“Back then we didn’t have mobile phones so you always gave out your mum’s number,” Dunstan says.
“It was three in the morning and Mum was banging on the door yelling, ‘Dennis, Dennis, Mick Fleetwood’s on the phone’. I said, ‘Mum, it’s bulls--t, it’s one of my mates taking the piss’. Then she said ‘no, no, I heard the beeps!’ It was like getting a call from John Lennon. They were the biggest band in the world at the time.”
Fleetwood told Dunstan that he had good news and bad news. The good news being he definitely had a job with the band. The bad news being that they’d booked him a flight to America that very morning.
“So that was the start of my journey,” he says. It was a journey that would last for 18 years and saw Dunstan rise from security manager to road manager to manager, a job that involved making sure that the “biggest band in the world” didn’t self-destruct and get buried under a pile of cocaine and toxic relationships.
Dunstan largely succeeded in this herculean task, and he still has a relationship with the band to this day.
Which brings us to Hindley Street Country Club, the ironically named cover band that started as a lark and ended up melting the internet. Dunstan has signed on to manage them.
“So why am I managing a cover band?” he asks, posing the obvious question.
“Look, I’m as jaded as the next bloke, but one of my good mates said, ‘you have to get on to this Hindley Street band’. I sort of put it in my back pocket and didn’t do anything about it. A couple of years later he said, ‘I know you haven’t listened to them yet, but here’s a track they’ve just released’.”
It was a version of the beloved Fleetwood Mac track Everywhere.
“I put it on in the car, cranked it up and I literally had to pull over,” Dunstan says.
“I thought, ‘this really is f--king good’. They’d put just enough twist on it to make it their own but stay loyal to the song.”
So Dunstan sent the song to Fleetwood and Christine McVie to get their feedback. Both agreed it was amazing.
He jumped on Facebook and sent HSCC a message letting them know that not only did he love the rendition but the band did too.
“Within a week I get a message back from Con (HSCC musical director Con Delo) saying thank you and asking if he could call,” Dunstan says.
“We just clicked, just hit it off. Before I knew it they were flying up to Noosa, we went out to dinner and he asked if I’d manage his band. We had another dinner and after that I said ‘OK, let’s do this’.”
But Dunstan isn’t the only one impressed by HSCC’s rise. He and the band are in talks with Beyond International regarding a multi-part documentary series, and one of the country’s biggest touring outfits – TEG Dainty – have added the group to their books.
Dunstan says the Dainty signing is proof positive that HSCC is the real deal.
“Paul Dainty is one of the most jaded f--kers in the world,” he laughs.
“He tours Guns N’ Roses, Michael Buble … if he’s on board it’s a big deal.”
Dunstan has his own plans.
“The fan base for this band is huge,” he says.
“They’re probably the biggest act in Australia that nobody’s heard of. From here this goes to a worldwide touring phenomenon. That is my goal.
“The music from the ’70s and the ’80s, it’s a long time before that disappears.”
It’s a sentiment that Delo agrees with.
“Our music told a story,” the 55-year-old bass player and musical director says over a coffee at a city cafe.
“These people were troubadours, they told stories.”
Hindley Street Country Club doesn’t play cool music. There’s nothing underground or edgy about their song choices. It’s proudly middle-of-the-road – Earth, Wind and Fire, Fleetwood Mac of course, Doobie Brothers, Michael Jackson – and Delo makes no apologies for that.
“It’s mostly 1978 to 1985, West Coast Californian rock,” he says.
“Nothing heavy. It’s nice music, and it’s what I like.
“And a lot of that music requires a lot of musical know-how. They’re very involved arrangements. You can’t fake one of our sessions, you have to know what you’re doing.
“The idea is to transport you, take you back. It’s like the scent of a perfume that takes you back to a time or place.”
And the numbers reflect Delo’s confidence that this is the music people want to hear.
Half a million subscribers, Delo says, with 340 million views on YouTube and perhaps half-a-billion clicks across all social platforms.
And the whole thing sprang from “a bunch of guys playing together and filming these tunes that were aimed at my demographic, 45 to 65”, Delo says.
The HSCC started uploading these tunes every Friday, and they bubbled away nicely getting respectable views until, after 70 weeks, the band covered the Bill Withers classic Just The Two Of Us.
“That was the one,” Delo says. “That’s when it went boom.”
Delo acknowledges that some within Adelaide’s close-knit muso scene have raised their eyebrows at the numbers, but he insists they’re completely organic.
“All our numbers are 100 per cent, one million per cent, true,” he says.
“You can’t fudge the numbers. The higher the numbers the more YouTube have to pay, so they would never allow it.
“My daughter said to me when this all first started to happen, ‘Dad, you do know that you’ve gone viral don’t you?’ … I thought that was something that happened to videos of cats.”
Delo, who takes the band on a multi-country tour of South America in the new year, says he’s as surprised as anyone at Hindley Street Country Club’s success.
“There was no master plan when we started this,” he says.
“We’re a cover band! OK, we’re a good cover band. We stay 95 per cent true to the original, but we’re recording them now with modern techniques so they sound crisp and clear and lush and people like that. But to say this was mapped out? Nope. I’m grateful for it every day.
“At 55, it’s a great time to be alive. A lot of people are thinking about putting their slippers on and watching the Crows on the couch at that age and I get to be a part of all this.”
Tonight is a rare occasion for HSCC fans – a live gig in their home town.
Delo says the band is careful not to wear out its welcome, and deliberately keeps Adelaide shows an annual event to maintain the sense of occasion.
“Everyone knows about us, but at the same time they don’t know about us,” he says. “We do one public show a year in Adelaide, so come check it out.”
■ Hindley Street Country Club plays Thebarton Theatre on Saturday, November 12. Tickets are still available through thebartontheatre.com.au
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