The man with the drover’s hat and the white Santa beard sits half-hidden behind his antique music stand, strumming an acoustic guitar.
You almost forget he’s there until that crackly, delicate, beautiful voice breaks into a Neil Young classic or one of his originals. This is the voice of a man who has lived and loved, felt pleasure and pain. But when it comes to Adrian “Aido” Spelt, you don’t know the half of it.
I wrote those lines a few years back and they resonate through my being now as I write this tribute to my dear friend Aido, who passed away suddenly last weekend. When I say “my friend” I really mean our friend, because there are very few people in Noosa who love surfing and good music who don’t count Aido, founder of the fabulous SandFlys, as a mate. He made you feel good about life, whether he was singing one of his plaintive songs on a local stage or down by the river, whistling to himself as he wheeled his surfboard trolley out to Tea Tree, or even interrupting one of his amusing between-sets stories to wheel around and catch the wave you were sure was yours.
Ah, Aido. Of course he had his quirks, and let’s start with his name. Everyone knows that the diminutive of Adrian should be Ado, but he always added the i, and even corrected me a couple of times when I wrote Ado. His bandmates will tell you that he wasn’t slow to correct them either, if their timing was off or they played a bum note. But his fellow players always loved the spirit and the passion he brought to his music.
“It was more like the other way ‘round,” laughs Chris Lofven, Aido’s longtime friend and bassist and collaborator in The SandFlys. “He was a great singer, gifted with a voice like Neil Young. His enthusiasm on the guitar, coupled with the strong hands of a labourer, meant regular string breaks and interruptions mid-show. But at our age the extra breaks were quite welcome!”
Veteran guru of cool music on the coast, Barry Charles posted: “It was so good to play the harp with him last Thursday (6 June0 and remember the wonderful times that Aido and the SandFlys gave us through their music. He loved Noosa and it came through in his original songs, and his album (Never Too Late0 will always be one of my homegrown favourites. The passion and unique nature of his singing style was stamped with courage, conviction and humour, and connected to so many people, young and old.”
One morning at Tea Tree Aido paddled up to me and said: “Did I ever tell you about our olive farm in Margaret River?” Later we caught up for a beer and a yarn while watching the waves run down the rocks at National Park.
The Spelt family migrated from the Netherlands in 1958 when Aido was seven. The family settled in Perth where dad built up a structural engineering business, but they never lived close enough to the beach for surfing to become a passion. Until third form at John Forrest High, when Aido became mates with a guy who surfed and the two would hitch-hike to the waves every weekend. He caught the bug, and joined the pioneering surf scene at Margaret River in the ‘70s, while working as a partner in the engineering business. He recalled: “Margs was the frontier, and my brother and I decided to push our boundaries and focus on the break. We got comfortable with a bit of size and power.”
Aido married and had kids, but at 33 his world was rocked when his wife walked out, leaving him to care for the children. Lonely and depressed, he picked up the guitar he’d been too busy to play in ages, started picking on it and writing songs. And then along came Debbie.
Deb was the love of his life. He left his dad’s business, bought a block of land at Margaret River and built the steel structure of their house in the car port of his suburban home in Perth. He said: “Every weekend Deb and I would go down to Margs and work on the house, but we ran out of money. Then one day a guy knocks on the door and says he heard I knew a bit about steel and he has a courier business and needs someone to knock up 120 cages with compartments. I told him I could do it but I had no money, so he set me up with all the machinery that became the basis of our business, Margaret River Steel”.
The business boomed. He and Deb had 30 people working for them. Aido recalled: “One day we’re sitting in the office and a little guy in a big cowboy hat walks up to Debbie and says, ‘Ah need a shed and I need a goddamn good one!’ That was how we met Jack Witkin.”
Witkin was a Russian Jew whose family had moved to Colorado and made a fortune in project home developments. But the mega-millionaire was also a survivalist who wanted to build a fortress from the coming apocalypse. He’d bought 360 acres of pristine land near Margarets and built high walls around the property to keep out invaders. Said Aido: “Jack was an unusual character but somehow we had a connection.”
At 50 Aido was surfing a remote break along the coast from Margarets when he felt a searing pain go right through his back. He thought he’d been attacked by a shark but he was experiencing a major heart attack. He managed to get to shore, made the long walk to his car and then drove himself three hours to hospital in Perth, where he had an emergency quadruple bypass. Nothing if not tough, our Aido.
Jack Witkin came to see him in hospital and told him he had to get out of the stress of the steel business and made him the offer of becoming caretaker of his property. So began the amazing adventure of Olio Bello olive farm and sanctuary. Aido told me: “I built a house for us right on the big dam and started doing what Jack had asked, which was to develop an olive farm. It took me a year to get it together, building a tasting facility and restaurant and a huge production shed. I went to Italy and learnt how to drive an olive machine and brought that back to WA. When Jack finally got back from Colorado he drove through the front gate and hopped out of his car and started sobbing. He just loved that place so much, but his wife had never wanted to come there, and after about eight years she told him, it’s me or the farm, and he sold it to a bunch of Perth doctors.”
The dream was over. Aido and Deb had planted and looked after part of the 13,000 trees of a dozen different varieties, and learnt how to blend them to create premium extra virgin olive oil. In 2006 their fully organic operation won them the best manufacturer award from the Olive Oil Association of Australia. But the new owners had different ideas about how the property should run, and two years later they threw in the towel and headed for Noosa, a place of Aido’s dreams that he first visited in 1971.
They bought the Grind Café on Gympie Terrace. One Grind became two and the business thrived, but then Deb contracted cancer. Aido said: “We had no family here so she needed me to be there for her. We sold the business and bought a food truck that I could operate alone on flexible hours. We kept that right up to Covid, by which time Deb was thankfully in remission.”
In 2017 Aido and bass player Chris Lofven formed a four-piece band they called The SandFlys, playing salty surf songs and baby boomer favourites. They were an immediate hit, and for the next five or six years, they rocked our town. I booked their first paying gig and in 2021 Aido repaid the favour by playing for my 70th for little more than a song.
In 2023 Aido was doing it tough. His health had declined and he was finding it difficult to muster the energy for surfing or playing music. But this year he bounced back with new strength, resuming his place in the lineup at Tea Tree and playing gigs all over town, solo, as a duo with guitarist Pete Wells, and occasionally as the re-formed SandFlys.
Last Saturday he was smiley and energetic, playing a well-received set at a busking carnival by the river. Then he packed his gear into the car and drove home, where later in the day he suffered a fatal heart attack.
As the family started flying in to support her, Debbie Spelt tearfully told a few of us gathered at the home: “He always said he’d be happy to go out surfing or singing, and he almost did.”
A Farewell Aido benefit concert will be held next to The Jetty Coffee on the river at Noosaville 10am-12 noon Thursday 13 June. All welcome, BYO chair.
A memorial paddle-out will be held at 3pm Friday 14 June at Tea Tree Bay, followed by a gathering at the National Park picnic area from 4pm.
