From Fleetwood Mac to YouTube covers band Hindley Street Country Club, DENNIS DUNSTAN has done it all. He talks to PHIL JARRATT.
If you didn’t know his track record in the global music industry, you could easily think that Dennis Dunstan was just another excitable manager talking up just another covers band.
“They’re recording songs live in the studio and posting them on YouTube, and they’ve got 150 million people viewing! They are knockout musicians and their work is phenomenal. That’s not just my opinion. Many of the great bands they’re covering have said the same thing. I’m thinking Vegas!”
But first he’s thinking Noosa, where internet sensations the Hindley Street Country Club will kickstart a national tour tomorrow night (Saturday 9 October) at The J. We’re enjoying a coffee on the deck at Eclipse, overlooking the shimmering Noosa River. Dennis, 68 next month, a former session drummer, is keeping the beat with his feet as he talks, almost spilling his coffee with every exclamation mark.
“Who would have thought that I’d be managing a tribute act and a covers band at this stage of life!” he says. “The reason behind that is our industry is a mess, and this is what works now.”
The music industry statistics back him up on this, and partly explain the incredible success already enjoyed by his signings, Tina Turner tribute act Rebecca O’Connor, and now Hindley Street, an Adelaide-based combo of seven seasoned musos who are suddenly turning algorithms into money. But we’ll get to them in a moment. First, we need to consider their X-factor, Dennis Dunstan, whose CV almost defies belief, until you check it out.
Born in a housing commission estate in Glenroy, Victoria in 1953, Dennis started beating the skins professionally at 15, playing with guys twice his age who would smuggle him into the licensed venues. He had ambitions to be a doctor, but when he was offered a job as a session drummer at Decca Records in London at just 19, that went out the window.
After sitting in with the likes of Steeleye Span and Roy Harper for a couple of years, Dennis was asked to audition as drummer for Deep Purple, but in the first of a series of defining moments on which his career has pivoted, he was called home to a family crisis. With work harder to come by in Melbourne, he looked to another aspect of the music industry which was just beginning to thrive – band security.
The unquestioned guru of this was martial arts instructor Bob Jones, so Dennis found himself trudging up the stairs to the Jones gym to a soundtrack of manly grunts and groans. Five years later he was a black belt expert working on the Bob Jones security details, alongside future action movie star Richard Norton, for bands like the Rolling Stones, Abba and Fleetwood Mac, during the 1977 Australian leg of their ground-breaking Rumours Tour. At the end of the Australian leg the band asked Norton to join the next leg in the US, but when he was unavailable they hired Dennis. By the time the 18-month tour had finished, Dennis was a full-time member of the Fleetwood Mac management team.
When he later helped fellow drummer and soul-mate Mick Fleetwood recover from a bankruptcy fiddle, he was hired as Fleetwood’s personal manager and the band’s co-manager, positions he would hold for the next 15 years.
Through the 1980s and ‘90s, Fleetwood Mac remained one of the biggest bands in the world, but also one of the most controversial and disaster-prone, forever on the brink of splitting part. How did a young Aussie drummer manage this?
“I never touched drugs in my life, so one of the things they loved about me was I could keep their acts together,” Dennis says. “One of my first jobs with Mac was to fire a bunch of people who weren’t doing their jobs. I was very good at my job and I could be the enforcer when required. I was an Australian kick-boxing champion so I could back it up.”
But more than kicking heads, Dennis was good at cutting deals, and not just for Mac. In Melbourne prepping for a Fleetwood Mac tour, he heard a song while trying on jeans at Myer, and was enchanted by the magical flute opening of Down Under. He found that the band was playing in a pub down the road that night and went to hear Men At Work. Soon they were playing support on Mac’s Mirage Tour of the US, and by the end of the tour, their debut album was number one on Billboard while Mac’s Mirage was number three.
After years based in Los Angeles, Dennis and his wife were looking for new challenges and a better environment for raising their children, so in the early 2000s, they settled in Noosa, a place in Dennis’s heart since the family had camped in The Woods every summer when he was a kid. He established Frontrow Management to run events and represent rising Australian bands, like country duo McAlister Kemp.
Then he heard an energetic Irish/Jamaican singer named Rebecca O’Connor doing Tina Turner songs. Says Dennis: “She was simply the best Tina Turner except for Tina herself. We had a chat about her future and I agreed to manage her as long as Tina herself endorsed the act. I sent a tape to Tina’s manager and he phoned me a few days later and put Tina on. This husky voice said, ‘You tell that Rebecca she so damn good she’s scary!’”
Rebecca’s Simply The Best show has been breaking box office records in Australia, Ireland and the UK for several years now.
The Hindley Street Country Club is Dennis’s latest client and passion, and if you listen to the band’s massive output on YouTube, no matter what you feel about covers groups, it’s impossible to not share his enthusiasm. Their musicianship is brilliant, and their playlist of the best soul, funk and rock from the ‘70s through to the ‘90s is enough to bring tears to the eyes of this baby boomer. Normally a seven-piece outfit, HSCC expands up to 12 for some live performances. They’ll be 10-strong at The J this weekend.
While the band’s co-founder and arranger Con Delo is on the wrong side of 50, other members are much younger, and Dennis Dunstan contends that this style of live performance is leading the way back from the Covid brink for musicians of all ages.
“HSCC play songs that people of a certain age not only remember but have never forgotten,” he says. “But what is interesting to me is that there is a whole new generation, like my daughters in their 20s, who are just discovering them, and they love them too.”
Tickets available at The J Noosa by visiting thej.com.au/
