The good-time music of Adrian “Ado” Spelt’s band The SandFlys has been putting a smile on the face and a spring in the step of baby boomers for quite a few years now, but not many people react the way the late Dennis Ballard did.
Dennis, a one-time soapie actor who featured in Number 96, Water Rats, Home And Away and many other shows, and was a production manager on films like The Great Gatsby, had turned a passion for vintage cars into a business called Mob Cars, based in Nowra on the NSW south coast, but he loved to get away to Noosa to visit brother Bob Ballard, a retired engineer.
Listening to The SandFlys play their Thursday morning riverside set at Noosaville a few years ago, Dennis was so moved by Ado’s song, Blue Jade, written for his daughter, that he approached him in the break and said, “Mate, you really should record that.”
Ado responded: “I’d love to, but we’ve got no money for that.” Dennis said: “Well, I might be able to help you with that. I can make it happen.” The two men became friends, bonding over a love of music, and had further discussions about recording Ado’s original songs.
Then Covid intervened, Dennis couldn’t get to Noosa for a while, and when he did he had contracted an incurable cancer. Bob took him down to the river to listen to The SandFlys, and after the gig he renewed his acquaintance with Ado. Drawing him close, he whispered: “That offer still holds, you know, and don’t do it on the cheap!”
I joined Ado and Bob Ballard for coffee at a café near Bob’s Sunshine Beach home about six weeks after Dennis Ballard’s death. Dennis’s dying wish had been granted. Ado and The SandFlys were in the studio at Dennis’s expense and more than half of an album appropriately called Never Too Late had been recorded.
Said Ado: “Dennis and I had a connection straight away, we were mates. Most bands who get to record do it when they’re young and they’re still playing those songs when they get old. Thanks to Dennis we’re doing it the other way around. There aren’t that many musos in their seventies bringing out their first albums! We’re an old schlepper band, but we’re doing it! All Dennis wanted was to be named as executive producer. And he wanted a vinyl edition. Dennis also wanted us to tell the story of each song, so there’ll be a booklet with the CD and the vinyl and a monologue before each song on the USB.”
Bob Ballard feels that the album will be a fitting closure to his brother’s adventurous life. He said: “Dennis had 33 vintage cars, then (filmmaker) Baz Lurhrmann bought one of them while they were making The Great Gatsby. Dennis supplied 10 vehicles for that film. The cars started out as a hobby and he turned it into a successful business. His dream was to bring Mob Cars up to Noosa. The drivers dressed in ‘30s suits and had fake machine guns. He was a real entrepreneur, but a successful actor before that. As well as managing the cars, he also acted in Gatsby but not in a speaking role. That was his last role. He’d always get cast as a bad guy, which he certainly wasn’t. The album is his memorial, in a way, and I’m just sorry he won’t be here to listen to it when it comes out.”
Ado says the songs on Never Too Late are a mix of rock and roll, country rock, surf instrumentals and soulful ballads. “One of them is called Highway of Life, which takes the piss out of people who build big houses in places like Noosa and Margaret River but don’t live in them. It’s a slide guitar rocker. We’re including the Tea Tree instrumental we’ve been playing for quite a while, but this time with added violin by guest player Hannah Ryder, which gives me goose bumps every time I hear it.”
Never Too Late will be available in November as a CD and download, with the vinyl edition to follow.
