By Phil Jarratt
Big, bald and buffed, and favouring tight jeans and tees, Con Delo looks like the kind of bloke you wouldn’t want to encounter late at night in a dark alley.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Con is known throughout the music industry for his warmth, humour and generosity of spirit. And the 50-something bass player also happens to be the leader of the world’s biggest covers band.
From humble beginnings in Adelaide just four years ago, the Hindley Street Country Club has become the global poster child for the new/old music industry, with the mind-blowing metrics of 230 million social media views of their 217-song catalogue of golden oldies, and a 600,000 subscriber base. These numbers will be wildly out of date by the time you read this, and by the time the 12-piece band gets here next month for two concerts at The J, their viewership on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, growing at 500,000 a day, will have passed a quarter of a billion.
What the hell is going on?
“It’s just frickin’ outrageous,” Con Delo chortles down the line from Adelaide. “I can’t quite put a finger on what is happening. It’s gone totally out of control, beyond my wildest dreams.”
But the phenomenal success of the band in all the major world music markets is certainly not dumb luck, as anyone who caught their first Noosa show at The J last October will attest. These hard-working session players are all known by their peers as “musicians’ musicians” whose virtuosity is renowned. Luck comes into the equation, however, with the emergence of the Hindley Street Country Club just before the world went into an entertainment-starved two-year lockdown.
The music industry’s incredible slide into the past didn’t begin with Covid and it won’t disappear when Covid does, but the pandemic has certainly super-charged a decade-old trend in which old music has almost buried new music. Lamenting the fact that old songs now represent 70 percent of the US music market in an article in The Atlantic magazine in January, music writer Ted Gioia wrote: “Even worse, the new music market is actually shrinking.”
In a perceptive article called “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” (answer: absolutely) Gioia cites damning evidence from MRC Data, the leading US music analytics firm: “The 200 most popular new tracks released in the US now regularly count for less than 5 percent of total streams. The ratio was twice as big three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted towards older music. The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.”
Other evidence of the trend away from contemporary music is the collapse of viewer numbers for the Grammy Awards, once the music industry’s biggest self-celebration. From 40 million viewers in 2012, the televised awards dropped 53 percent from the previous year in 2021 to 8.8 million. This year they have been postponed and no one cares. In the investment world the big firms are getting into bidding wars for the song catalogues of artists in their 70s and 80s, like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, and the best-selling form of physical music remains the vinyl LP, which is itself more than 70 years old.
While all this is happening, down in sleepy Adelaide HSCC have racked up 70 songs with more than a million views each. At the top of the list is Grover Washington’s “Just The Two Of Us” (1980) with 13 million, followed by Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (1987) at 9.3 million. You can find the originals on YouTube, of course, but Con Delo says that HSCC’s point of difference is that he works hard on new arrangements. “There are a lot of covers bands around the world, but most of them perform the songs verbatim, exactly as the original. I don’t. I change the grooves around, I muck around with the chords. The way I explain it is, I put a bit of Aussie muscle into them.”
Delo started playing music very young and as a teenager drifted into playing gigs with different bands around Adelaide where the flair and authority of his bass playing was soon recognised and led him to session work and to backing visiting major artists. He says: “I ended up working for the Hard Rock Café in China, opening up their venues in Beijing and Shanghai and bringing Australian bands in. That helped get me a reputation internationally. In fact a lot of the music we do now as HSCC is what I was playing back then.”
Delo writes all of the arrangements for the band, but he adds: “I also write some of my own material, but the way the recording industry is now there’s just no traction for it, so a lot of my ideas end up going into new arrangements of old songs. I’ve got a lot of original material up my sleeve that I’d like to release one day, but I never go into the studio thinking, oh god, not more covers. They actually give you a great canvas to work on.”
The popularity of old songs has happened simultaneously with the collapse of what used to be known as “record” sales, now a diminishing market of digital downloads, vinyls and fast-disappearing CDs. In the good old days, a band would release an album and go on the road to promote its sales. Now the business model has been flipped, with bands relying on social media to make their names and live performances to create revenue.
Despite having achieved global recognition in record time, and with more than $25,000 a month coming in from YouTube advertising (plus other smaller royalty streams, such as Spotify), Con Delo says he’s never had to work harder in his life. “But I’m loving it,” he adds.
The way Delo describes how HSCC works, it’s clear that he’s as much an entrepreneur as a musician. He says: “The way the industry works now means that you have to work ridiculously hard. I select the songs we’re going to do and send them to the guys and girls to learn, then we get together for a recording session and I’ll make some final changes to the arrangements, then we run through three or four times and we record. It takes about 90 minutes a song, we do two songs a session and we do it over two nights on a Monday and Tuesday between five and nine, including setup time. So then we’ve got four songs, which is a month’s content. We release a song every Friday at 7.30am Adelaide time, which is late Thursday afternoon in America. Then you sit back and wait. Generally you can tell within a couple of hours how a song is going to go.”
So far, they’re all going well, many phenomenally well, and both Delo and HSCC’s manager, Noosa-based Dennis Dunstan, say the end is not in sight. Says Delo: “It won’t end when Covid is just a memory because now we’ve hit critical mass. We’re getting 13 million new views a month, the majority of them international. On top of that we’re getting 25,000 new subscribers a month and a lot of them are coming from jurisdictions where they’re not dealing with Covid any more, they’re out and about. The graphs all show that it’s exponential growth.”
Says Dunstan, who managed Fleetwood Mac through two of their most productive decades: “In the modern music industry you just have to be on YouTube, and when you look at HSCC’s growth, Australia only represents about five percent of those views whereas the US is around 30 percent, so we’re planning a massive American tour later in the year to venues of up to 2000, and we’ll fill them. Europe is going to be good too. The band has the potential to make a lot of money touring globally. They are so good, so professional that they’re now recognised as the world’s best covers band. You’ve got a line-up that includes five lead singers, three of them gorgeous and talented girls. It’s a bit like Fleetwood Mac in that sense. Something magic happens when they perform.”
After recent sell-out shows in Sydney and Melbourne, and with Noosa and Perth coming up, Con Delo says he can’t wait to take the excitement of a HSCC live performance onto the international stage later this year. “If you’re a muso, it’s what you live for. And we all get along really well. We’re a bit older, there are no rampant egos and we’re thoroughly professional. But we want to have fun too, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
The Hindley Street Country Club will perform at The J Friday 6 May and Saturday 7 May
Tickets available at www.thej.com.au/hindley-street-country-club/
