Discography

Studio 1 · Cassette only · 500 copies · November 1993

Velvet by Candlelight

Dubbed two at a time in Joan Velletri’s garage in Preston over eleven consecutive Sundays. The sleeve was photocopied at Nu-Tone Business Machines on paper Frankie described as “surplus.” Every copy has a slightly different running time because the machine drifted. Nocturne restored it from the only known unplayed cassette in 2014.

1. The Tendertone Swing
2. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?
3. Moonlight Over Merri Creek
4. Spanish Eyes (Preston)
5. The Barmaid at the Bowls Club
6. Volare (Come On Now)
7. Sixty Dollars and a Counter Meal
8. Quando, Quando, Quando (Whenever, Whenever, Whenever)
9. Thornbury, 1.40am
10. The Girl from Ipanema (6:40)

Studio 2 · Vellum Records · 8 September 1995

Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?

Recorded in four nights at a demonstration studio in Fitzroy that Ron Vellum had access to because his brother-in-law sold the desks. Reached No. 4 on the Victorian Independent Cassette Chart, which existed for eleven weeks. First appearance of the Velvettes on record. 2,300 copies sold; 1,900 of them at engagements, from a card table.

1. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?
2. Bella Signora of Sydney Road
3. Strangers in the Night (Strangers in the Car Park)
4. Chicken or Fish
5. Besame Mucho
6. The Photocopier Salesman’s Lament
7. That’s Amore (Thornbury)
8. Carnation for the Mother of the Bride
9. Mas Que Nada (Not Much At All)
10. Table Nine
11. My Heart Is a Function Room
12. The Tendertone Swing (reprise)

Live 1 · Recorded 14–16 March 1996, Hotel Sirocco, St Kilda

Live at the Chandelier Room

Recorded on a borrowed two-track from a chair beside the bar, so the room is louder than the band for most of side one. It has never been remixed. Contains the last recorded performances of Sonny Kane and Dougie Farr with the band, ten weeks before the Tuxedo Schism.

1. The Tendertone Swing
2. Volare (Come On Now)
3. Moonlight Over Merri Creek
4. Delilah (Apology Version)
5. The Girl from Ipanema (11:02)
6. Feelings (for Marjorie)
7. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?
8. A Slow Dance for the Recently Divorced

Studio 3 · Vellum Records · 2 May 1997

Ipanema After Midnight

The first record with Warren Tiplady, and therefore the first with no drumsticks on it. Side two is given over entirely to the Long Ipanema, at that stage running fourteen minutes and five seconds, which Ron Vellum described in a letter as “a commercial decision I was not party to.”

1. Sway
2. The Last Bus to Reservoir
3. Perfidia
4. She Ordered the Fish
5. Never on Sunday (Never on Monday Either)
6. Brushes Only (instrumental)
7. The Girl from Ipanema (14:05 — complete side)

Compilation · Vellum Records · 1998

The Best of the Tendertones, Vol. 1

Assembled by Ron Vellum without consulting the band, from the three albums then in print, and sequenced — as he explained on the inlay — “in the order I like them.” Fourteen tracks. Frankie has never owned a copy.

Studio 4 · Vellum Records · 19 June 1999 · The last Vellum release

Two Drinks Minimum

The final Vellum record and the high-water mark of the Chandelier Room era: eleven originals, three covers, and a horn section of exactly one man overdubbed four times. The title track has opened the second set at every engagement since.

1. Two Drinks Minimum
2. The Sirocco Waltz
3. Tie a Yellow Ribbon
4. Every Bride Cries Eventually
5. Prawn Cocktail Moon
6. Guantanamera
7. Wodonga
8. Norm Never Came
9. The Way We Were (The Way We Are Now)
10. Tenderness Is a Kind of Stamina
11. Somewhere Between Preston and Paradise
12. The Last One Is Always Slow

Studio 5 · Solo · Recorded August 2002, Rosebud · Reissued Nocturne NR‑009, 2012

Songs for an Empty Function Room

Nine days, one four-track, one caravan, one man. Recorded during the Wilderness Years while Frankie was selling above-ground swimming pools and the band did not, in any formal sense, exist. One hundred cassettes; nineteen sold. The rest were given away at the pool yard.

Nocturne’s 2012 vinyl reissue sold four thousand copies in Europe and is the reason for everything that happened afterwards. It is widely held to be the best record the act has made, a view Frankie has called “a bit rich, considering nobody wanted it at the time.”

1. Empty Function Room
2. Above-Ground Pool, Below-Ground Love
3. The Chandelier Came Down
4. Twelve Sundays in a Garage
5. Moon River
6. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe? (voice and nothing else)
7. Nino’s Waltz (first recording)
8. Goodnight, and Mind the Step

Studio 6 · Astoria Sound · 4 February 2005

The Comeback Buffet

Recorded five months after the reformation at Norm Castellan’s wake, in a single weekend, on the band’s own money. Astoria Sound is the band’s own label and has never released anything by anybody else. Sloane’s organ is out of tune with itself throughout and was left that way.

1. The Tendertone Swing (2005 arrangement)
2. Norm Never Came (rerecorded)
3. Fly Me to the Moon
4. Chicken or Fish (rerecorded)
5. Beyond the Sea
6. The Barmaid at the Bowls Club
7. Wonderful Tonight
8. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?
9. A Slow Dance for the Recently Divorced

Live 2 · Recorded at sea, third season · Sold on board only

Tenderness at Sea

Recorded across nine nights in the Neptune Lounge and sold exclusively at the on-board gift concession, which is why original copies carry a price in three currencies and a photograph of a different band. Includes the only recorded performance of “Copacabana (Coburg)”, abandoned after a complaint.

Studio 7 · 2008 · Recorded in a rehearsal room in Port Melbourne between seasons

Songs of the Seven Seas (and Port Melbourne)

Twelve songs about water, of which four are about the bay. Recorded three weeks before the band flew to Portugal for an engagement it had misunderstood. The last track, “Estoril”, was written on the return flight and added in a single afternoon.

1. Beyond the Sea (reprise)
2. The Captain’s Farewell
3. Port Melbourne, Tuesday
4. Never on Sunday
5. Sixteen Nights in the Neptune Lounge
6. Perfidia
7. Estoril (You Broke My Heart in Portuguese)

Studio 8 · Astoria Sound · 2010

Continental Breakfast

The lightest record in the catalogue and the only one with a joke on the cover, which Frankie approved and then spent four years regretting. Bruno Salgado’s percussion is the making of it.

Live 3 · Recorded 12 July 2008, Casino Estoril terrace

Ao Vivo em Estoril

The Misunderstanding, in full, from the house desk. Three hours and twenty minutes cut to seventy-one for the LP. The crowd noise at 4:12 of “The Girl from Ipanema” is seven hundred people singing a horn line they had never heard before that evening.

Live 4 · Recorded 31 December 1999 · Released 2011

Y2K: The Midnight Set

The bootleg, released properly after eleven years, from the best of the four surviving cassettes. Everything after 11.58pm is acoustic: no organ, no amplification, one saxophone, brushes on a chair.

Studio 9 · Recorded in Cascais, February 2013

Saudade, Sort Of

Made in nine days in a converted garage two streets from the sea, at Marco Reis’s insistence and largely at his expense. Del Auguste’s first record with the band and the first to be arranged rather than assembled. Frankie sings four songs in Portuguese, phonetically, from cards.

1. Cascais at 4am
2. Estoril (slow version)
3. Mas Que Nada
4. A Saudade Não É Nada
5. Bella Signora of Sydney Road (rerecorded)
6. The Girl from Ipanema (19:44)

Compilation · Nocturne Reissues, Berlin · 3×LP + 40pp booklet

Preston Baroque: The Vellum Years 1993–1999

Everything Vellum released, remastered from the only surviving tapes, found in Ron Vellum’s sister’s roof. Includes eleven previously unreleased Chandelier Room recordings and a forty-page booklet by Hartmut Bell that the band was not consulted on.

Studio 10 · Astoria Sound · 8 November 2017, one year to the day

For Nino

Ten tracks. The tenor chair is empty on nine of them. The tenth is “Nino’s Waltz”, played by Bettina Croll on Pesic’s own horn, in one take, the first time she had played with the band. The take that is on the record is the take on which she stops for four seconds in the second chorus. Nobody suggested another.

1. The Air-Conditioning Man
2. Twenty-Five Years and One Month
3. Feelings
4. Moonlight Over Merri Creek (rerecorded)
5. The Empty Stand (instrumental)
6. Nino’s Waltz

Studio 11 · Astoria Sound · 2019

Requests

Twelve songs the band was asked for and did not know, recorded as they were played on the night. Each track is credited to the person who requested it; all twelve were traced and all twelve agreed.

Track 7 was requested at the Preston Bowls Club on 3 May 2018. It has not been identified.

Live 5 · Recorded nightly, 26 March – 24 June 2020, Reservoir

Live from the Balcony (Reservoir)

Ninety-one consecutive evenings at seven o’clock, recorded on a neighbour’s phone from the footpath below and released unedited: traffic, a dog, an aeroplane, and on night sixty-two a woman three balconies along joining in on the last chorus and being invited back the following evening.

Studio 12 · Nocturne Reissues · 38 min 51 s · One track, two sides

The Long Ipanema

Twenty-eight years after the arrangement began growing, the band finally recorded it: one continuous take, no edits, the fade at the end of side one and the pick-up at the top of side two carefully arranged so the listener loses nothing but the turning over.

It was this pressing, and specifically the title printed on its label, that prompted the correspondence of March 2023.

Live 6 · Recorded 14 February – 22 March 2024, Golden Lotus (formerly the Astoria), Thornbury

Still Tender: Live at the Astoria

The 33rd anniversary residency, in the room where the band was formed, recorded properly for the first time in the act’s history. Best-selling record in the catalogue. The opening night set begins, as the first one did, with eleven bars of an organ finding the key.

Studio 13 · Astoria Sound · Arranged and conducted by Delphine Auguste

The Velvet Songbook

Eleven of the originals, rescored for eighteen players by Del Auguste, who proposed it, costed it, booked it and informed Frankie eleven days before the first session. He is audibly uncomfortable for the first two tracks and audibly not, from the third onward.

1. Moonlight Over Merri Creek
2. Thornbury, 1.40am
3. My Heart Is a Function Room
4. Nino’s Waltz
5. Estoril
6. Empty Function Room
7. Tenderness Is a Kind of Stamina
8. Goodnight, and Mind the Step

Studio 14 · Astoria Sound · 6 March 2026 · Current release

The Long Goodnight

Four Sunday afternoons at the Golden Lotus. Eleven songs, nine of them slow. Frankie is mixed, at his own request, “a little further back than usual, as a courtesy.”

1. The Long Goodnight
2. Table Nine
3. Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe? (1991 arrangement, restored)
4. The Man Who Sang the Wrong City
5. Every Bride Cries Eventually
6. Prawn Cocktail Moon
7. Cascais at 4am
8. Nino’s Waltz (instrumental)
9. Somewhere Between Preston and Paradise
10. A Slow Dance for the Recently Divorced
11. Goodnight, and Mind the Step