History
Compiled from the band’s engagement diaries, which are complete except for 2003.
Thornbury, February 1991
The Astoria Reception Centre on High Street had booked the Norm Castellan Trio for a wedding on the evening of 14 February 1991. The trio did not arrive; they were in Wodonga, at a different wedding, having taken two engagements on the same day.
Also booked, for forty minutes across the meal, was a photocopier salesman from Preston named Francis Velletri, listed on the running sheet as “Frankie Velvet — interval songs.” At a quarter past eight he was told there was no band. At twenty to nine he came back with three men he had found in the room: Barry Sloane, the venue’s own organist; Ken Pantelis, the bride’s uncle, who had played drums in the army; and Ivan Pesic, a refrigeration mechanic who was there to service the air-conditioning and who had a tenor saxophone in his van.
They played for four hours. The bride’s mother is supposed to have said, at about twenty to two, that they were a lot of tender tones. Sloane wrote it on the back of a place card.
Pesic stayed twenty-five years.
Thirty-five years.
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1991
Formed
14 February, Thornbury. From August, a Tuesday residency at the Golden Fleece Hotel in Brunswick for the door and a counter meal. It ran nineteen months.
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1992
The first replacement
Ken Pantelis left in June with a back injury. Rather than hold auditions he arrived one night with Dougie Farr and introduced him from the stage. The band has filled every chair that way since.
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1993
Velvet by Candlelight
Five hundred cassettes, dubbed two at a time in Joan Velletri’s garage in Preston over eleven Sundays. The sleeve was photocopied at the office where Frankie was still working.
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1994
The Chandelier Room
Ron Vellum of Vellum Records, operating out of the back of a milk bar in Northcote, signed the band on a single page. In April they began a Wednesday-to-Saturday residency in the Chandelier Room of the Hotel Sirocco, St Kilda. It ran six years and 611 performances.
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1995
The first album
Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe? Rhonda Pike and Marj Delahunty joined as backing vocalists and were billed, from the first night, only as the Velvettes.
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1996
Preston Baroque, and a split
Neville Marsh’s review appeared on 12 April. On 30 May, between sets, Sonny Kane and Dougie Farr left over a proposal to change the shirts. They formed Sonny Kane and the Velveteens, who are still working. The remaining four played the third set as a quartet.
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1997–1998
Tiplady, and New Zealand
Warren Tiplady joined on drums. In September 1998 the band played nine dates across New Zealand, of which seven happened. Tiplady broke a stick and a snare head on the same night in Palmerston North and has played brushes ever since.
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1999
New Year’s Eve
The power failed at two minutes to midnight. The band finished the set acoustically and came off at twenty past one. A cassette of the last forty minutes circulated for eleven years before it was released properly.
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2000–2003
The quiet years
The Sirocco was sold, and demolished in March 2001. The band did not announce anything and did not play for three and a half years. Frankie sold above-ground swimming pools. In August 2002 he recorded Songs for an Empty Function Room alone on a four-track in a caravan at Rosebud — one hundred cassettes, nineteen of them sold.
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2004
The wake
Norm Castellan — the bandleader who had not arrived in 1991, and a friend to all of them afterwards — died on 12 September. At the wake in Fairfield, Sloane sat down at the piano, Pesic got his horn out of the car, and the band played together for the first time in four years. They have not stopped since.
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2005–2011
At sea
Six seasons in the Neptune Lounge of the M.S. Coral Duchess on the Pacific circuit. Two sets a night, six nights a week. Eight hundred and fourteen performances, and no reviews at all.
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2008
Estoril
A promoter in Cascais booked the band for a Saturday on the casino terrace. He had been expecting a DJ from Rotterdam. Seven hundred people came, the band played for three hours and twenty minutes in white dinner jackets, and they have gone back to the Lisbon coast every year since.
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2011–2013
Marco, Del, and the reissue
Marco Reis, who had been at Estoril in 2008 and followed the band around the coast for three summers afterwards, joined on bass. Hartmut Bell of Nocturne Reissues in Berlin licensed the Rosebud cassette for vinyl on the strength of a copy bought in an op shop; it sold four thousand in Europe. Delphine Auguste, a church organist from Footscray, joined in 2013. Three nights at the Palais Rialto sold out in an afternoon.
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2014
The Vellum years, collected
Nocturne’s three-record set gathered everything Vellum had put out between 1993 and 1999, remastered from tapes found in Ron Vellum’s sister’s roof.
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2016
Nino Pesic
He died on 8 November, aged 71, eleven days after his last engagement. He had not missed one in twenty-five years. The band played the whole of 2017 with his chair set and empty.
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2017–2019
The tenor chair
Bettina Croll, who had kept the band’s books since 2009, took it in November 2017. Pesic had nominated her in a letter written eight months before he died and given to Del Auguste to hold. In 2018 the band announced a farewell tour of eleven dates and was back fourteen months later.
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2020
Reservoir
From 26 March, Frankie sang from the balcony of his flat at seven each evening for ninety-one consecutive nights, joined from the seventh by Del Auguste on a keyboard in the car park below. The recordings were made on a neighbour’s phone.
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2021–2023
Lionel, and a film
Lionel Bright joined on guitar at nineteen, after a recording of him playing “Nino’s Waltz” in a garage in Sunshine reached the band by three separate routes in one week. Priya Ramanathan’s Still Tender premiered in Northcote in 2022. The arrangement of “The Girl from Ipanema” was recorded in full the same year; it runs thirty-eight minutes.
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2024–2026
Back to Thornbury, and Coburg
A six-week residency at the Golden Lotus — formerly the Astoria — for the thirty-third anniversary, and the live record that came out of it. The Velvet Songbook followed in 2025, arranged for eighteen players by Del Auguste. Since March 2026 the band has been at the Emerald Room in Coburg on Fridays.
The booking that was meant for somebody else.
The offer came by email in February 2008 and was accepted on the grounds that it was in Portugal and the fee was in euros. João Bettencourt had spent some weeks trying to engage a Rotterdam DJ trading under a similar name, and believed he had found his management.
The mistake became apparent at twenty to ten on Saturday 12 July, when nine people in white dinner jackets carried a Hammond organ onto the terrace of the Casino Estoril in front of a crowd expecting house music until four in the morning. Bettencourt’s account, given to Ruído the following month, is the only first-hand record:
“I understood at once what I had done, and I went to the sound man to stop it. Then the old one with the saxophone played eight notes, and I sat down on the step, and I did not get up again until two o’clock.” João Bettencourt · Ruído no. 31, August 2008
The band played three hours and twenty minutes. “The Girl from Ipanema” ran twenty-two minutes, and a section of the crowd sang the horn line back. They have returned every year since, and in 2011 acquired a bass player who had been at the front that night.
Forty-one songs in 1991. A hundred and six now.
The set has been two halves of fourteen since 1994, with an interval of twenty minutes. Roughly a third of the book is original; the rest are standards the band has been playing for long enough that the arrangements have drifted a long way from the records they came from.
“The Girl from Ipanema” has grown by about ninety seconds a year since 1994 and has never been shortened. The recorded version runs thirty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds.
“Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?” has been in the set since the first night and has always been sung that way.
Requests are taken and are generally attempted whether or not the band knows the song.