Mount Gambier music legend Dale Cleves steps into the retail void left by Allans' exit from Adelaide and nationally

Allans Music madea hasty exit from its prominance in Gawler Place, Adelaide city, in 2018. This created opportunities for the Dale Cleves Music Group from Mount Gambier in South Australia's southeast to expand nationally. Bottom right: A young Dale Cleves as pianist with his father Frank's band in 1958.
Images courtesy Dale Cleves Music Group

Legendary Mount Gambier figure Dale Cleves’s family business stepped into the void left by Allans Music’s exit in 2018 from Adelaide and its long-standing prominent city presence in Gawler Place.

Allans, started in Melbourne in 1850, became the largest musical warehouse south of the equator by the late 19th Century. Allans Music store first opened in Adelaide city around 1911 at 51 Rundle Street before moving to Gawler Place in the 1960s. It offered an extensive record selection and a big range of instruments.

Allans' national late 20th Century finances became rocky,  \leading to a 2010 merger with Billy Hyde Music to become the largest music retailer in Australia. But that didn’t stop it being rescued from receivership in 2012 and going into voluntary administration and being wound up in 2018.

The Billy Hyde Music brand was brought back to life in 2019 in South Australia (at the Adelaide suburb of Marleston in 2024) and Victoria by the family-owned Dale Cleves Music Group from South Australian southeast city of Mount Gambier. This wasn’t the Cleves group’s first business move beyond Mount Gambier where the family had built up a powerful music tradition around The Barn Palais dance venue.

Dale Cleves, inducted into the South Australian music hall of fame and awarded an Order of Australia medal, was the full flowering of that family music  tradition. His grandfather Frederick was an entertainer and promoter in the early 1900s, his grandmother Jessie was a pianist and singer, and his father Frank was a professional drummer and band manager known as South Australia's king of swing.  At 20, Dale Cleeves was managing The Barn Palais and playing piano, as well as arranging and recording music, for his band, The Starrliners.

In 1964. the 24-year-old Dale Cleves opened a Mount Gambier music store, combining a teaching studio, piano store and record bar. Cleves began a long association with Bosendorfer pianos and opened another store in Warrnambool, Victoria, in the 1980s. The business became one of among the leading Yamaha piano dealerships in Australia, winning national, state and regional dealer awards.

The Cleve group bought and reinvented Winston Music in suburban Adelaide in the 1990s. With Dale’s son Michael involved, Dale Cleves Music Pty Ltd became Yamaha Music Australia’s biggest national account for many years. In 2015, Michael Cleves opened what was initially a temporary piano store on the edge of the Melbourne city centre. This became the Australian Piano Warehouse concept with stores across Australia as the nation’s No1 piano retailer.

The Cleves also took the chance in 2019 to revive the legendary Billy Hyde brand, firstly, with a superstore Melbourne and then Adelaide. The Cleves also extended further nationally by bringing Kosmic Sound in Perth, Western Australia, back to its heights when it was voted one of the best musical instrument stores in the world.

Dale Cleves had shown in Mount Gambier the breadth of his abilities. Besides being a founder of the Generations in Jazz festival in Mount Gambier from 1982 and helping develop the James Morrison jazz scholarships, Cleves was recognised for excellence in hospitality at his Mount Gambier restaurant and accommodation venue, the Barn Palais Mountt Gambier, as well as for his local Hereford cattle breeding.