Review: Fred Smith at Night Owl Studio

Fred Smith at Night Owl Studio
Friday, September 29, 2023

Like your average singer/songwriter, Fred Smith has an Arts/Law degree from the ANU and day job as a diplomat for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Even so, IMHO, he has but two peers in the fraternity of Australian singer/songwriters (his position re the sorority is another matter) : Nick Cave and Paul Kelly. Although he’s been the subject of an episode of Australian Story for his triple vocation as musician, author and diplomat, unlike Kelly and Cave, Fred Smith is not a household name. More’s the pity, people don’t realise what they’re missing. The reason is partly that Fred’s preferred musical medium is country-folk, not pop-rock.

As he put in on For Myself, the middle track of his latest album, Look, which had it’s WA launch last Friday at the Night Owl Studio:

Wasn’t getting far so I learned to play guitar
Now I play folk music all the time
Like a rolling stone or ginger Leonard Cohen
I’m known to sing a poem or two that rhymes
I could play it faster on a telecaster
Build a better future for myself
But the songs I like best are
The songs of war and death
And I’m trying to build a future for myself

And certainly he does. He travels the country extensively performing in folk clubs and festivals, town halls and out-of-the-way venues like the charming converted warehouse in Morley that is The Night Owl. He has a dedicated following among the folk community, filling these venues on a single email. And little wonder, Fred’s songs are humble, funny, deep, ironic, moving, insightful, witty, powerful, personal, universal and memorable – often all at once. It’s a rare skill.

Look is the twelfth album of original material he has released over the past twenty-five years. As well as the staple acoustic guitar folk numbers, it has a decidedly rockabilly/country feel. And unlike his last album, The Sparrows of Kabul, which told the complex and nuanced story of the evacuation of Kabul after the city fell to the Taliban, this is not a thematic work. Instead, it presents a diversity of songs in a range of styles that explore current world issues, pay homage to some of his key influences, Helen Garner and Leonard Cohen, send-up his personal struggle with the human conundrum and make the odd insight into love. Most of this is filtered through Fred’s trademark, self-deprecating sense of humour.

For me and Dan and the sailor man never know quite what to say
Straight to the point with the owner of the joint and we asked if we could stay
We got flogged like a dirty dog and spanked with a wooden spoon
Wound up sitting on the dock of the bay singing this lonesome song

Unlike rock ‘n’ roll, Fred Smith’s music is not predicated on being sensational. Rather it is understated and nuanced with the odd spectacular moment. Although you can dance to some of his tunes, it is mainly music to listen to and think about.

This verse from the upbeat reggae but blackly comic Crisis is a case in point:

In the Murdoch media and Fox News on TV
Visions of the greedier become reality
Bojo lost his mojo and we ended up with Truss
This is just what happens when the dog catches the bus
You get crisis, it’s a crisis, it’s a crisis

As Fred said, try singing ‘crisis’ while smiling and shaking your head.

Or this from the similar upbeat Strange How, his ironic take on the internet:

Well the Book of Face is a sacred place you never feel like you’ve arrived
‘cause every post reveals the highlight reels of everybody else’s lives
While you’re home alone on your mobile phone thinking life has passed you by
Full of jealousy for what you might be and it can make you want to cry

Fred is a virtuoso cross-picker, a deceptively complex guitar style that enables subtle harmonic shifts accompanied by complex melodic lines. His fingers seem barely to move yet they release such rich and haunting patterns. He now plays a Cole Clark guitar after his much loved Taylor was destroyed in transit out of Kabul – its carcass resides in a glass case in the Australian War Memorial.

His playing on the album and at the launch, though, truly came to the fore on Lenny, his ode to Leonard Cohen. In a duet with bass-player Josh Gray, Fred emulated perfectly what Laughing Lenny called ‘his one chop’: a very fast tremolo pick that trembles and shakes. Cohen is the only acoustic guitarist to truly master this technique, it’s his claim to “playing a mean guitar." Fred nailed it. The lyrics too map beautifully the essence of Cohen.

Then he looked into the future
Noticed it was looking grim
Fixed our flesh wounds with a suture
For our souls he wrote a hymn
Got us singing “hallelujah”
Though we know our odds are slim

The simple chorus, a repeated Amen, by the end, as with many of the songs at this show, was echoed around the room as the audience sang along.

It was telling from his intro that he first heard Cohen from a Christian. As he put it, “a Christian in the true sense, from before they formed an alliance with the lions." Even his intros are witty and deep and capture the essence of complex situations. As a highly intelligent and sensitive woman in the audience, a founding member of the WA Women’s Hall of Fame put it, “he is just so damn clever."

As well as Gray, Fred’s band the other night were all West Australian. The electric guitarist, Luca Gatti, like Gray studying jazz guitar at WAAPA, put in a fine turn of pure country lead. It was first time he had performed with Fred, with the two only meeting on the Thursday before.

The third member of the band was Perth’s drummer for all seasons, Reuben Kooperman. Reuben has been gracing folk and pub stages in WA for the best part of fifty years, from the legendary band ‘I Don’t Love You Harry’ in the mid 70s, through to the Hiltones with their celebrated long-standing Friday night residency at the Hilton Park Bowling Club. In between, he has played at every Fairbridge Festival, drummed for a plethora of touring artists and featured on many many WA albums. Like Fred, he too has a serious day job as both the honorary Thai Consul and a project manager of major construction works, including, among many others, the iconic City of Perth Library.

And speaking of day jobs, Fred currently works three days a week for DFAT. In the course of his twenty-seven year service, he has been posted to Bougainville following the uprising at the turn of the century as well as three ‘tours of duty’ in Afghanistan. The first of these stints was as the first diplomat to be embedded with Australian troops in Uruzgan Province, the subject of his renowned 2011 release The Dust of Uruzgan. The accompanying book was published in 2016. His second posting was in 2013 during the withdrawal of Australian troops from the province. More recently he was posted to Kabul, culminating in the aforementioned evacuation. This is a very serious job giving him first-hand experience of the complexity of that clusterfuck war. As usual, he writes about this with compassion, sensitivity and humour. Often though, these songs are very dark.

Fred gave a taste of this at the launch with This I Know from The Sparrows of Kabul. This nine minute, twenty-nine verse song reimagines an interview between Major General Brereton and Dusty Miller, a medic with the SAS, as a part of Brereton’s investigation into alleged war crimes. A dark and tragic song about failure and redemption in the fog of war, it tears at your soul, with the narrator ultimately redeemed by telling a secret story that had been eating his sanity.

He extended the show further with a few other of his old classics, including two songs of love Maryanne, for his wife, and She is my Song. He introduced these by wryly noting that Australian men are not known for their emotional athleticism and our male songwriters are usually oblique and back-handed when addressing issues of the heart. This is ironic and humble coming for a man who has written what is arguable one of the three best songs of love ever to come out of this country. A Woman Like You from his album of ‘thinking men’s drinking songs,’ 2009’s Urban Sea Shanties, sits comfortably alongside Nick Cave’s The Ship Song and Hunters and Collectors’ Throw Your Arms Around Me.

My course I relented in a bar room frequented
By the baffled, the bent and the broke
The slow wheel of time had passed most of them by
Those that hadn’t been caught in the spokes
We drank from the bottle a toast to the victorious few
Who’d stayed on the plain between pleasure and pain
For the love of a woman like you

Lyrics don’t get much better than that.

Fred ended the show with Texas, from his 2007 album Texas. Although the song is about Texas, the album more broadly documents the three years he spent in the United States as the musician spouse of the Australian cultural attaché to Washington. Another country tune, the song captures the characteristic hyperbole of your typical Texan.

In a hotel room in Dallas I could not believe my eyes
She had a map of Texas tattooed in between her thighs
With El Paso and Texarkana on each corner of the map
When I got to Corpus Christi well there was no turning back

Fred will be back in WA in November to launch his new book, The Sparrows of Kabul, the companion to the album. The concert is being held at the Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre on Friday, November 3. A powerful book and a moving show, it is not for the faint-hearted but certainly is for everyone who cherishes serious, insightful music performed with sensitivity, grace and humour. As Fred himself put it in the opening track of Look.

Now the folks all listen when I talk or sing
So I feel obliged to say intelligent things
For the lady knitting in the second last row
I’ve come a long way to be here to say
I’ve got a long long way to go …

He certainly does.

You can stream Look on the usual services or pick up a hard copy at any of his gigs or through his website. There is also a charming vinyl version, a collectors’ item.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook