Music / Urban Sea Shanties, Fred Smith and A Few Good Spooky Men. At The Street Theatre, October 4. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

I arrived at this packed-out concert expecting a focus on quirky songs from the 2020 album Urban Sea Shanties, where Fred Smith, 2023 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year and recent recipient of an OAM, performed ironic, witty and wise songs with an “elite subset” of the Spooky Men’s Chorale.

What I saw, however, looked more like a compendium of songs from Smith’s own considerable repertoire.

Smith was fully backed by six members of the famous chorale, who added a beautiful blokey resonance and in one case an acapella backing to the music of the night – articulate and sympathetic, although for the greater part they played a supporting role. More of the Spookies, please.

For this show, Smith also fronted up with a formidable band, flanked downstage by ace fiddler and guitarist Dave O’Neill (unusually playing on electric guitar at one point) and Jack Bradley on banjo and guitar.

Right from the beginning the audience was clapping hands, clicking fingers and singing along without being prompted.

Canberra fans of Iain Sinclair’s erstwhile Elbow Theatre will remember Smith in his fledgling performance days fronting up to sing  curtain-raisers, a time when he picked up the theatrical tricks that make his shows so entertaining. The gradual introduction of all the performers on to the stage showed his theatrical know-how.

Smith’s aptitude for history – he likes to style himself as “an ethnologist in a rayon suit” – allowed him to explain the strategies of a 1942 battle, the extraordinary conflict in Bougainville, and his time as a peacekeeper singing songs to mystified children who, from the photos, seemed to be enjoying themselves but, in Smith’s estimation, could well have been dismissing him as “a patronising bastard”.

Smith has gone much further since then, achieving international fame through his album and book Dust of Uruzgan, in which, as an embedded diplomat serving in Afghanistan, he chronicled and paid tribute both to Australian soldiers and to the Afghans themselves – producing a uniquely sympathetic view of a conflict few of us understand.

All these phases in Smith’s life and career were reflected in this concert. The poignant Sapper’s Lullaby, about Australian victims of IEDs in Afghanistan, accompanied by visual footage screened upstage, was one highlight, as was the riotous Niet Swaffelen op de Dixi, about a strange Dutch cultural practice seen in Afghanistan, which brought the first half to a close.

Smith’s time in Afghanistan was also reflected in the tragic-comic song about an Islamist reprobate, Falzibad, during which a belly dancer insinuated her way around the stage. Smith pretended not to know where she had come from.

The second half began with What Could Go Wrong, a number definitely not on Urban Sea Shanties, accompanied by unnerving images of Donald J Trump.

It also featured his own composition Amen, written in tribute to the late Leonard Cohen, the unbearably moving Say a Prayer Marianne, looking back to that battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, and a cheeky rip-off of the Skye Boat Song, Bonney Boat, during which Smith’s nemesis, a Belconnen bagpiper, appeared to upstage him – his worst nightmare.

Smith’s trade trick is to look surprised and shocked when any such unexpected figures arrive on stage. He’s always straight-faced Fred from Belconnen, even though his real name is Iain.

Understatement is Smith’s greatest weapon, and you could say the same for the delightful Spooky Men.