With Smith telling his surprisingly intimate stories and piecing his songs into a larger personal narrative.
His stage patter – underscored by a constantly present and supportive band, particularly Reuben James on low-rolling piano – has the air of an over-rehearsed yet genuinely felt conversation. Sponsored by Nova-FM, and topped-and-tailed by a station DJ who lands all the associated sales notes like a karate chop, the show on the first night suffers from poor sound and a stiffness that Smith himself half-explains when he jests on stage about having had six months off on holidays and how “I almost forgot I sing for a living.”
Over two nights at the Sydney Opera House the singer gifts Australian audiences with a preview of what will be a much bigger and bolder global tour in support of his second album, The Thrill of It All. It’s not so much success he is seeking it’s that indefinable thing we might call greatness. Smith may be one of the hottest pop singers on the planet right now, but his ambitions for his music seem to be quietly more profound. There’s a reason why the room spins around him. and that sense of someone fragile and powerful at once who has just landed from another world.
In the middle of it all Smith himself is eerily poised, his odd, squared-off body posture adding to an alien calm that his pale blue eyes only intensify. Publicists, make-up, a film crew, management and record company attendees, media comings and goings timed to the second … it’s an almost Presidential atmosphere of significance.
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