He’s also cited more contemporary inspirations like Adele and Amy Winehouse. Smith has spoken of female singers dominating his listening as he grew up and learnt to sing himself, particularly Whitney Houston and Chaka Khan. The messages are simple but nonetheless transcendent: love hurts love is all you need. It demonstrates what can happen when a set packed with pop hits, heartfelt lyrics and great singing is embraced – and I mean embraced by the artist as much as the audience. The second night, with much improved sound, repeats the song order and anecdotal patter, but it’s a revelation. It’s an evening, really, where the artist and the professional in him is puzzling out how to both relax and be in control. 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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