Music / Under The Influence: Fred Smith, with Shortis and Simpson. At Belconnen Arts Centre, May 4. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

“It’s a long way to the middle when you’re in folk music,” troubadour and Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year Fred Smith told his audience on Saturday night when he took the stage in Shortis and Simpson’s final Under The Influence session.

This, the final iteration of a series where Shortis and Simpson have invited musical legends to join them while sharing both their musical influences, followed sessions where Keith Potger, Karen Middleton, DJ Gosper, Nigel McRae, Beth Tully and Michael Simic underwent  gentle interrogation from Shortis and some reinterpretation from Simpson.

The match wasn’t always comfortable, Shortis and Simpson’s savage take on the racial politics of Pauline Hanson, for instance, was very different from the characteristically understated approach of Smith.

But it was Smith’s night centre stage, in what proved to be a long evening, partly to do with the extraordinary diversity of his life and career.

We heard of childhood periods spent in Melba and Cook, in between his father’s diplomatic postings that took him to places as far afield as the Philippines and Hawaii.

From those latter experiences, including an early encounter with death in Manila, that he moulded the “catastrophic ballads” for which he is best known, while the boredom of life in Belconnen in the ’70s (not now, of course) was a recurring theme in the show, complete with slides showing us just what he meant.

After a juvenile recording of The Mickey Mouse Song, the young Smith’s early encounters with music were common enough. Shortis and Simpson joined in there, treating us to a rendition of the Beatles’ quirky song Rocky Raccoon.

After a swift race through boarding school and its influence on the most scatological of Smith’s compositions, stints at university and time living in a group house in “the People’s Republic of O’Connor”, we heard how Smith, under the influence of the late artist David Branson, started performing original work, eventually becoming the warm-up for productions by Canberra’s Elbow Theatre, where I first saw him.

We heard of his artistic development during time as a DFAT offer in Bougainville and later Afghanistan.

But the main thrust of the night was his outline of the three great influences leading to his name most famous song and album, The Dust of Uruzgan.

These proved to be John Schumann’s I was only 19, from which he  learnt the need for specificity in lyrics, Kev Carmody’s tragic Droving Woman and, from Smith’s time touring in the US, American composer James Keelaghan’s Cold Missouri Waters.

Smith’s renditions of all these was amply backed by his band, Dave O’Neill, Matt Nightingale and Mitch Preston, with O’Neill’s soaring fiddle rising above the lyrics.

All these “influences” led us to believe that the performance would culminate in The Dust of Uruzgan, but Smith, playing a daredevil game with his audience, went a completely different way, winding up with an original song about author Helen Garner and a full-on tribute to Leonard Cohen, before taking two encores.

Was it wise of him to play such a catastrophic game with the audience’s expectations? The thunderous applause would suggest that he got away with it – just.