Fred Smith: Warries Album Launch

Fred Smith and band will be performing a special Anzac Eve concert at the Street Theatre to mark the release of his new CD, Warries.

Warries is something of a retrospective, documenting a fecund period in the artists life, but also a remarkable phase in Australian recent history in which soldiers and civilians, many from Canberra, deployed into conflict zones in the Pacific and Central Asia as warriors and peacemakers.

Warries is a sequel to his acclaimed Dust of Uruzgan album, described Stephen Fitzgerald in The Australian as continuing “a tradition of profoundly affecting Australians-at-war ballads that includes Eric Bogle’s And the band played Waltzing Matilda, Don Walker’s Khe Sanh and John Schumann’s I was only 19”.

Warries extends this tradition, beginning with the song Smith regards as the “granddaddy of them all”—a searing rendition of Schumann’s setting of Henry Lawson’s poem Scots of the Riverina. The album then moves on to new recordings of songs Smith wrote while working in Solomon Islands, Bougainville, and Afghanistan, some of which were initially released on his Bagarap Empires and Dust of Uruzgan albums, and others written after those two landmark recordings.

Fred will be performing with an all-star band including Matt Nightingale, Mitch Preston and Dave O’Neill (Eric Bogle Band). With a unique combination of Fred’s songs from the front line, wry humour and big screen projections of imagery from ADF and professional photographers, this show is an opportunity to go beyond the jingoism and celebrate Anzac Day with a fascinating immersion in the grit and reality of conflict.

Warries is Smith doing what he does best: vivid reportage, humanising distant conflicts and reminding us that Australia, while a continent, is not an island.