What influences and experiences growing up shape a performer? There’ll be as many different answers to that as there are performers but for Kai Smythe, it all began in the kitchen. “As a child my mother used to play a lot of Prince and Michael Jackson and D’Angelo in the kitchen and she’d always turn it up really, really loud and I’d know that if she was turning it up loud, she was dancing,” he recalls of his childhood in Queensland.
“So me and my brother would run to the kitchen and we would all just dance, which is a really fond memory of mine and also one that makes me think, now that I’m doing this show, that’s where I was brought up: listening to Prince in the kitchen by my mother,” says Smythe.
Now 30-years-old, and having called Melbourne home for the past seven years, Smythe is about to stage Hairy Soul Man as part of the 2013 Melbourne Fringe Festival. He says it’s the artistic culmination of the various shows he’s been performing for the past few years.
Originally Smythe was an actor but once he “got sick of the whole thing” turned to filmmaking and music. “It’s only been in the last three years I’ve started performing live comedy wise,” he says.
Performing in the duo Mager and Smythe, which he calls “an action adventure comedy duo best described as a mix between Tenacious D and Indianna Jones,” their show, In Search of Atlantis, toured nationally in 2010, winning the Melbourne Cabaret Festival Award at Melbourne Fringe and a nomination for Best Cabaret at the Adelaide Fringe. The pair played all the characters and performed all the music. The following year, he was in another collaborative effort, Sexytime, which was a physical comedy based on the history of attraction that played at festivals here and in Edinburgh.
Then last year he tackled solo stand up in his show Big Hairy Fun, which had some songs in it, and it was in doing that he realised how much he loves performing music. “Every night I’d look forward to singing the songs in the show and the stand up bits I was like ‘oh yeah I’ll breeze past that to get to the songs’. So this show I went ‘just focus on the songs, that’s what you love doing’”.
The result is Hairy Soul Man, which combines anecdotal patter, dance and his own original songs as he fronts a ten-piece band every Friday and Saturday night of the Fringe. “I’ve been down a few different paths and I think now I’m getting to a point where the pendulum has swung all the different ways and I’m finding a balance of all my different artistic endeavours,” he says.
“Because I have the music background I do have a lot of music friends,” Smythe says of being able to pull together such a large band, which is being overseen by Musical Director, James OBrien (ex-The Boat People). “We’ve found this opportunity to be able to play together, which is awesome”.
The original music will be all soul. “Some (songs) span to R&B, blues, there’s a little bit of reggae in there but mostly based on soul music but no particular soul era. Because I love northern soul, all the stuff from the ’70s, and neo-soul and the new stuff that comes out now,” he says.
Smythe has just released one of the tracks from the show, Loving Myself, as a single. He says the song encapsulates the true essence of what the Hairy Soul Man show will entail. “When you listen to that, you will know if you want to see the show or not,” he says.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
Venue: Lithuanian Club, 44 Errol St, North Melbourne
Dates: September 20 – October 5 (Friday and Saturday only)
Time: 9pm
Tickets: $15 – $20 from here.
