By AIDAN RASMUSSEN
What do you get when you cross 70s English glam with American soul and Australian rock? Cross-dressing, beer-swilling rugby league players who know how to groove?
Not quite. Something even better: the very familiar sounding, accomplished debut album, The Shock of the Smooth, from Auckland trio - soon to be quartet - Smoothy.
Leather-clad lead singer Dominic Blaazer is laidback about his music and the direction his band is heading. Smoothy for him is about having fun and providing an outlet for his songwriting.
"Since I was 16 I always wanted to be a singer in a band and be up the front with a guitar. And lots of other things have come in the way that have musically satisfied me, or not as the case may be. When Smoothy began about three years ago I just thought, 'Oh well, I can try and write some songs,' and five of them came out within a couple of weeks."
The culmination of those three years has been the release of The Shock of the Smooth, whose production was initially born out of fear. Blaazer's greatest concern when it came to Smoothy was that one day either he or another member of the band might have an accident preventing them from playing and later recording.
"If I didn't have a record of how this great band sounded, I would be really upset. I made it my sole mission to get us recorded."
He's a confident wee chap, Blaazer. Even though the album was conceived for creative purposes rather than commercial ones, after listening to the it, Blaazer believes Smoothy has every chance of achieving commercial success. Their music, he believes should appeal to an American and British market, who are so used to bad music that they will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the debut.
Shooting off at the mouth? Definitely not: the last thing you can accuse the softly-spoken Blaazer of, is arrogance. He has every right to sing the praises of a band that has captured all the best elements of 60s pop and 70s glam and put them into 12 songs. Which is not surprising, considering Blaazer was, "wrapped up in the whole glam movement" when, as a child, he moved to England from Jamaica in 1972. Glam was at its peak. "It's part of my conditioning," he says.
In a band that boasts members from the Chills, the Peter Stuyvesant Hitlist (Blaazer is their Hammond organ player) and Polaar, you would expect to have a little confidence in your abilities.
Listen very closely to this album and you'll get the distinct impression that Smoothy are only warming up, that they haven't quite nailed it yet, but aren't too far off.
"This definitely is a preview of greater things to come," says Blaazer.
* Smoothy play an album launch gig at the Kings Arms, Newton, on Friday, June 9.
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