When 19 year-old Irish singer Rebecca Smith found herself doing a Noel Pearson show opposite John Kavanagh in London s West End, she said to herself, To hell with opera!
It was the mid- 80s. After five years of training to be an opera singer, Smith had come to realise that the genre was a vocation. You either give your life to it or you don t, she says emphatically. And at 19 years of age, I was just more interested in going out and having a good time.
Like Jimmy O Byrne, her co-partner in a new musical project, Rebecca Smith comes from a long background in theatre, musicals and TV drama. Currently she plays Annette Daly, the man-eating solicitor on Fair City, while O Byrne s most recent TV incarnation was as Mary McEvoy s manager in Glenroe.
Smith and O Byrne first met last September, when they played opposite each other on a show called Me And My Girl at the Cork Opera House. They soon discovered a mutual love for jazz and swing. Now they ve made a new career out of their shared devotion, forming a band that sings praise to the best songwriting of the 20s, 30s and 40s.
Backed by a band of well-known musicians, Smith and O Byrne s late Saturday night stints held in Club Absinthe in Dublin s Andrew s Lane have been called the best kept secret in town.
Both Jimmy and myself have ideal voices for this kind of music Gershwin, Cole Porter . . . numbers you ve heard from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horn . . .
We re the only swing group around that have a female and a male singer in front, notes Smith. The get-up in Andrew s Lane is very good they ve little tables with check cloths and candles on them it really is almost what you d see on a Hollywood dinner dance evening. We plan to dress it up even more, and go the full 30s and 40s hog, with diamante earrings and frocks. But for now it s a bit more casual.
From Irish soaps to classy swingtime is that styling or wha ?
See Rebecca Smith and Jimmy O Byrne: A Swinging Affair in Andrew s Lane, 15th and 29th May.