King Capsis

Paul Capsis is an artist who is uncomfortable with too much down time.

"I always need to be working," Capsis tells us from one of his regular café haunts in Surry Hills a few hours before the launch of his new album, Make Me a King. "If there is too much time in between projects I get freaked out." If not drawing a breath in between gigs is the way this two-time Helpmann Award-winning actor/singer prefers to live, then his recent schedule has been ticking plenty of boxes.

One of Australia's most versatile performers, Capsis has enjoyed a 20-plus-year career across the genres of film, theatre, opera, live concerts and cabaret. It's his reputation for versatility that has seen him work alongside some of the most revered musical directors and producers in the business including Barrie Kosky in the 2006 Sydney Theatre Company staging of The Lost Echo, which earned Capsis a much-deserved Helpmann Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Play.

After wrapping his latest studio album in May, Capsis was whisked off to Melbourne to play not one, but three roles in the Malthouse production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, directed by Michael Kantor. "Initially I was approached to play the role of Jenny Diver as a male prostitute," says Capsis. "Then Michael Kantor decided he would get me to narrate and play the role of a sleazy Arch Bishop involved in the underworld, which was my favourite role out of the three." If you're thinking Capsis errs on the side of an over-achiever, you're right; however, the Surry Hills veteran is completely void of the ego that often comes with the title. As far as down-to-earth, organic and thoroughly chilled-out artists go, Capsis takes the cake.

It's been just under two years between Capsis' last studio album Everybody Wants to Touch Me and his new offeringMake me a King, and the brief hiatus between recordings comes as much as a surprise to Capsis as to anyone else. "After Everybody Wants to Touch Me, I thought, that's it for a while. I even wondered if it would be my last studio album." While the thought sat well with Capsis, it wasn't long before executive producer Robert Patterson beckoned Capsis back into the studio with a carte blanche offer. "This album is raw; it's the closest to the real me sound that you're ever going to hear. I worked with the amazing Bob Scott who has an incredible ear and wanted totally rawness from me and I feel that's what I gave.

"There's a lot of emotional outpouring on this album," Capsis confesses, "to the extent that I find it hard to hear some of the tracks. Many of them take me back to the exact time and place when I first encountered the pieces. It's all very confronting."

Capsis' emotional confrontation is to our advantage as an audience, as his unique renditions of classics by Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and even Garbage makesMake Me a King undoubtedly his best studio album to date. While Capsis cites his personal favourite as REM's 'I've Been High', it's hard not to peg 'Perfect Day' as this album's strongest track.

In typical Capsis fashion, this rolling stone is in no danger of gathering  moss, as the artist switches hats yet again to prepare for his role in the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, adapted by Samuel Adamson and opening in mid August. "I'm in a dress, again," says Capsis, knowing that neither of us are surprised. "The fact that at times as a performer I can be seen as genderless can work to my advantage." It's this ability to cross genders that gave Capsis his break in film in the role of Toula in Anna Kokkinos's 1998 feature Head On and allowed him to explore the issue of reconciling sexual identity with cultural tradition by playing a cross-dressing ‘wog boy' living in Melbourne's western suburbs.

When you ask what's on the cards next for Paul Capsis, you're bound to get a laundry list of projects, one of which came as an offer by phone during our interview. When All About My Mother closes Capsis will be working on his one-man show Angela's Kitchen, dedicated to his Maltese-born grandmother, to whom Capsis dedicated his previous album. If Paul Capsis is indeed worried about to much down time, he clearly has nothing to fear. Andrew Georgiou

Make Me a King Out now through Universal

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