Tim Minchin: ‘I'm blessed. I've got Matilda paying my mortgage'

Times

2 days ago

There aren't many more fun evenings than the one I had at Tim Minchin's Songs the World Will Never Hear last month. For almost three hours the big-haired Australian musical comedian (or is he a comedy musician?) regaled a besotted Hammersmith Apollo audience with songs and chat that veered from subversive to moving to hilarious. He and his band segued from The Good Book, a country number mocking evangelical Christianity, to a showstopper called Confessions in which he sang earnestly about feminism, human rights and environmental Armageddon before adding the timeless rejoinder: 'F***, I love boobs, though.'
The tour was subtitled '20 years of fkn hardcore rock'n'roll nerding' and the audience matched the performer for geekiness. When Minchin mentioned Avogadro's constant, the number of atoms in one mole of a chemical substance, dozens shouted out its value (6.02 x 10 to the power of 23, since you asked). 'You wouldn't get that at an Oasis show,' he said. During one of many extended interludes about death, religion and kittens, he said: 'Tonight the plan is to do more songs and less talking … that's going well.' The roars of laughter suggested that people were fine with that.
'I want to assert my right to do exactly what I f***ing want,' Minchin says with a grin when we meet two days later. For much of his 20-year career he has done just that — in his Instagram bio he describes himself as 'songwriter, singer, pianist, actor, writer, comedian, producer, speaker, poet, wanker, reader, runner, worrier'. Most famously, he wrote the music and lyrics to Matilda the Musical, which has been a fixture in the West End since 2011 and ran for four years on Broadway, winning seven Olivier awards and five Tonys. He followed that in 2016 with Groundhog Day, an adaptation of the film, which won two Oliviers. His acting roles include a rock star in Californication and 'a really sexy koala who was a bit of a dick' in the animated film Outback.
At the heart of his career is a tension between sincerity and sarcasm, big-headedness and self-deprecation, and most of all between music and comedy. As Minchin once said: 'I'm a good musician for a comedian and I'm a good comedian for a musician, but if I had to do any of them in isolation, I dunno.' He was being hard on himself, but it clearly bothers him. He is turning 50 this year and said in the show that 'my present to myself is to never again explain what genre I am'.
Minchin knows his act isn't for everyone. 'It's very sort of didactic and shameless. I don't look like Harry Styles.' Well, he's far more glamorous on stage than your typical comedian, with his eyeliner, extrovert mane and barefooted sensuality. Today, in this ritzy hotel in west London, there are shoes and no make-up but he still dazzles. He is publicising the release of Time Machine, a collection of reimagined songs he wrote when in his twenties. While still witty ('I'd never dream of asking you to discontinue use of my therapeutic pillow,' he trills in I Wouldn't Like You), they tend towards the heartfelt. 'I'm a muso; the fact that I'm funny is a bonus,' he says.
A newer, Randy Newman-like ballad called Peace is even more sincere. It was given a wild ovation at his show, after which he said: 'I can't tell you how much it means to be able to sing a song like that in a room like this.' Was that because it made him feel like a 'proper' musician? Bristling slightly, he points out that last year he did his Unfunny tour, where the accent was on the music. 'I sell tickets whatever I do,' he says. Yes, but does he see the tunes becoming dominant? 'That's what I thought I was doing — slowly cross-fading into a singer-songwriter. But why would I go on stage and go: 'Here's half of me'?'
For an artist who often talks about having 'never been played on the radio and never had a record deal', live performance is the key. At the Apollo he kicked off with a rousing number called Turn Off Your F***ing Phone, and the show was a convincing case for being in the moment. Minchin hopes that AI will draw people into theatres, hungry for live experiences. It would certainly be hard to recreate the moment when he mucked up a song, started again and fast-forwarded — singing and playing the piano at double speed — to the point where he had gone wrong. 'I'm going to become a purist,' he says. 'You want to see me, you're going to have to get a ticket.'
Born in Northampton to Australian parents, Minchin moved as a child to Perth in Western Australia. It was a liberal, middle-class upbringing: his father and grandfather were surgeons, his mother stayed at home and he went to a private school before studying English and drama at the University of Western Australia.
'I became a comedian because I didn't feel I had a right to complain,' he says. Musicians always seemed to be railing against something, he explains, mimicking a rapper: ''I popped a cap in his ass and someone shot me and my friend died.' And you're like, 'Well, I went to hockey training.'' Yet he never disowns his privilege, maybe because it gave him the self-belief to 'do exactly what I f***ing want'.
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Are there any rivals in his very popular niche? 'Definitely not. I am peerless!' One who comes to mind is Bo Burnham, the American musical comedian whose Netflix special Inside was one of the joys of lockdown. 'Oh yeah, he's a very dear friend,' says Minchin, who is an outrageous name-dropper. 'He's the smartest person you will meet. I was a big influence on him and then the student overtook the master.'
Burnham, 34, has been struggling with celebrity, Minchin says. 'Fame when you're young is trauma and he has a long way to go to get to the place of peace that I have got to.' The same goes for Burnham's partner, the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. 'She is unbelievably talented, but suddenly she was on a Taylor Swift tour and now everyone's looking at her and she's like, 'How do I write?'
'It breaks your brain on one level, getting standing ovations,' he says. When they stop 'it's a genuine chemical withdrawal', but he has learnt to deal with that by doing things like renovating the house he shares in Sydney with Sarah, his wife of 24 years. They have two children, Caspar, 16, and Violet, 18, about whom he was very funny in his show: 'She's grown up OK, but when she was younger she was a bad person.'
He says: 'I'm the most blessed artist on the planet. I've got Matilda, who sits there paying my mortgage.' A song on the album Dark Side has a line: 'Clever never made no one rich.' Yet he says he has 'found the place where being clever did make you rich, which is comedy and theatre'.
When Minchin says he has reached a place of peace, however, he knows that's not entirely true. Groundhog Day, his favourite thing that he's done, closed after five months on Broadway. 'This hit-or-miss dichotomy is bullshit,' he says. 'It got five-star reviews on Broadway and seven Tony nominations.' He concedes that it's not an easy musical, 'especially for Americans. The first lyric is, 'Lumpy bed, ugly curtains, pointless erection.' And then he kills himself over and over again, and it's clearly godless: how do you generate meaning in a meaningless universe? Groundhog Day says we need to be better; Americans want it to be like, 'We're amazing.''
I ask about Stephen Sondheim, who gave up on making a Groundhog Day musical because, he said, the film 'cannot be improved'. It led to an email row between them when Minchin was asked about it in an interview. 'I was prompted, but in the article it looked like I had volunteered [a reference to Sondheim saying the movie was unimprovable]. Steve said something like, 'Thanks for being a c*** about me in the press.' I was about to open Groundhog Day on Broadway and I wrote back, 'Stephen, I was asked a question, it got framed as an offer. I'm about to open a Broadway musical, you know what that feels like, can you imagine what it feels like to get a mean email from Stephen Sondheim?' I got really cross and he went, 'I'm sorry, let's start again.'
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'I've got some chips on my shoulder about Broadway,' Minchin says. 'It's mean, a bit nasty, not a meritocracy.' He says Sondheim used to remind him: 'I've never had a Matilda.' That's quite a compliment from a giant. 'I'm like, 'You're Steve Sondheim. You don't need a f***ing Matilda, you idiot.''
His focus on live shows reminds me of Daniel Kitson, the revered comedian who never does TV or DVDs. They are mates too, of course. 'Before we became friends he hated me because I was razzle-dazzle. He was so desperate not to have a brand that it became a brand.' A bit like Richard Dawkins, a fundamentalist in his atheism. I ask if he is a fan of Dawkins. 'Oh no, I'm a friend,' he says. This is getting out of control. He knows 'some of the smartest people on the planet', from the physicist Brian Cox to Matthew Warchus, who directed the original Matilda and its film version.
His next musical, which he can't talk about, is another film-to-stage adaptation and he is playing a crooked harbourmaster in The Artful Dodger, a Disney series. He also has an idea for a TV show 'that could be my opus — it's a vehicle for me, about music, a period piece. I can't get it commissioned so I'm thinking about writing it into a theatre show.' Wherever it ends up, odds on it will be a hoot.
Time Machine is out now; Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre, London; matildathemusical.com