Tim Minchin appears like a shadow of himself, flickering into life on the computer screen. Gone are the colourful dreadlocks that made him such a distinctive presence in the early days of his comedy career. His face is bare of make-up. His eyes are not ringed with kohl. He still wears his fair hair long, however, and it is tucked tidily behind his ears. He is leaning into the screen, trying hard to make meaningful eye contact across the continents.
Minchin is in the attic room of a rented house in Sydney, a drum kit the only furniture visible behind him. It is 9.30pm in Australia, and Minchin is at the end of a long day of talking to the media. Despite interview fatigue he is unfailingly polite, easy and garrulous, and genuinely considerate in response to every question, worrying that he hasn’t been succinct enough in his replies or has gone off topic. He is basically the opposite of everything you might have heard about the musical polymath, who has been described as “a singer-satirist wanker” and a “pseudo-intellectual preachy c**t”. And these are just the insults he has coined for himself.
Minchin is keenly aware there is a dissonance between the spiky public persona with which he emerged into the public eye in the mid-2000s and his current status as a musical-theatre hero, responsible, in Matilda, for one of the greatest stage shows of the 21st century.
“Look, I don’t think I am a very edgy guy,” he says. “I’m a married dude with kids and no addictions. I’m basically not contentious. But my tools have not always been so soft-edged.”
Although he began his career hoping to be an actor, it was behind a grand piano that Minchin first came to prominence, playing deceptively harmonious chorus tunes against which he spun controversial, polemical lyrics about atheism, science, religious conflict and gay rights.
Graduating from theatre school, he realised quickly that his future lay elsewhere. He spent some time on the audition circuit but “had no career!” When he turned to comedy, however, “all of a sudden I had one. Because I looked interesting and I could play the piano. My songs had funny words. I was trying to be an old-school end-of-the-pier sort of character. I [became] a funny sort of artist.
“Because I [am] so rooted in logical philosophical and science, I tried to just let that be my thing, and if that was a little bit uncommon, to talk about determinism when you are singing a funny song, well, that’s why people would come to see my shows: because it was a little bit different.”
Minchin’s singer-songwriter-satire shtick went down well in Britain, where he achieved his first taste of fame, and where his awards included the prestigious Perrier comedy prize for best newcomer at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but in his native Australia he was more of a Marmite artist, and still is. “In Australia, if I ever publicly talk about things I get s**t – ‘Imagine the balls on Tim Minchin preaching No Extremism while he is an anti-Catholic bigot’ – but there’s not much work that I don’t stand behind. It was of its time and I was of my status.
“The early work that has aged,” he continues, “has aged, like all comedy does, mostly because language conventions have changed. Of course there are things that I wouldn’t say or do now, because back then I was just a guy playing 200-seater theatres, trying to take the power off things that were very powerful, especially with my stuff about religion.”
“But I hate the idea that some people think I am mean and edgy. And I hope it’s not hypocritical that I actually have quite a moderate worldview. So the short version is: I am a polemicist as an artist but nonconfrontational as a person.”
This distaste for confrontation is one of the reasons why, several years ago, Minchin withdrew from social media, on which, like all public figures, he received his share of personal abuse. It was the degradation of public discourse that really rankled. “Every f**ker is a polemicist now,” he says, “getting on Twitter, hating things they don’t believe in.” He could almost get angry thinking about it. Instead he shifts back into philosophical mode. “The thing is there is no rhyme [to online polemics]. There is no art in it. No one is turning it into a song. They are just screaming into the internet, and all it does is make the world a worse place.”
Minchin understands too that, one way or another, what the world decides to make of him is beyond his control. As he has written most eloquently in his song The Fence, “We divide the world into terrorists and heroes, into normal folk and weirdos, into good people and paedos, yeah we want the world binary, binary, but it’s not that simple ... It’s actually, naturally, not that white and black.”
Minchin is currently promoting one of his most conservatively respectable, least potentially controversial projects to date: a compilation of speeches he has delivered to graduating classes at various universities over the years, including the University of Western Australia and the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts, his alma mater. You Don’t Have to Have a Dream: Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious is a beautifully produced pamphlet, laid out like a series of poems in slim paperback form.
Although Minchin proclaimed in one of his earliest songs, White Wine in the Sun, “I don’t go in for ancient wisdom,” the speeches do set out a series of maxims for aspiring creatives, from the basic – “exercise” – to the more profound: “the personal nature of the work [of an artist] leaves you vulnerable to beatings.” And people really do want to know what he has learned from his own journey as an artist: the speeches have been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
When describing the process of their composition, Minchin admits to the transactional nature of the speeches’ origins. “I made these speeches because I was being given these honorary degrees, and I am genuinely quite honoured to have my mediocre talent recognised,” he says. “But I also understand the quid-pro-quo nature of these things. I am a person of profile, and my job as a speaker was to shine a light on their university. So I tried to make them good, and even though I’m not very good at doing things in advance, the very least I could do was be entertaining.”
As he sat down to put his ideas on paper, Minchin applied the same approach to their composition as he does with all his work: “Couch ideas in fun language, with a real rhythm.” Minchin was aware of a fundamental irony at the heart of the endeavour, however: “I don’t know where I get off on being so didactic,” he says. “Because I am not a good receiver of advice, and my career is a glowing example of what happens if you actually ignore everyone. So I don’t know why I think I should be telling people what to do.”
Minchin is proud to recognise a through line in the speeches that “hangs together with my other work, a humanist perspective, a really loving sensibility that raises its head, I think – I hope – in everything I have done”. Contrary to his most savage critics’ opinions, “I don’t make work in order to flog the audience with my worldview.”
At the same time, as an artist, he admits: “You can’t help it. You are trying to bring everything you are into everything you do. That’s the only way I know how to work, anyway. I don’t have that much formal training, so I bring all my weapons to everything I do, and one of those weapons is a penchant for philosophical bon mots which are built on my worldview. It is actually quite nice to be almost 49 and looking back over my work and feeling some sort of ethical continuity.”
Minchin includes in this his two musical-theatre texts: his most recent hit, Groundhog Day, which stormed the West End and Broadway last year, and which he calls an ethical text exploring “what it is to live in a godless, meaningless universe”, and the outrageously successful Matilda, created with the playwright Dennis Kelly and the director Matthew Warchus for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010, which is underpinned by the philosophical position that goodness is its own reward.
In You Don’t Have to Have a Dream, Minchin addresses the students of the prestigious Mountview musical-theatre school from the set of what he calls his fluke. Glib acknowledgment of its success aside, however, Matilda fundamentally changed his life and the course of his career.
“When Matilda happened”, Minchin explains, “I basically retired from comedy.” Comedy had begun to feel “a bit self-indulgent, and the thrill of working on something of such complexity, requiring hundreds of people to be on their game, was incredible. I probably should have done [my comedy shows] a bit longer, but stepping off felt so special.
“It allowed me to be a reasonable father and good husband, where I was not on that crazy ride, trying to turn out a new show every year, and I got such a kick, thinking I could have this sort of career working in art that lives in the culture. Matilda will live forever, or as close to forever as matters to me.”
And that’s an ambition Minchin didn’t even know he had when he was a young man himself, listening to the inspirational speeches and advice of those artists who went before him.
You Don’t Have to Have a Dream: Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious is published by Ebury Press
