Tim Minchin’s rise from rock’n’roll nerd to stadium superstar

HE’S profane and provocative, naughty but nice. Tim Minchin’s talent has taken him from rock’n’roll nerd to superstar.

STRIP away the rock-star ­regalia, the adoring global audience, critical hosannas — Genius! Phenomenon! — and the nice new house in the Hollywood Hills, and Tim Minchin is just another guy who likes lolly snakes.

He’s sitting here, in an ornate nook of the heritage-listed Chauvel Cinema in Paddington, Sydney, tearing the head off a red one with his teeth. World ­domination is tiring and he needs the sugar hit.

It soon becomes clear that beneath the demented shock of carroty hair, chemically straightened, back-combed and hair-sprayed for the full wasted-diva effect, a large intellect is ­fraying slightly at the edges. Fatigue sends him off on tangents that his perfectionist streak would not normally indulge. For instance, the acclaimed musician, comedian and composer spends rather a long time fruitlessly denying he’s a redhead.

As a fellow follicular one-percenter, I can’t pass up the opportunity to reference his song Prejudice, which, ludicrously, equates being a redhead with the burden of being black and has the line: “Only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger.”

“Hi Ginger,” I greet him (I’ve been practising this for days).

“I’m not really a redhead,” he replies, bizarrely. “I mean, I’m not red like you. Mind you, it’s quite red these days but yours is proper red.”

“You’re a ginger, of course you are,” I say, expecting some sort of punchline. “What are you talking about?”

“Is it red? You call that red? No, you’re looking at my beard; look at my hair, it’s not red. Actually, it will be red in this filtered light. Sometimes it just doesn’t look red at all and I feel quite awkward about it.”

This sort of equivocation shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Minchin, the self-described “foul-mouthed idiot from Perth”, has always had an ambivalent relationship with his own image. Self-deprecation is his forte, and a curious blend of raging ego and genuine self-doubt has informed his act from the early days when he was a struggling musician-comic supported by his wife Sarah’s social-worker salary. On stage, he’ll unpack a profane, intensely provocative ­origami of complicated rhymes fuelled by barely suppressed rage (The Pope Song employs more than 80 swear words) and then glance nervously about as if his own ideas have given him a fright.

But he has now become a superstar. He fills 10,000-seat stadiums with his one-man show; he’s toured UK arenas as Judas Iscariot in Jesus Christ Superstar and played a coked-up rock star in the American TV series Californication, not to mention the triumph of last month’s concerts on the steps of Sydney Opera House. “I’m a really late bloomer,” the 39-year-old shrugs. “I’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years unpacking ideas for a job and I suppose you get good at it, sort of.”

Then there’s Matilda. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s deliciously nasty musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel has proved an unqualified smash in London’s West End and on Broadway. It arrives in Australia this winter ­toting a swag of international awards, including a record seven Oliviers and four Tonys. Off the back of writing the music and lyrics for one of the most acclaimed stage musicals of recent times, Minchin is now penning a musical version of the 1993 film Groundhog Day and developing an animated film for DreamWorks called ­Larrikins. But, you know, no big deal. “It’s not like Picasso coming up with a whole new form,” he says. “These are just ideas that anyone could have and I have to have them because it’s my job.”

Is this shtick? Not really, says close friend Rhian Skirving, who directed Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd, the prescient documentary which tracks Minchin’s rise from obscurity to his breakthrough winning the Perrier Best Newcomer Award at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “He is self-deprecating and ultimately humble, but he also understands that he has some very rare talents,” she says. “In the old days, he was probably more insecure about his worth as an artist simply because he hadn’t had it validated in the same way he has now. But that long stretch of humility becomes part of your make-up and he still carries it around with him.”

When Minchin started out more than a ­decade ago he accompanied the performer Eddie Perfect on piano, often playing cabaret clubs to an audience of two. “Here’s a guy who worked really hard and persisted with his material and didn’t compromise even though I saw him down a lot of times,” Perfect says. He isn’t surprised his friend is struggling with the notion of success. “It’s not like there’s a moment when the siren goes and you get to do that big sporting fist-pump, ‘Yeah, I’ve won!’” Perfect says. “He’s got so much amazing stuff in him and he’s so ambitious and there are probably a million things he wishes he could be doing right now, all at once. I think we haven’t seen the best of Tim.”

Minchin was born in England but grew up in suburban Perth, the son of a surgeon and one of four children (he has an older brother and two younger sisters). “I was a little bit asthmatic and quite early on I was pretty underdoggy and not very bright,” Minchin says. “I was very deaf at a young age, I eventually had grommets in my ears, but my parents didn’t quite realise at first.” His upbringing was loving and stable. Though being middle-class meant money “has never been a source of fear or aspiration”, the paucity of emotional turmoil was no help when it came to creating art. One of his early songs, the self-referential Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd, laments this fact: “So he sits and imagines his girlfriend is dead / To try and invoke some angst in his middle-class head / But the bitch is always fine / At half past nine / When they go to bed”.

On stage, he assumed the guise of a grandstanding rock god: kohl-rimmed eyes, rat’s nest hair, dissolute dress suit and bare feet. In the early small venues, he was cloaking himself in dry ice and irony but, a friend says, “I know for sure there was a period when what he really wanted was to be a massive rock ’n’ roll star.” After ­graduating in contemporary theatre from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Minchin moved to Melbourne and took a trickier route: he would win the crowds with a combination of serious musicianship and ­confrontational comedy. Though he once toyed with becoming a schoolteacher — “I think I would have been OK” — by his late 20s he’d decided “I was going to be a muso whatever happened and I’d just be poor”.

In 2003, when Neville Sice and David Read took over as owner-operators of the 45-seat Butterfly Club, it had become the unofficial home of Melbourne’s cabaret scene. Housed in a rundown Victorian terrace teeming with kitschy trinkets, it resembled your crazy aunt’s living room. Sice, who now runs the Melbourne Cabaret Festival with Read, remembers the night he first saw Minchin — “a bit chubbier with short, curly ginger hair” — accompany a subversive singer-comedian named Eddie Perfect on piano. Towards the end of the show Perfect handed the floor over to Minchin, who chose to showcase the deeply sacrilegious Ten Foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins, a ditty about suicide bombers that he still plays today.

“I walked out of the show and said to my partner, ‘You know the little guy with the crazy eyes, I’ve just booked him’,” says Sice. “Tim was not only an extraordinary piano player but he played unlike anyone I had ever seen. His songs and use of language were just mind-blowing.” They were also slap-in-the-face shocking. Along with the silly stuff, songs about boobs and an ode to a blow-up doll (“increasable, uncreasable you”), he was scathingly funny about religion. A hardened sceptic and avowed atheist, Minchin takes on religious dogma of all kinds in songs that are as infectious as they are offensive.

Perfect still considers Ten Foot Cock one of Minchin’s best (“So you’re gonna live in paradise / With a 10-foot cock and a few hundred virgins / So you’re gonna sacrifice your life / For a ride on a UFO”). He adds: “Also, it has to be said that ‘We don’t eat pigs, you don’t eat pigs … Why not not eat pigs together?’ [from Peace Anthem for Palestine] is probably the most succinct, funny and insightful contribution to the forging of peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Minchin played The Butterfly Club for a year. His “dressing room” was separated from the backstage kitchen and storage area by a ­plastic chain and a sign that said “Private Parts”. Sometimes the audience was just family and friends, “but he always gave it everything”, Sice says. Minchin can’t read music and is largely self-taught on piano. Yet “his knowledge of music is as good as his use of the English language,” says Sice. “His improvisation is astounding and I reckon his playing is the better for it. He and Eddie used to do some extraordinary things. Tim would sit on top of this cheap old upright piano and pull off the sound board and lid and play with his bare feet a duet with Eddie seated at the keyboard.”

Meanwhile, Skirving, a friend from Perth, had also moved to Melbourne and was ­living around the corner from Minchin and his wife Sarah. (Minchin and Sarah are childhood sweethearts and she is clearly on his wavelength: When the RSC rang to offer him Matilda she asked, “Why don’t they get someone proper?”) Skirving felt her talented friend was going somewhere but it was the couple’s attempts to start a family that piqued her interest as a documentary maker. “Here was an artist trying to have both a family and a career and not wanting to have a child until he could provide for them,” she says. Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd, which went on to play in ­theatres, intimately traces the ups and downs of this quest — the couple now have ­Violet, eight, and Caspar, five — against the background of Minchin’s climb from anonymity.

At the 2005 Melbourne International ­Comedy Festival his show Darkside caught the attention of Scottish producer Karen Koren, who offered him a spot at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His debut performance there won him rave reviews as well as the Perrier Award and he was soon inundated with offers. In one turbulent fortnight, Minchin became famous.

Gore Vidal said, “Whenever a friend ­succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Yet Minchin seems to inspire zero envy from his peers, who seem truly, convincingly happy for him. “Tim always wanted to write stuff that was smart, to construct songs with complicated arguments using complicated language, and he also really wanted people to love him,” says Perfect, who has forged a successful performing career in ­Australia. “It actually requires quite a lot of an audience to get on his wavelength, so it took a really long time to find that audience.”

Hypocrites. Fundamentalists. Homeopaths. Minchin has them all in his sights. “I’m a bit ranty, aren’t I?” he says, biting into another snake, yellow this time. Leaning back in his chair, he crosses one black-booted, skinny-jeaned leg over the other and fixes me with a look rendered unnaturally intense by blue-tinted contact lenses. “Some people in my life say I stick the knife in and pull it out and think that means it doesn’t hurt,” he says. “I can be a bit caustic. But I think I’m usually pretty clear that what I’m cross with is the hypocrisy of claiming a magic thing and using that to promote bigotry. I mean, every ­single person who has ever stood up and said ‘God says this’ is a liar.”

He is wary, though, about being the poster boy for atheism and has deliberately put some distance between himself and the Richard Dawkins crowd. “The whole point about atheism is that it’s the absence of something,” he says. “It’s so boring! It’s only the f. kers misusing their misbelief that makes atheism interesting.”

Like most perfectionists, Minchin doesn’t take criticism well. When Guardian critic Phil Daoust coughed up a measly one-star review for Minchin’s Edinburgh show, the comic waited three years before retaliating with The Song for Phil Daoust, a jaunty tune in which he vows to make the critic’s children “watch you eat your own face-meat”. (The intervening years have done little to thicken his hide. Sice was there recently when a tweet came through from a guy who found Minchin’s voice “aggravating”. He has more than 850,000 followers but agonised over this one tweet: “Is he right? Is that a fact?”)

Minchin has said the only thing he reads is his Twitter feed and he’s concerned at the internet’s new role in public shaming. Of particular interest to the avowed feminist is the hate women get from other women (“They get slammed for the audacity of having an ­opinion!”) and it has stirred him to write his first new comedy material in four years.

First he has to wrestle his music and lyrics for the Groundhog Day musical into shape. “Last week, I was like, ‘This is shit, it’s f. king rank amateur, stupid shit’,” he says. “I’m feeling all right about it this week, but there’s a lot of pressure on this — it’s a sacred text and it’s my second musical and I’ve noooo idea if it’s any good. I don’t know who to believe — the me that thinks it’s pretty f. king good or the me that thinks it’s shit.” The crowd’s reaction to a Groundhog Day teaser — the surprisingly affecting Seeing You, which he previewed last month at the Opera House — bodes well.

The targets of Minchin’s satire necessarily have had to change as his star has risen. “I don’t like the feeling that I’m bullying people because I am now what would be considered a wealthy white male — I am that ultimate privileged being,” he says. “I think all artists, if their work becomes popular, have to find a new way to write. Even musicians — you have to figure out what it means to be a folk muso with 10 million bucks, you know?”

He has removed Fat Children (“Do not feed doughnuts to your obese children”) from his ­repertoire because it “just made me sad” but there’s still plenty of room to punch upwards. “My targets remain incredibly powerful: quackery, bad science and religion,” he says. And does he regret writing that song about Daoust? “Not really,” he says. “I still hate his guts.”

Minchin’s humanism may not extend to ­critics but, coupled with his rascally, Dahl-esque world-view, it is a perfect fit for Matilda. Scouting for a composer and lyricist to work with writer Dennis Kelly, the musical’s director Matthew Warchus went one night to Bloomsbury Theatre in ­London to watch Minchin’s one-man show. Because Matilda is about a brainy moppet who seeks solace in Dickens and Dostoevsky, there had to be genius in the songs. That night he was treated to exemplary musicianship, anarchic mischief and, yes, lyrical genius. But it wasn’t until the encore that Warchus knew he’d found his man. In a voice choked with homesickness, but without a jot of false sentimentality, Minchin came out and performed White Wine in the Sun, in which he sings about bringing his baby ­daughter home to his family 14,000km away: “Wherever you are and whatever you face / These are the people who’ll make you feel safe in this world / My sweet blue-eyed girl.”

The audience wept buckets. “Tim is dark but always with an underlying warmth and humanity,” says Skirving. “That’s how he gets away with such brutal truths in his comedy, he always lines it with not just humour, but with heart. That’s why people fall for him so hard.”

Minchin’s verbal fusillades, agrees Perfect, “come from a place of love. If he attacks things it’s because they’re ideologically unsound and have implications that are cruel to another whole subset of people. He’s got a warrior aspect to his writing that comes from wanting to engender his audience with a sense of social justice and inclusion.”

Minchin is “just so pleased to have put something in the world that is just f. king good for people,” he says. “It’s not born of anger. It’s just a … Good. Bit. Of. Stuff.” He stops short of calling the musical wholesome — “an awful word that implies Disney” — and settles on two words that could be used to sum up his own disposition: it’s naughty and nice.

It was an overcast day in October last year when Minchin flew into Sydney to officially launch Matilda. Dozens of media gathered in the arts precinct of Walsh Bay to watch the bespectacled composer perform songs from the musical on a grand piano. “It is quirky and a bit dark and full of heart and it makes kids laugh and think and grown-ups laugh and cry and think,” was how he described his tour de force.

It was school holidays and there were a few children there, tagging along with their parents. Ignoring the grown-ups with their cameras and microphones, Minchin immediately crouched down to kid level. “Hello! Are you from a newspaper or a television network?” he asked a couple of clearly amused pre-teens. Then he launched into Quiet, a thrilling, discordant ballad that reflects the mental turmoil of a child genius with a frantic escalation of existential questioning that stops, suddenly, before delivering a whispered, emotional kicker that had a roomful of journo eyes pricking with tears.

Quiet

Like silence, but not really silent

Just that nice sort of quiet

Like the sound of a page being turned in a book

Or a pause in a walk in the woods.

Outside, the grey waves of Sydney Harbour washed softly against the posts of the pier. Minchin’s voice cracked slightly and sank to a murmur:

And it is quiet

And I am warm

Like I’ve sailed

Into the eye of the storm.

“That song is called Quiet and although it’s not the one you go away humming, I quite like it,” Minchin said as the last note faded. He rarely performs the song. It belongs to the schoolgirl Matilda, a fact he acknowledged with another stab of self-deprecation: “I admit it’s a bit weird when sung by a hairy man.”

Back at the cafe, I tell him that I found his performance of Quiet moving. “Cool,” he says, before leaping to undermine his achievement. “But anytime you make someone hark back to their childhood, you’re going to move them. Adults are so f. ked up about their childhood.”

Minchin has reached the bottom of the packet of lolly snakes and he’s finally prepared to acknowledge he’s done all right for himself. “Look, I’ve done much better than I thought I ever would,” he says, crumpling the plastic into a misshapen ball. “I was 30 before anything happened so I knew who I was already — I had my partner, my wife was pregnant; my child was born the year my career was born. And I’ve got really f. king kind parents. I’m one of four kids and we all talk to each other and I’ve got no deep-seated pain that says I have to be mean to people. It’s just I got all brought up good, you know?”

This story has a happy ending, then. “So far,” he says warily. “I’ve got a song called Nothing Can Stop Us Now; I wrote it the morning after I got married. It’s very short.” He sings:

Nothing can stop us now

Only the good times left

Nothing can stop our love

Except terminal illness

Or sudden accidental death.

He stands up and stretches lazily. “Give me a hug,” Minchin says, reaching out both arms. His hair smells nice. Like strawberries.

Matilda opens at the Sydney Lyric Theatre in August