Tim Minchin: ‘I like making stuff and I don’t like people taking it away’

Any readers offended by the F-word had better click away immediately, because Tim Minchin, the Australian musician-composer-actor-comedian (“my aim is to be uncategorisable”) holds the record for the most ‘f***s’ in one ditty – his “Pope Song” about child-abuse among the Roman Catholic clergy. And right now, he’s in the midst of his first UK tour in ages, Back, which is subtitled “Old Songs, New Songs, F*** You Songs”.

“The ‘f*** you’ was ‘f*** you if you think you’re going to get what you expect’,” he explains. “Also, there’s a song called ‘F*** This’ which begins with the lyric ‘F*** America… f*** its Teflon self-esteem, won’t someone wake us from the nightmare of their American f***ing dream’… but then it goes inwards and inwards and ends up, ‘F*** me, f*** my privilege, f*** my wealth… my wide-arsed middle-class audience and f*** my dwindling mental health’.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, so perhaps it’s necessary to take a few steps back. The 44-year-old British-born Minchin (both parents are Australian but he entered this world in Northampton) is most famous for three things – the humorous/satirical songs he performs at the piano, being the co-author of the wildly successful stage musical Matilda, and for his look: the Iggy Pop hair and eye make-up he wears so that audiences can better see his facial expressions while his arms are otherwise engaged pounding the ivories. “In England I’m very much known as a comedian”, he says when we meet. “In Australia I’m not… perhaps for Matilda… or just as a weirdo.”

His background is musical, the stand-up comedy coming later when his show Dark Side won the 2005 Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Of his new tour he says: “I wanted it to be very clear it’s a concert because people still think of me as a stand-up.”

Actually, I’m meeting Minchin to discuss his acting. He’s the co-author and star of a totally binge-worthy new Sky Atlantic comedy-drama, Upright, in which Minchin’s dissolute forty-something musician Lucky ferries his upright piano 800 miles across the Australian Outback to Perth, en route striking up an unlikely friendship with a tough but vulnerable teenage runaway Meg (the terrific Milly Alcock).

“I was coming back having lived overseas for 12 years and I really like the idea of telling an Australian story,” says Minchin, who also wanted to confront Aussie stereotypes, the way they often portray themselves as naïve or irredeemably crass. “You know, Kath & Kim or Crocodile Dundee… and even [Barry] Humphreys with his enormous f***ing brain… even Edna with her eviscerating wit still plays on that. The convict myth is perpetuated basically.”

The upright being carried across country on the back of a pick-up truck reminded me of Jane Campion’s The Piano. Was he referencing the Oscar-laden 1993 movie? “No, weirdly I didn’t think about it,” he says. “It was really an aesthetic idea about a piano in the Outback… the appeal of a really formal object like a piano in this chaotic nihilistic landscape.”

He says of his character Lucky that he is “pummelled” – a fair description of Minchin himself when he returned to Oz after an ultimately shattering five years in America labouring on the $100m Dreamworks animation Larrikins. Starring Hugh Jackman as a cartoon kangaroo, half the budget had been spent and many of the animated songs were already in the can when the film fell victim to Universal’s takeover of the studio.

Netflix offered to buy Larrikins from Universal but the studio, which had written the money off as a tax break, wouldn’t sell. Minchin says that Universal president Jimmy Horowitz told him that “It’s schmuck insurance – if someone made a lot of money out if it, we’ll look like schmucks”.

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To compound this massive disappointment, his musical Groundhog Day, trailing critical praise and awards from its London debut at the Old Vic, closed early on Broadway. “It’s a bit tough for America because it’s a bit dark and very subtexty,” he says of the show. “But mostly it fell foul to a very busy year on Broadway. It will live again.”

These twin setbacks, which go some way to explaining the angry lyrics about America quoted earlier in this piece, coincided with Minchin turning 40 and his first experience of depression. “I’m actually a very happy person and it wasn’t a midlife crisis,” he says. “It was just adjusting to coming home and losing a lot of work. I like making stuff and I don’t like people taking it away. Turning 40 just makes you aware of time. Don’t take five years off me you f***ers, I’m going to be dead soon!”

Happily settled in Sydney now with his wife Sarah – they met at university – and their children, Violet, who’s 12, and Caspar, 10, Minchin is feeling productive again. His first album is due to be completed in February, quirky songs in the vein of Randy Newman or the Kinks. “I’ve signed a f***ing record deal at 44, having written songs for 30 years”, he says, more in amusement than rancour. “I’m going to write my ‘Waterloo Sunset’.”

There’s also a mooted biographical musical about the influential American atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, which he asked me not to elaborate on, although he is happy to discuss his own lack of the religious impulse. “I didn’t become a comedian so I could bang on about the absence of God,” he says. “In fact, I’ve only written songs where religiosity is used to justify bigotry. The one people really like these days is ‘Thank You God for Fixing the Cataracts of Sam’s Mum’, so I generally bash that out in my concert.”

He may be without faith, but is not without charity, a proportion of the proceeds from all his live shows going to good causes (in the UK, the beneficiaries are Samaritans and Barnardos). And as his fans and 1.4 million Twitter followers will know, Minchin is not short of opinions – some of which get him into spats (he was being accused of being an anti-feminist on the day we meet because of something he tweeted about the Old Vic’s new gender-neutral loos). “If you don’t like it get off Twitter I suppose, which I’m tempted to do, but that’s how I sell my tickets… that’s my access to my audience.

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“I’m really non-binary about opinions. The thing that upsets me most is our inability to have conversations that don’t descend immediately into straw man arguments and false equivalences.

“I think Brexit’s a terrible, terrible idea but I’m not that well informed,” he says by way of example. “The bigger question is: ‘Is globalisation inevitable?’ – and if so: ‘Is building big walls to try and hold back the inevitable tide of globalism a smart thing to do?’”

Personally, Minchin is quick to check his privilege and appreciate his own good fortune. Matilda has made him financially secure, but he’s not interested in chasing that by writing a sequel.

“It would be a foolish thing to go for. I’ve got to know [Andrew] Lloyd-Webber and Steve Sondheim a little bit, which is an incredible sentence to be able to say for a self-taught boy from Perth, and I’m hugely admiring of both men. But there’s a real sense that both of them aren’t hugely at peace with their careers – Steven in his eighties and Andrew in his seventies.

“I don’t need to write another hit musical because I wrote Matilda, so I can chill. And if that is the thing that lives, what a fantastic stroke of luck in that it not only tells the story of a tiny feminist icon, of how books are a key to emancipation and how to stand up to bullies… but it’s something that employs hundreds of people across the world and is the first theatre experience for millions of kids… it makes me think that whatever else I say that is stupid, it would be pretty hard to say Matilda’s a bad thing in the world.”

Upright begins on Sky Atlantic at 10pm on 28 November