it change your relationship with your work, with the work that you produce for matilda, do you think? yeah, itjust has its own life. and one of the extraordinary strokes of luck in my life, of which there have been many, is that this thing i helped create, itjust lives without me and it lives in culture. and, you know, a high school in sydney right now is doing it well, dozens of high schools in sydney are doing it. and you know, the finnish version, i just got sent the translation, i think the mandarin translation and then there s children s books and now there s this incredible feature film. # sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty. and i actually feel uncomplicated about it. i feel like matilda, of all the things i ve done, there s just no.downside to matilda. it s just done so much good in the world. it s generated incredible opportunities for kids and money for charities and
and he was the firstjourno to kind of do the sneer, that, of course, comes whenever anyone gets any popularity. there s got to be an equal and opposite reaction. and he wrote in the guardian, which was the paper i read and which had, what, in 2005, five million readers. it was pretty big because it was before it alljumped off the page and he wrote this just utterly sneering review, one star review, really snobby in that sort of guardian way, like, quoting shakespeare. i was like, how dare you quote shakespeare at me? i ll quote shakespeare at you! and just incredibly sneering and ungenerous, a thing that just says i m terrible at myjob. it really, really threw me. and so like a year later, when i had to come up with a new show, i thought, well, i m going to take that guy down. so i wrote the song for phil daoust. # ding, dang, ding dang dong # this ends my phil daoust song # everybody sing along # la la la la la la la # i hope something
image and persona develop? you know, the shock of wild hair, the very thick kohl eyeliner. yeah. make up. but then also paired with a frock coat. the concert pianist s tails. yeah. when did that start? i mean, it was quite a quick sort of, not particularly thought about decision about the end of 200a. i was in sydney writing a little musical with my friends, actually, and this cabaret thing i was doing was definitely quite clearly looking like the thing i should concentrate on. people were really enjoying it and the room was, you know, sometimes playing to two people in the audience, but in general, people were starting to take a bit of an interest. # you could be clever as voltaire # but it won t get you nowhere # if you want to sell discs. ..# and very early 2005, i did a show at the seymour centre in sydney and i had just decided to.
love s labour s lost thing was built of the script, which has a few songs in it, you know, like all his comedies have a hey, nonny nonny and a bit of a thump, but then it was enhanced with other sort of metaphysicists and elizabethan poets likejohn donne, but other shakespearean sonnets that have been wedged into this script to kind of make it more of a musical. and it really worked. i wrote this set of songs and i think we performed it for three nights and everyonejust loved it. and everyone in the cast and everyone who saw that show remembers it. # 0 mistress mine where are you roaming? # 0 stay and hear, your true love s coming. it was profound because i could feel both the kids who were in the show and the audiences, i could feel them, the stillness, i could feel that i had captured them. and that s a very intoxicating feeling to go, oh, i ve
really take to music lessons very well and neither did he, but he was much more interested in music than i was. that was, in the end, the thing that kept me on music was my brother going, oh, come and work out the intro to light my fire , because, you know, we d listen and i would do the keyboard bits. do you regard yourself first and foremost as a musician or a comedian? 0h, certainly not a comedian. i mean, i would consider myself a musician and then probably a writer in the broader sense and then an actor and then a comedian, probably, now. now? now. while i was a comedian, i would have happily called myself a comedian. but even during that time, i tended not to call myself a comedian. so you ve passed through the comic phase, then? well, really, i got known as a comedian, but i was always a cabaret artist who was just pretty funny between songs. the best thing i ever did was stop calling myself a cabaret artist and start calling myself a comedian, and everything went bang. cheerin