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 you love catches on fire, phil # ding, dang, dong, i ve written you this special song # to sho
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 i was 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. i ve got very curly hair. i decided to straighten my hair, don t know why. and i d lost a bit of weight and ijust thought, ijust had this sense that maybe this show i was doing, which at the time was called dark side, might be a bit of a chance. an
And 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. cheering the first choice that you ve made for this cultural life is being asked to write a musical version of love
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 back 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 done so much good in the world. it s generated incredible opportunities for kids and money for charities and good messages for young women. and it s. i m very, very lucky to have been involved. and a personal affirmation for you, for your work. has it changed the way that
Yes, i suppose so. but it was a youth theatre company that i felt very familiar with, and i pretty quickly decided i could do it. just by sitting down and trying. and i had written a lot of songs by then and i had written, you know, i had gone through this phase in my teens, like a good teenager, of musicalising ts eliot poems. like, i ve got this song that i can still hear that goes: # let us go, then, you and i # when the evening is spread out against the sky # like a patient, etherised upon a table.# yeah, i know it. right? we all know that. and by the way, i ve gone back to eliot in my later years and it stands up, man. it s brilliant. it s beautiful stuff. anyway, i even had, i did a bit of wasteland as well. # this is the way the world ends.# like, i was using this grunge stuff coming out of seattle and, like, putting it to ts eliot lyrics. so i was already writing music to pre existing lyrics and this love s labour s lost thing was built off the script, which has a few songs in