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
A pedal piano, and a lot of people had pedal pianos and inherited them, but mostly, they sat there gathering dust. but my mum retained ours and kept it working because we had this collection of something like 300 or 400 pianola rolls, scrolls, and so that was played a lot. and so i grew up listening to all these old pre war songs like, you know, funiculi, funicula and all these weird songs and then, you know, sound of music and oliver! and all those musicals were on pianola rolls. i mean, it feels like a completely different generation. it s a mechanised piano. so then did you start emulating on the piano? were you following along on the keys? i wonder if. ..the extent to which that influenced me. certainly, it s not that simply causal, but, yeah, interestingly, my brother took up guitarjust as a kid and i learnt piano and i didn t really take to music lessons very well and neither did he, but he was much more interested in music than i was.
From les mis , or stop musically commenting on itself and stop textually commenting on itself. he was like, just write. i mean, he didn t put it in that many words. he just gave me a nudge in that direction. i realised what he was saying is i didn t need to armour myself with meta, with irony, with satire. i could just write with words to try and elicit a genuine emotion out of the audience. and once he gave me permission to do that, it actually. changed my life. matilda sits in culture as something that altered british culture a tiny bit, and i contributed to it and that made me think, oh, i could be an artist, notjust a clown. i am just the luckiest human in the world. imean, i. and i mean that. and i am lucky that i was able to leverage some of my losses into gains to find ways to talk
I m not someone who thinks, well, i m an artist, they will come because i m brilliant. i m like, how do i make something that people are just going to really enjoy? like, how do i entertain these people with everything i ve got? and i always thought mucking around with ideas of rock and roll and virtuosity, which is really what i built my career on, is playing with ideas of punk versus virtuosity, high status versus low status. and i didn t think about it too much, but i think that s what i was doing. i was like, what if i m this weird genius who then is just swearing his box off aboutjesus, you know? darwin s theory of natural selection. i mean, not only is it. what s the word. ? right. if that is an image that is constructed, is the stage persona of tim minchin different to the offstage tim minchin? he really was then. the 2005 guy was a character. it was sort ofjust a person i was pouring my nerves into, probably.
This show i was doing, which at the time was called dark side, might be a bit of a chance. and so i thought. i ve always had a fairly pragmatic attitude to this. i m not someone who thinks, well, i m an artist, they will come because i m brilliant. i m like, how do i make something that people are just going to really enjoy? like, how do i entertain these people with everything i ve got? and i always thought mucking around with ideas of rock and roll and virtuosity, which is really what i built my career on, is playing with ideas of punk versus virtuosity, high status versus low status. and i didn t think about it too much, but i think that s what i was doing. i was like, what if i m this weird genius who then is just swearing his box off aboutjesus, you know? darwin s theory of natural selection. i mean, not only is it. what s the word. ? right. if that is an image that is constructed, is the stage persona of tim minchin different to the offstage tim minchin?