In HUGE praise of… Tim Minchin

I think my very first encounter with the works of Tim Minchin was a friend (quite possibly the same friend who introduced me to Muppets, Cleo Laine and the concept that vegetables need not be bad) showing me a song entitled, ‘If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out (Take My Wife)’.  As songs go, it’s short, sweet, and led to that inevitable half-day lost that comes from just following youtube links through to their logical conclusion.  In the process of doing so I discovered that being inflatable had its perks, relationships and pathogenic metaphors have their place, and that only a ginger, can call another ginger ‘ginger’.  Fact.

(My favourite-ever summary of the Twilight series, issued by a 12 year old boy in a school hall before his peers: ‘Why don’t you read Twilight?’ I asked.  ‘Cos it’s crap,’ he replied, ‘Fact.’  Complete diversion off-subject there, sorry…)

However, while youtube is a marvelous thing, it has portability issues for a girl whose relationship with wifi is largely defined by which theatre she can find it in next, and my awareness of the musical exploits of Mr Minchin could easily have lapsed as routers across the country declared, ‘no no no, we are for downloading tech specs, not listening to music or playing chess during shows…’  – except that it seems in the few years in which I’ve been following, Tim Minchin seems to have gone from being Pretty Groovy to the Ozzie Ginger King Of All He Surveys.  And this is no bad thing.  Turn on the TV one night, and there he is, in full eyelinered glory, sat by a piano – but of course – then the terror strikes.  ‘Oh God,’ you think, ‘one of my favourite singer-comedians is about to perform something suitably bland for the 9 p.m. BBC1 audience slot, something with maybe a few slightly wry lines about being Australian, perhaps, or maybe a reference to bad shoes, because that’s about as exciting as these things are allowed to get at this time of day, oh dear lord no….’

Imagine then the relief, the absolute relief to discover that not only can this guy seriously play piano, but even when constrained by the BBC’s firm commitment to not swearing, cursing, insulting the right-wing conservative press, or frankly saying anything that might in any way be construed an opinion, he can still subvert, undermine, send up and entertain, in the key of C sharp minor (everyone’s favourite key) and a 6/8 rhythm.  And as if that wasn’t enough, he then went and wrote the music for Matilda the Musical, probably the best musical I’ve ever seen.  (Obviously excluding all the musicals I’ve lit oh yes but really oh no… and that right there was a lighting designer covering her arse…)

But!  While technically I oughtta be able to use words to capture the full awesomeness of all this, it has been pointed out to me that you only really need get a couple of bars into a song on a piano, before the number of musical combinations available to you exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, so all things considered maybe I should just say…

Tim Minchin…

… go listen.