I'm constantly playing left hand like a kick drum, right hand like a snare and chords like a guitar.
My style of piano is very much I'm mimicking drums and guitar. So I think that might be why my style is a little unusual is because I play piano. And The Beatles, often their lyrics were playful and sarcastic. I mean, The Kinks, half their stuff was basically satire, Dedicated Follower of Fashion, I Want to be like David Watts or whatever that song is. But it's playfulness.Īll those bands, actually, although they're all '60s bands, they're all writing. My granddad gave me a book of Ogden Nash poems. My parents didn't have a big record collection at all. And I didn't really know who was until much later as well. And actually, in terms of my love of language and stuff, it partly probably comes from Gilbert and Sullivan. Songwriting wise, Ray Davies and Lennon-McCartney and Freddie Mercury were my influences. I didn't listen to a lot of Elton or Billy Joel or anything. But, yeah, I'm not influenced by comedians, nor by pianists particularly. No, people used to say, "You're like Tom Lehrer." And I'd go, "Who?" When I first started being silly, I didn't even know who he was. But that tradition of piano playing musical comedy didn't dive into you at that early age. I think of your style as being most similar to Tom Lehrer, who was foisted upon me by parents who had lived in the US in the 1960s. And on the other, just Beatles and the Stones and The Kinks. Now it's all just retrospective.īut more influential than any of that stuff was on one side the musical theater-y stuff that was on the pianola rolls and that my gran took me to because we went to the theater a bit. And then I think like most of us, my sense of what my music was ended at the end of the '90s. So I got into Pearl Jam but mostly because my mates did and all that stuff and eventually Nirvana and The Pixies and stuff. So I was dragged to things by my friends. I've always found it quite hard having music on. Then later when my friends started listening to more music, I was never the one going out to pursue it. So I guess he was feeding me and Crowded House and Excess and The Cure. Dan told me what to play, what to listen to. Who do you think of your early musical influences as being? But, yeah, I think we all just loved music. And I never really found another wingman, although the guitarist I work with now is the most amazing guy ever. I was more driven to do it.Īnd, yeah, when I left Perth, I stopped playing with my brother. Let's play them," or at least better, whatever that means. And in our early bands, it was really that me being the lyricist, he being the musician.īy the end of the time that Dan and I were playing in bands together, he was just playing for me but joyously. And I would write the lyrics in our later teens. And my brother and I wrote together a lot. When did you start to put those two together? And I thought I was in the latter.īut you played a lot of piano and you wrote a lot of poems as a kid. I think I thought there were special people and then there were normal people. Literally, I didn't really think it was possible. It took me a long time to give myself permission. And we were pretty straight.Īnd I don't know when I thought that it was realistic that I could be an artist for a living. Of the Fishers, that family, our family was the most conservative, I guess, because my mom married a surgeon. It was quite wayward in his time.Īnd I grew up in a much less wayward corner of the family.
TIM MINCHIN PROFESSIONAL
I think maybe because the only professional musician in the family was my uncle, Jim. Did you always expect you'd go into entertainment?
You played with your brother, Dan, in bands. You talk about family singing around the piano. Your uncle, Jim, was a bluegrass musician. You seem to have grown up in a fairly musical family.
He's presently doing a tour, the Back Tour, which is currently showing in Canberra. I think I speak for many Australians in saying we're sorry that Larrikins didn't work out but delighted to have Tim back here. Then he had a really bad experience with a project. Now 43 years old, Tim grew up in Perth before moving to Melbourne, London and Los Angeles. And you realise the song doesn't just work lyrically and musically but also visually because every line corresponds to the next letter of the alphabet. But I remember the moment when I thought, "This guy's a genius." It was midway through the School Song in Matilda when they start turning lettered blocks over. He's even been kind enough to let me quote snippets of them in two of my books. As a science-loving rationalist, I've always loved Tim Minchin's songs, and everything from dogma to alternative medicine.
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