It’s 20 years since Tim Minchin’s life-changing Edinburgh fringe in 2005, and tonight he’s singing 20 songs of commemoration. There’s a lot to celebrate: few careers are this distinctive, or this successful. And there’s a real sense Minchin has got life where he wants it tonight. With a five-strong band in tow, the balance is better than on his last tour between troubadour and rock Gargantua. And there’s an embrace, too, of his misfit status: who cares if no one knows whether he’s a musician, a comedian, an auteur or a clown – or whether tonight’s show is, as Minchin describes it, “an absolute shitshow of tonal inconsistency”?
I mean, he’s not wrong. Minchin has always been a curious mix of cool and uncool, sending up rock theatrics while openly in thrall to them. He is an artist of excess, never knowingly underwritten – and for more than three hours tonight, we get a lot of him.
Curiously cool and uncool … Tim Minchin. Photograph: Paulwdixonphotography
None of the songs, selected from a 28-year career, are left to speak for themselves; they’re all chattily placed in the context of Minchin’s life at the time. This one (Song of the Masochist) was written to help his brother get over an ex-girlfriend. That one (Apart Together) touchingly summons a story about his father and recently deceased mum.
The balance is roughly equal between comic songs, serious songs and bits-of-both songs. There are fantastic highs, like a rendition of Revolting Children, from Matilda, replete with a squawking electric guitar solo courtesy of bandmate Jak Housden, and the show’s newest number, an elegiac, rounding-off-a-life affair palpably written by a man entering his second half century. And there are moments when we fall foul of our host’s refusal to care what anyone else thinks: see his “I love boobs” number, Confessions, at which one feels faintly embarrassed that his whole band are obliged to sing along.
But that’s Minchin, for whom honesty or bust (or in this case, both) is a guiding principle. It’s far more endearing than not tonight, in a show that lays on the line his delight to be where he finds himself – and ensures we share in it.