Twenty years after he burst on to the UK comedy scene by winning best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe, Tim Minchin is back with his Songs The World Will Never Hear tour. Here, the composer and lyricist of the award-garlanded Matilda The Musical and Groundhog Day The Musical, tells Jay Richardson whether he still considers himself a comedian, the songs he can no longer play, his 'stupid' facial hair and the rock 'n' roll of his conception….

So what kind of band and stage setup are you touring with?

Well, I'm bouncing back from my serious, low-status piano show of 2023 [An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and His Piano] and going back to the same scale as the [2019] Back tour basically, though I'm not going to have a horn section, just a six-piece. 

What I've done successfully is manage expectations of what I do over the last ten years. I'm no longer worried about whether it can be considered comedy, whether it's big or intimate. We just put on a really good show. Sometimes it's bombastic and sometimes it's tiny and personal. 

In fact, the bounce is now my stock-in-trade. Getting away with something absolutely ridiculous, then totally sincere. Something huge, then small and vulnerable. Because that's what I want to see to see from an artist, not the same thing for two hours.

Fans want to hear their favourite songs. But comedically, you've got to offer them new stuff and surprises right?

Yeah, I'll put in a bit of new stuff. But I haven't written any new comedy since 2010. It just wasn't where my instinct took me. 

That said, when I did the Unfunny Evening show, I was adamant that I wasn't going to do any comedy songs. But I've found that my non-comedy songs are not non-comedy songs. I put You Grew On Me (Like A Tumour) in the set. That's a beautiful love ballad. I forgot that it kind of is a comedy song too. I just excoriated anything too punchline-y. Because I want to keep asking questions of my audience.

Hang on, that's not really the right way of putting it. I just don't want anything I've done in the past to trap me into being defined as anything particularly. Because I'm a good songwriter and I've had some success outside of comedy, I've been asserting my right to go on the road and not do comedy songs. 

Even so, my instinct to make people laugh is overwhelming. When people came to see the Unfunny show, they laughed all night. But they also cried. And I held them in silence.

How much do you trust your instincts?

What's weird is, in my head, I've travelled this long journey in order to try to assert that laughter is not the only currency in my work. I've spent so many years trying to educate my audience that I do all this other stuff. Or at least, that I write across a wide emotional bandwidth.

But I look back at my [2010] orchestra show, and that had Not Perfect and The Fence, which was really just a pop song, White Wine In The Sun and Beauty (Is A Harlot). A good third of the show was completely sincere. You go all the way back to Edinburgh 2005 and Not Perfect was the encore. The dirty secret is that I'm a cabaret artist. But I wouldn't want that as the headline.

Now I'm back, 20 years almost to the month that I came to Edinburgh for the first time. And I find myself very relaxed about doing what I fucking want. Not because I don't care about the audience, far from it. But because I've worked so hard for so long at making sure my shows are good, regardless of what genre you want to put them in. They'll enjoy it, I'll have fun and it'll be silly. This tour is actually going back to being a bit sillier. As I say though, it'll push out in all directions.

Why reference Rock 'n' Roll Nerd's lyrics in the show's title? 

Breaking out in 2005 with Darkside, my persona was science nerd, godless and a bit sweary. But above all else, a rock 'n' roll nerd. That original show had Rock 'n' Roll Nerd at one end and the song Dark Side at the other. Both say 'look, I wanted to be a rock star but I'm a fucking middle-class nerd and so I can't be'. The great irony is that those songs were written when I was playing cabaret venues. But they ended up in the Albert Hall with an orchestra.

And there's something very defiant in the title. Because the lyric is: 'He will always be a rock 'n' roll nerd, he'll keep writing songs the world will never hear, and though they won't be heard, he'll just keep writing'. And I know it's a bit cheesy. Coming from someone who's been as lucky as I have and has managed to have a big career. 

But I still have that sense of just being a songwriter. I'll write songs. And if people don't like them, fine. I've still got that defiance I had in my late twenties, getting absolutely nowhere. That sense of not needing you to put me on the radio. Not needing to be Taylor Swift. I don't need anything. I'm going to keep writing and my audience will find me. 

The great, great joy of my career, as audiences keep coming, whether I'm making TV drama, film or writing children's musicals, is that I've got this amazing base level of people interested in what I'm doing. So yeah, it's a defiant throwback to the person I was 20 years ago when I first came to the UK.

Are you finding new aspects of the songs as you revisit them?

Yes. Again, Rock 'n' Roll Nerd comes to mind. I thought I wrote that as a piss-take of myself and people like me. I didn't really want to be a rock star, I was always writing for the theatre. I was taking the piss out of well-educated, nice people with long hair and rock star aspirations who didn't have any of the grit. 

But looking back, that early work has quite a lot of grit in it. And the grit comes from being someone who didn't think they were allowed to be an artist. 

I grew up in the Nineties and come from a privileged background. Not in the British sense, I hope you don't think I was rich and a Tory. I mean my dad's a doctor, my parents stayed together, I love my siblings and I'm well spoken. 

Deep down, I thought that meant I didn't get to be an artist. And I was a bit pissed off. So the comedy came out of a sense of: 'Fuck you! I'm fucking doing it anyway! I'll just do it differently. I'll talk about sex and death and God and what a dickhead I am.' And weirdly, I became a comedian. It wasn't my intention, I just found myself writing those songs.

Are there any songs you won't play now? 

There are songs I wouldn't do now. But only because they had a real, specific purpose. Like The Pope Song. And with Peace Anthem for Palestine, there is absolutely no way. Even with my strong belief that irony and humour should persevere through all tragedy, there's a time and a place. I wouldn't want to play it now. 

We could have a huge conversation about why that's the case. If it was funny ever, why isn't it funny now? What's wrong Minchin, too much of a pussy?

It's interesting and I could talk about that. But there are songs I played back in the day that I very quickly decided were edgy in a way that didn't do anything. I've always been pretty strict with myself in terms of whether I'm being edgy for no purpose. Many of my songs wouldn't go down well in some crowds. Certainly, the rules have changed. Rules around language. The application of irony is much more policed now in a way that I don't think is helpful.

But I would mostly stand by my songs. They were written with a good heart within the cultural context of the time in which they were written. 

What can you tell me about Peace and some of the other new songs you might be debuting on this tour?

Well, I don't know if I'll do Peace. I only played it live for the first time recently.

Peace is a completely serious tear-jerker. Or at least a ballad that people have found very, very moving. It's certainly got no humour in it whatsoever. 

It's about how there have been times in my life where I'm not so at peace with myself and it's got a lot to do with the world we live in, constantly letting ourselves be bathed in the news, constantly getting bombarded by our little devices with the hot takes and edgy opinions of every fucking person we've ever met and a bunch we haven't. That outrage feed that we have allowed ourselves to be exposed to. It's a ballad about struggling to still my mind.

And what's interesting is, since I started writing that song I have completely got off social media and largely off the 24-hour news cycle. And I'm much, much better.

Do you feel as if a song like The Fence predicted the binary aspect of a lot of argumentative discourse now?

I wrote that song in 2009, certainly before the height of Twitter. And it's been interesting since. The main thing I've talked about for 15 years, all the way back to Ready For This? and before, is logical fallacies, confirmation bias and binary thinking. And that was in the context of me coming into comedy in a new, atheist, post-9/11 environment, right when the big issue, the monster that we were trying to take down, was fundamentalism. 

And it still is. It's just changed its shape and now there are fundamentalists on both sides of politics. Progressives are not really progressive anymore. Or, at least, a certain section of progressivism has become incredibly controlling and much more like a religion. Doctrine and dogma have compelled speech and restricted speech. These things were previously the purview of the far-right. Though they also still exist on the far-right. 

It's been unbelievably frustrating. And yeah, I fucking told you so. I've been saying this for many years. In Back I did a big spiel on the bubbles of the Left and confirmation bias, tribalism and shouting at one another. And the message is not that the Left are dickheads, they're wrong. The message was always ‘the Left are dickheads because they've got the right ideas, but they're making things worse by not having any strategy and not caring if the way they're going about spreading their ideas is making things worse’.

And here we are in 2025. I've been saying to friends, and in boardrooms and on stage for years, this will fucking backfire. If we keep just speaking down to people, it's going to backfire. And I cannot believe how quickly and dramatically that has happened in the last six months. Obviously, I'm not the only one who's been saying this. 

It's nice to be off social media because I've realised I can't fix it. I'm still engaged though. In fact, just yesterday, I had a big meeting about joining a board of an initiative promoting critical thinking in schools. So I'm still very, very engaged, I just won't be a part of this shitshow. 

I knew that Edinburgh was important for your career. But you reckon you were conceived on the train there too?

I'm pretty sure that's true. My mum's dead now, she was the holder of all family memories. But as far as I know I was conceived on the way to Edinburgh. I don't have the story of why. They were living in Northampton and Dad was studying at Northampton General. I guess that means my big brother was with them on the train as well. Fucking hell! 

But yeah, that's why I'm such a good muso. I felt the rock 'n' roll of the engine within me as I was becoming a blastocyst.

What changed after Matilda? Why did you start to feel that comedy was solipsistic?

That's a good question. Sometimes I think I was mad. I did an arena tour and then I just stopped really. Well, I didn't stop, I kept playing little gigs here and there. But I left the UK, turned my back on all those panel shows and things that make you ubiquitous. I had offers for my own panel shows. They might have been real or they might not have. I thought that fame would be a bad idea for a young family. I already had enough of it.

But mostly, it was ambition. And at the risk of sounding like a total cunt, I continue to have a pretty interesting career and I think it's because I've curated how I'm seen. In the UK, I'm still seen as a comedian. But globally, those musicals I wrote, they weren't just a comedian having a crack. They're pretty serious shit. I am a songwriter and a composer.

I really can't believe I got to be a comedian. And I get to be a comedian. I love making people laugh. It just doesn't feel like my core craft. I have so much admiration for those for whom it is. I feel like I'm a funny guy. But my core craft is playing piano and singing. And lyrics. And there isn't a single musical comedian who's released a well accepted, serious record is there?

Steve Martin maybe? And Billy Connolly came the other way ...

Well, I came the other way too. And with Matilda, obviously, as I said earlier, I'm just asserting my right to be more. Which is hubris. But I think I've done pretty well over the last 15 years to not let myself be pigeonholed.

I don't want to bite the hand that's fed me. I owe my career to comedy and would absolutely hate it if people coming to my shows thought I'd lost all humour. 

But with the Unfunny shows, people came out of them completely emotionally drained. That's another skill I have. And in order to practise that skill, to write a song like Quiet from Matilda, or to put the audience in a dark room and have them sing along to something and create these moments of beauty, you actually have to keep asserting and defending your right not to be called anything. 

I've managed to do it and can stop worrying about it now. So call me what you want. You can call me a comedian or a composer. A lot of people call me a dumb cunt. 

What can you tell me about the upcoming album, Tim Minchin Time Machine?

It's a new album coming out around the tour. Even though the tour is not the tour of the album, it's in the same spirit. The tour is a little bit of a look back. The album, I'm not sure how much I'm talking about it. But it's a bit about looking back over my career … 

1996 to 2006?

Yeah. It's basically mostly songs that, when comedy took me away I went 'oh well, I guess they'll never see the light of day. I'm a comedian now and they'll just sit in the drawer'. But you know what, there's some pretty good songs there. And they include a couple of the songs that got me known as a comedian because they're crossover songs. They're not like Prejudice or Fuck I Love Boobs [aka Confessions]. They're not like classic comedy songs, they're pop curiosities. For the first time they've been studio recorded.

Including a definitive version of Rock 'n' Roll Nerd?

There is a definitive Rock 'n' Roll Nerd! And a definitive Dark Side. But a lot are songs that most people have never heard. A few are songs that a lot of people have but which never got studio recorded. And a few are somewhere in between. And yeah, there's a really amazing version of You Grew On Me (Like A Tumour) on there. 

Will you revisit the Matilda soundtrack at some point? 

No, the Matilda songs have their own life. In the future, I was thinking of putting Seeing You from Groundhog Day on a record though. 

So what else are you working on?

Well, currently, the reason I've got this stupid facial hair is that I'm filming season two of [Disney+'s] Artful Dodger. I play Darius Cracksworth, a baddie. 

I did this tiny little indie film for a friend, Pickpockets. There's two or three stage musicals I'm working on. I've written a TV show that I haven't sold yet. I can't talk about any of them, sorry. But I will be acting, writing scripts, writing musicals and recording until I die.

• Tim Minchin's Songs The World Will Never Hear tour begins at the Soho Theatre Walthamstow on Wednesday. Tim ​Minchin tour dates. Here’s  Ruby, the new single from Tim Minchin Time Machine: