Tim Minchin has revealed the work he is most proud of to date as he celebrates the chart success of his new album, Time Machine.
The award-winning Australian musician, composer, actor and comedian, 49, achieved a No 11 spot on the UK charts last week with his latest record, which features previously unreleased songs and recordings of live favourites such as “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd”, “You Grew On Me” and “Dark Side”.
Minchin is arguably best known as the composer and lyricist for the Olivier and Tony Award-winning stage musical Matilda, which was adapted into a film starring Stephen Graham and Emma Thompson in 2022.
However, it is his TV series Upright – the first series of which premiered in the UK on Sky Atlantic in 2019 – that he says he is most proud of.
“If no one bought this record, I’d be like… ah, it’s alright,” he said during an interview on The Independent podcast, Roisin O’Connor’s Good Vibrations. “I won’t spend the next year going, ‘Have you heard Time Machine?’.
“After I’ve done this press, I’ll never mention it again. If you want to come to one of my shows… that’s great. I really like where I’ve got to with live performance. [I’ve got] plenty of pride in my work, plenty of non-pride. But Upright is the one where I’m like… watch it.”
Upright, which attracted rave reviews from critics, stars Minchin as Lucky, a struggling musician attempting to transport an upright piano across the Australian outback. After he crashes into runaway teenager Meg (Milly Alcock), the pair join forces to get to Perth – while encountering a number of hurdles along the way.
“I love it so much because you don’t really know why [Lucky is trying to transport the piano] because [of the way] the story unfolds,” Minchin, who also co-wrote, produced and directed the series, said.
He reserved plenty of praise for his co-star Alcock, who was 19 at the time she was cast in the show and has since gone on to star in hits including HBO’s House of the Dragon and Netflix’s Sirens.
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“I’m incredibly fond of Mill… she is incredibly good,” he said. “She got to sit in a huge range of emotions in that show – and in the second season, I sort of wrote it for her because I wanted to be like, ‘Please come back’, you know?”
Minchin also championed Alcock in her new role as Supergirl, stating that her brief appearance at the end of the new blockbuster Superman was “the best thing” about the film.
Elsewhere in the interview, he addressed the divisive reactions to his 2020 song “I’ll Take Lonely Tonight”, about choosing fidelity to one’s partner over an opportunity to have sex with someone else.
In the song, Minchin describes being tempted by another woman but, wishing to avoid doing something he later regrets, resorts to eating junk food in his hotel room and falling asleep on his phone.
“ The whole song for me is about the domestic, pedestrian-ness of temptation,” he explained. “It’s just human stuff. But there’s a reason why temptation has been codified in endless myth – because the feeling as a man of being sexually attracted to a woman in that moment… it’s transcendent. One of the biggest feelings I’ve ever had in my life is wanting to sleep with someone I’ve got a crush on.”
He continued: “There’s a reason why it’s what the poets have written about, and so I wanted to take it there and then bring it right back to [chocolate] wrappers, because it’s both: it’s both the most pedestrian, quotidian, human thing to want to shag someone, and it is… ships have been crashed, empires have fallen, for our inability to control these feelings.”
Minchin also spoke about his trouble with social media and why he chooses to stay away from it, the nature of art criticism, how he and his wife Sarah handled his growing fame in his late twenties, and why he doesn’t believe AI would be able to mimic his music.
The full episode of Roisin O’Connor’s Good Vibrations with Tim Minchin will be available wherever you get your podcasts from Friday 8 August.
Minchin brings his Songs the World Will Never Hear tour to Australia from October. Time Machine is out now.
