The second coming of Tim

January in 2018 was unusually hot and dry when Tim Minchin arrived in Sydney, with his wife, Sarah, and two children a broken man. A new project had lured him back to Australia but the indefatigable artist, who’d built a career performing rock anthems about reusable shopping bags and cutting satire about religious hypocrisy, was finding it hard to summon his creative zeal. Hollywood had “taken his glitter” and he felt defeated. At times, he believed his career was over.

“I had this pervasive thought that I was done,” he says. “I’d made the mistake of going to a place where they batter artists, and I got battered and they won.”

Tim and his “little unit” had started over many times as they’d followed his ambitions from Perth, where he was raised, to Melbourne, London and then LA. Movie studios had come calling after Matilda the Musical, which Tim wrote the score for, earned a record seven Olivier Awards and four Tonys. Tim then toiled for four years as the composer and director of a DreamWorks animated feature, Larrikins, before that dream was ended by the callous flick of a studio executive’s pen. Compounding the pain, his Broadway musical Groundhog Day was collapsing. Sarah, who “leaves a trail of devastated women” every time they leave a country, was also struggling with the prospect of yet another move.

“We were both pretty down actually,”