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.
