Back: Tim Minchin – Home Release

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Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

On stage, Back was the return of a performer – whose resumé defies categorisation – after some seven years break from touring. This home release brings Tim Minchin Back to audiences after ten years since his last recording Tim Minchin and the Heritage Orchestra (2012).

While trappings of the old Minchin (the self-described “love child of Liberace and Edward Scissorhands”) remain in the hair, eyeliner, shoelessness, and so on, the differences here could not be clearer. The symphony orchestra is changed for a small band of musicians introduced by name; the Royal Albert Hall becomes the Shepherd’s Bush Empire; the whacky exuberance of a decade ago has mellowed. It still erupts at intervals, but there is much, much more here than simply old favourites.

As this is a filmed concert, it’s worth noting the strength of the production. The video is of a high fidelity, certainly (never has the eyeliner been so beautifully rendered and, thus, ironically unnecessary), but the whole thing is also just exceptionally well shot, largely avoiding anything experimental, allowing the show to play to the audience on its own merits. Even that aside, the sound is the real surprise. For example, individual vocals are properly distinguishable in the backing tracks. Given that we all carry tech that would probably outperform the professional equipment used to capture the 2012 concert in our pockets now, noticeably above-average sound is a rare thing.

Of course, the crisp audio-visual HD is only worth having if what it delivers matches that quality. Thankfully, Back does not fall short. That said, whatever your familiarity with Minchin’s work, elements here will probably come as a shock. The contemplative, often sombre tone of the album this tour introduced (Apart Together, 2020) was a surprising, though welcome, departure from comedy, and even from Minchin’s higher-profile work on Matilda. Since then, the album’s focus on love and loss at a distance has taken on startling and painful prescience. This recording, from the post-pandemic encore tour, is quite changed from the 2018/19 run, let alone anything from 2012 or earlier.

From here on, it’s difficult not to stray into spoiling the experience, so perhaps one example will speak for the whole. In 2018, the show’s encore song was ‘When I Grow Up’ from Matilda, an idealised vision of an adulthood full of TV and sweets on the way to work; when I saw the second tour at the Hammersmith Apollo last year, Minchin encored with ‘Carry You’, which is about the loss of loved ones you’re too far away to touch; the recorded show uses ‘White Wine in the Sun’, acknowledging simple, unironic love for some of life’s mawkishly romantic elements.

These three show a Tim Minchin who has quickly ‘grown up’ into someone with an extraordinary talent for self-reflection, both acknowledging his former self – the young man who became famous for his eloquent obscenity and witty rage against religion – and the person today, who has lost loved ones, and who really likes Christmas, in spite of its numberless sentimentalities. In very recent memory, we have all had to ‘Grow Up’ a little faster than expected, and perhaps this is what makes Back a powerful experience. As this Christmas approaches, here is a film with wit, humour, and some great music, but just enough sentimentality too.

Tom Martland