The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 202

TINY TIM'S BIG COMEBACK VI 5f nriNYs I-1 II I I 'M I wSOMff WTLLSET PflOFESSKPML LDIt The two I obsessions of Martin Sharp: the 5 outsider Tiny Tim and Luna Park paraphernalia. little to show her husband as anything but a freak. Tiny is more philosophical. 5'I think people will get some insight into my talent but the audience isn't ready yet to accept me as more than a freak," he said. "People love something new, but they hate it at the same time because it looks so weird.

They've been running away from me in subways since 1956. "I know Mr Sharp believes in me so much and I praise the Lord for that and maybe he's made a cult movie which at the very least will survive as a museum piece. But Mr Sharp, I think, is interested more than ever in my thoughts on this world and its cataclysmic times, on my fundamentalist spiritual attitudes. Today all the prophecies are coming true the murders, deaths, assassinations, children been thrown off the roof these are all prophesied in the Scriptures." Tiny Tim, describing himself as "the biggest sinner holds strong opinions about loose sexual conduct. Bora of a Catholic Lebanese father and a Polish Jewish mother, he believes that sex belongs only in marriage, and then only for procreation.

He rejects women's liberation and equates birth control with "stuffing a Brillo pad up the faucet to stop the water His faith in the inevitable global catastrophe has obviously given him a resilience to the minor one his career suffered: "It's been a long drop but as long as I can get up and see another day, well, I thank the Lord for that." Now Tiny Tim is considering following up his Brighton marathon with an even longer one in Hollywood. Sharp's film-making debut may well hasten Tiny's return to fame, or at least bring the recognition which Sharp thinks he deserves. "He's got a fantastic cheerfulness, he's full of honesty," says Sharp. "He may be hurting inside well, he is but he's an outsider. I like outsiders." MARTIN PORTUS is mortgaged to pay for Sharp's grandest ambition a two-hour film about the singer which Sharp has been working on for a decade.

Street of Dreams will premier this Tuesday at the Brighton Arts Festival in Britain. Tiny Tim, of course, will be there, complete with ukulele. He plans to break his record by singing a medley of popular tunes for three hours without a break. In his last marathon, organised by Sharp at Sydney's Luna Park in 1979, Tiny sang for two hours, 15 minutes and seven seconds. Sharp filmed the extravaganza, six months before a fatal fire -swept through Luna Park killing seven people.

The the suspicious circumstances of which are still being investigated, wedded Sharp's twin obsessions of Luna Park and Tiny Tim. Images of the fire and of the park's sinister fun weave throughout the film. But the real star is Tiny himself who, from his New York apartment, described Sharp this month as a "new Andy Tiny's beloved second wife, Miss Jan, who lives in a nearby apartment, thinks Sharp's film will do FOR ARTIST Martin Sharp, Tiny Tim is a genius, an Einstein of showbusiness, an encyclopedic master of popular songs. But for most of us, Tiny is that longhaired freak in white make-up who had one hit in the '60s and once got married on the Johnny Carson Show. Remember Tiny's Tiptoe Through The Tulips in falsetto? Now 56, he is enjoying his first hit since his glorious fame of 1968-69, with a country-and-western number called Leave Me Satisfied.

The between years have been spent in what Sharp calls and Tiny is fond of re-quoting "the satanic mills of He now pays the rent by working in a circus and appearing in nightclubs as a curiosity. Sharp has followed rollercoaster career of" Tiny Tim with a singular and unique obsession. After 1970 when no one would record the one-time star, Sharp took on the job himself. His family home in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill is Uttered with 400 tapes of interviews with Tiny Tim, books of newspaper clippings about him, recordings and photos. The house itself MATTHEW MARTIN Nijfht and day with.

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