Math appeal: Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen in 1967

FOUR years ago Tom Lehrer placed all his songs in the public domain so that anyone could perform them without paying copyright. So I went to my friends Annlouise Butt and Isaac Bernier-Doyle, artistic directors at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, and proposed that we do a show based around them.

Who, you ask, is Tom Lehrer? Many readers – certainly most under the age of 60 – will not know who I am talking about.

But mention a song called The Elements, and they remember that their science teacher used it in the classroom (for the song is simply the names of all the chemical elements, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance). If you say Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, they are quite likely to have heard this most macabre of songs – and once heard, it is never forgotten. But they do not know who wrote it. And there’s a reason for that.

Lehrer wrote songs and sang them himself, accompanying himself on the piano, and he shot to fame in the 1950s for his scabrous satirical wit and energetic musicality.

Typically he would take a cheerful, innocuous genre of song, and turn it into something either unpleasant or obscene – like this: “All the world seems in bloom on a spring afternoon / When we’re poisoning pigeons on the park.”

Later, in the mid-1960s, he wrote songs attacking or ridiculing cherished institutions, such as The Vatican Rag about the Catholic Church: “Two, four, six, eight / Time to transubstantiate.”

In Senator Joe McCarthy’s America of anti-Communist hysteria, he sailed close to the wind, writing for example a song about Werner von Braun, Hitler’s rocket scientist, who after the war became America’s rocket scientist: “A man whose allegiance / Is ruled by expedience / Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown / ‘Nazi, Schmazi!’ says Wernher von Braun.” Then there was the haunting, lilting I Wanna Go Back to Dixie: “I want to talk with Southern gentlemen / And put that white sheet on again, / I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years.”

He was part of the new wave of American comedians who were replacing the staid safety of Bob Hope and Jack Benny. The new guard included performers like Lennie Bruce, who was arrested on stage in Chicago for obscenity; Dick Gregory, scourge of American racism; Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl – and Tom Lehrer.

But unlike the others, Lehrer never intended to be famous, and was not entirely pleased when it happened.

He was a maths prodigy, starting at Harvard in 1943 when he was just 15, getting a first class degree at 18 and a Masters at 19. Along the way, he wrote and sang some songs for the amusement of his friends.

In 1953 he paid to have a record made of them to sell to fellow students, and to his amazement it took off. It eventually sold about 350,000 copies – the samizdat hit of the decade.

Lehrer wasn’t displeased exactly, but he hankered after the life of a graduate student. He gave up writing and performing in 1960, was tempted back briefly in 1964, and had pretty well stopped again by 1970. That year a young English graduate student at Harvard called Peter Hennessy – now the famous historian Lord Hennessy – got a rare interview with him.

Might he ever go back to writing and performing, asked Hennessy? Lehrer said: “That question always reminds me of a cartoon in Punch more than 100 years ago. There’s a dying patient, he looks up at the doctor at his bedside and says ‘Doctor, is there any hope?’ and the doctor says, ‘No. Why?’”

But Hennessy did find that, although he was not doing paid performances, he had done some benefits for his local left-wing Democratic Congressman Robert Drinan. Later, he did a few more for the great hope of the left in those days, Eugene McCarthy.

But for the rest of his working life, he taught maths (or math, as they say in the US), moving to the University of California Santa Cruz, where he added a course on the American musical to his teaching repertoire, but keeping his home on the east coast. And that is why you may never have heard of him.

“There’s never been anyone like him,” said Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the Broadway producer who briefly spearheaded a Tom Lehrer revival in the late 70s and early 80s with a musical revue called Tomfoolery. “Of all famous songwriters, he’s probably the only one that, in the great sense of the word, is an amateur in that he never wanted to be professional. And yet the work he did is of the highest quality of any great songwriter.”

Now 96, Lehrer is still in the house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which he has lived for most of his life. He sees his friends, and never gives interviews.

For those like me, who discovered Tom Lehrer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Tom Lehrer is magical: witty, tuneful, a beacon of irreverence in an age of austerity and respect.

It’s typical of the man that he should have placed his songs in the public domain, deliberately turning his back on the money machine into which most famous performers turn their backlist. All his songs are available to download from tomlehrersongs.com

There you can also find his statement, ending: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.”

I jumped at the chance to write a play around this enigmatic figure, investigating why he gave up writing and performing, and bringing in as many of his greatest songs as possible.

• Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math And Doesn’t Want To Talk To You is at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village from May 28-June 9.