By NOEL MURPHY
KEVIN Bloody Wilson’s formula for making people laugh is dead simple – and something most Aussies will understand perfectly well.
“Just get pissed,” he bellows over the phone uproariously between expletives.
“I stayed pissed, that’s the formula, get f…..g drunk. And if I’m ever labouring for material I bring my mates around and steal their stuff.”
What might otherwise be a copyright nightmare – his mates don’t usually recall the material they’ve given him – works just perfectly for Wilson. That and the typical Aussie diffidence toward authority of all kinds.
“We have a unique sense of humour, it’s totally irreverent,” Wilson said.
“Things can be completely f….d up and the rest of the world will be in mourning but in Australia we’ll be cracking cans of piss and making jokes about it.”
Wilson, who’s bringing his brand of irreverence to North Geelong’s Sphinx Hotel on 20 June in a tour called his Helping Prevent Global Boring, is a grand stickler for such traditions.
He won’t have any truck with political correctness and delights in tearing down anything remotely resembling shibboleths across religion, politics, sex, race – the list goes on a bit.
“I managed to leapfrog PC years ago,” he said.
Wilson’s maintained his shoot-‘em-right-between-the-eyes comedy for more than 30 years, ever since he learned to get an edge over other rock band singers by inventing a few new lyrics of his own for hit songs.
The method has apparently worked pretty bloody well, too.
“I retired into my career,” he laughed.
“This has never been work.”
But there’s more than razor-sharp one-liners and jaw-drop shockers to Wilson.
As a cover-band frontman, he dabbled with all manner of musical genres and is now in the middle of a project that’s taken him around the world and immersed him in all kinds of music, such as the Soweto Choir in South Africa, blues in Chicago, rockabilly in Memphis, Red Hot Chilli Pipers in Scotland, reggae in Marley Studios and a TV show examining music’s origins, exponents and social relevance.
As part of the program Wilson also gets to write and perform a song in each musical style, not a comedic one but a fair dinkum example true to the style. He’s in his element – but some things never change.
The name of the program? Kevin Bloody Wilson’s Rythms and Roots.
