The legend of Kevin Bloody Wilson was born a long way from anywhere, in a West Australian mining town called Kalgoorlie. It all started innocently enough - just a guy with too much time on his hands changing the words to other people’s songs, and writing a few of his own, purely for the fun of it.
Kev was an electrician for a while, a music teacher for a while, and he even sold whitegoods for a while. But the whole time Kev was doing these jobs he’d find himself walking around humming whatever melody was in his head at that moment. If that melody didn’t already go with some very wrong lyrics, Kev would simply go ahead and invent some. (How else would Rennae and Renata’s “Save your love my darling, save your love” become “Shave your muff my darling, shave your muff”?)
After a year or so of performing these songs to three miners and a dog in the pubs in and around Kalgoorlie, some of Kev’s mates suggested that he make a recording of his dirty ditties so they could take them away and play them to the rest of their mates.
Next thing you know Kev went and roped his wife Betty and his young kids Travis and Jenny into helping him prepare his first batch of Kevin Bloody Wilson cassettes. Kev would pay the kids ten lousy bloody cents for every cassette they labelled up (the kids went along with this quite happily until Betty pointed out that they’d probably make more money as slave labourers making running shoes in Manilla) and when Kev sold 87 of his initial batch of 100 cassettes within a week, he realised he was onto something and decided to take his show on the road. (To the best of my knowledge his kids, now both successful grown-ups in their own individual rights, never did have the presence of mind to sue the old man for the whole ten-cents-a-cassette thing!)
Twenty years, countless live gigs and millions of album sales down the track, Kevin Bloody Wilson has not only found his niche, he’s grabbed an esky and a deckchair and he’s made himself really bloody comfortable in it!
Kev’s songs match the Kalgoorlie landscape, dry and unforgiving. These songs are uniquely Australian, and yet year after year, album after album, tour after tour, people from all corners of the globe keep laughing their guts out at Kevin Bloody Wilson’s completely authentic and original body of work.
