“Good morning, you cunt!” It’s not every interviewee who chooses to greet your correspondent in such, er, familiar terms, but then hirsute Aussie stand-up, Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson, has a number of mitigating factors in his favour. Aside from the fact that cheerfully referring to quote-hungry hacks as “cunts” is the type of conversational flourish we expect – nay, demand – of humorists of his stripe (Wilson is a graduate of the bar-room/working men’s club circuit in his native country), there is the even more pertinent consideration that I have just interrupted Wilson’s breakfast.

Fortunately, following our opening badinage – me tearing strips off Wilson for having drawn me out of bed at such an ungodly hour in the first place, Wilson blithely retorting that he has a brother called also called Paul (“He’s a cunt too”) – it rapidly becomes apparent that Wilson just happens to be one of the most jovial, amiable characters you could hope to come across.

This freewheeling sense of fun certainly translates to Wilson’s stage-show, where such ingeniously scatological musical gems as ‘I Gave Up Wanking’ and ‘Bali Belly Song’ (sample line: “I’ll never shit solids again/’Cos me arse is jammed open with frickle fatigue), have ensured that Wilson has played to full-houses everywhere from Las Vegas to the London Palladium. Given the preoccupation with bodily (dys)functions which permeates Wilson’s material, it would be remiss of me not to enquire about the extent to which his stories are autobiographical.

“Well, they all are, to a point,” Wilson confesses. “I mean, it pains me to say this, but something like ‘Bali Belly Song’ is lifted pretty much directly from my own experience. I became really sick on holiday, and my arse was more or less glued to the throne for a fortnight. But the worst aspect of contracting the illness was probably when I called home to explain the situation, more for sympathy than anything else. My mother pissed herself laughing. Overall, though, I have to say I learned a valuable lesson. In industrialised cities they tell you not to breathe the air, but in Third World countries it’s very much, ‘Don’t drink the water!’”

An electrician by trade, Wilson began his comedy career playing for friends in his hometown of Kalgoorlie, a sparsely populated townland in the Australian outback. Was it a good place to grow up?

“Oh fuck, it was,” replies Wilson, his voice tinged with nostalgia. “It probably typifies outback towns, because it’s surrounded by what appears to be nothing, and yet people still manage to etch a living out of the ground. Kalgoorlie’s actually built around gold-mining, it’s one of the largest gold-mining areas in the world, in fact. I did my apprenticeship in the mines, and I loved it. And I guess a lot of the humour comes from there too, y’know? I remember I used to go into the canteen at lunch time everyday – I’d just shut up, listen hard and filch all the best material!”

Although initially content for his stand-up routines to remain a hobby in his spare-time, Wilson found that his occasional forays into the football and cricket clubs in the larger Australian cities were attracting bigger and bigger audiences. Was there a specific point at which he realised his sideline career was taking on a momentum of its own?

“I can give you the precise moment,” answers Kevin. “I’d moved to Perth, and my mates in Kalgoorlie were on to me, saying, ‘Well, you’re not up here anymore, how about sending us some tapes of the new stuff you’ve been working on?’ So, on the back of their encouragement I went into the studio and recorded a whole bunch of material. I remember that period quite vividly – there was one Saturday afternoon when my kids sat in the living room with my wife and I, sticking the labels on the cassette covers.

“Anyway, there were 200 hundred cassettes, and on each one I put a sticker saying, ‘If you’re mates enjoy this, don’t let them borrow it, tell them to fuck off and buy their own’. At the next show I did, there were 100 people in attendance, including four strippers and myself. After the show, I sold 90 tapes. That was the moment when I really thought, “What the fuck is going on here?” My actual fee for the show was something like $150 – I came home with close to a $1000. My wife and I were sitting in the kitchen with all this money in front of us on the table, both completely dumbfounded.”

Is Wilson ever surprised at the extent to which his humour has since translated to all corners of the globe?

“I’m surprised by it all the time,” he admits. “I’m in awe of what’s happened, actually. Almost everyday, I wake up in amazement and think, ‘Fuck, where are we today?’ I mean, as I’m talking to you now, I’m looking out the window at Durham Castle. That’s the sort of thing which just blows me away, and it happens all the time. It’s an amazing way to make a living.”