Vegemite, Holden cars and the Southern Cross; without any one of these things life as an Australian just wouldn’t be the same, and right there alongside these giants of Aussie iconography is one of our most celebrated artists, a man who’s razor sharp wit and salacious vocabulary has provided the soundtrack to Australian summers for 25 years.

The 12th Man (aka Billy Birmingham) has been a constant on the Australian cultural landscape for quarter of a century; his endearing lampooning of the Australian Cricket Commentary Team is now legendary and his place among our greatest creative minds assured.

Now, after a marathon knock, Billy Birmingham is sending The 12th Man back to the pavilion for good. To celebrate the retirement EMI are releasing a box set of the 12th Man’s discography. It’s all here; everything from the original Wide World of Sports recording through to 2006’s Boned!

As coincidence would have it, the man Birmingham has spent so long taking off recently called it a day himself. Former Australian cricket captain and commentating doyen, Richie Benaud announced last year that he was to retire after the 2010 season, only to turn around and sign a new three year deal.

So will we see the 12th man rescind his own retirement? Will there be more classic comedy in the works? And what’s Jimmy Barnes got to do with all this? RedHotPie got on the blower with an excitable Billy Birmingham recently to get the back story and some insight into what life is like as The 12th Man’s alter-ego…

(RedHotPie) Billy, we’ve known you for 25 years as The 12th Man, but what’s going on behind that persona? On the Boned! Album in which you also played yourself, it seemed like you spent a lot of time playing golf and drinking beer.

(Billy Birmingham) look, I used to have a lot of fun, and there was a bit of truth in that, playing golf and stuff because I lived in the southern highlands of NSW, about an hour and a half down the Hume Hwy. We didn’t have a farm but we had three big acres and a big old house. My daughter was three when we moved there and my boys were born in Bowral Hospital and I used to have a pretty good lifestyle down there.

I would record the albums in various houses and play lots of golf; Jimmy Barnes was down there, he was the one that lured us all down there in the first place, he was a good neighbour and mate. And Mark Opus who produced, well, who didn’t he produce, he produced Chisel and The Angels, he was down there, and then Cal Callaghan from GANGgajang moved down there, so we did often find ourselves on Bowral Golf course at 11:30 in the morning with absolutely nobody around and it was just magic.

We’d have a couple of carts and we’d be cruising around the golf course, maybe take a couple beers and have a yarn, and you know, there’s no hurry because there’s no one up your clacker and there’s no one in front of you, there’s no one anywhere. They were good days, but mate, I’ve hardly swung a stick since I’ve moved back to Sydney 18 months ago.

Now that I’ve retired The 12th Man character I guess I’m going to have to think of something to do, or join the dole queue. But yeah the last 12th Man project will be this doco thing we’re working on for next year.

Well with Mr Benaud cancelling his retirement are you certain the 12th man’s fate is a sure thing?

(Laughs) I’ve been saying to people, ‘I can hear Richie now’, (adopts Benaud’s voice) ‘Ha-ha, yes sucked in Birmingham, I knew if I said I were retiring you’d jump on the bandwagon and try to steal my thunder, but it’s was all bullshit, I’m staying on, sucked in you dope’.

(Laughing) Look I’ve got no idea mate, Johnny Farnham said I can make as many comebacks as I want; he did say I should wait at least two weeks before I do my first one. But a lot of people have been asking me since Richie did his 180 degree back flip, ‘does that mean you’re going to do one too Billy’ and I’ve said ‘look, I don’t think so, but thank you to Richie for leaving the door open’.

Well never say never Billy

That’s right, well that’s what they say but look, the landscape’s changed mate. (Adopts the legendary Richie Benaud voice) Richie Benaud in the central commentary position all of those years from 1978 onward with the cream, the bone, the white, the off white, the ivory and the beige, the permanent sun tan, the hair was perfect, the bottom lip had a mind of its own. ‘Yes welcome back to the MCG or the SCG or the Adelaide Oval or where ever the fuck I am; and that’s the way it happened here, so let’s go down to Tony Greg for his pitch report’. (Adopts Tony Greg’s voice) ‘Yes, thankyou Ritchie, well what a magnificent one day strip has been prepared here today, look at these cracks here just in front of the popping crease, the last time I saw this many cracks in the one place was at last year’s gay and lesbian mardi gras’.

(Laughing) all of that shit was pretty much the stuff that I played around with over many years, and what we’ve seen over the last couple of years is the landscape changing. Mark Nicholas is in the CCP or Central Commentary Position, he does a very good job, he’s a very good presenter, but he ain’t Richie Benaud and he doesn’t sound like Richie Benaud.

I’m not very good at doing the English voices, I did Mark on the last album (Adopts the Mark Nicholas voice) and injected a bit of Austin Powers baby yeah, and had him sounding a bit smashing.

Tony’s not the guy whacking the keys in the pitch any more, it’s usually Tubby (Mark Taylor) and Heals (Ian Healy) or Heals and Slats (Michael Slater), and I don’t think there’s a player comfort meter anymore which I used to love, I invented the Scrotometer you may remember, a device which has alligator clips that attach to the players testicles which gives you a read out on sweatyness and rash detection.

So all of that stuff that I played around with for years because it was there for years has now changed to a new landscape and therefore there’s not as much there for me to muck around with. I’ve done just about every silly Sri Lankan, Pakistani and Indian name you can think of, I’ve done just about every cricket gag you can think of , you know, go for a slash, cracked one down behind square leg and that sort of stuff.

So I would hate to do one where people said, ‘gee what a pity you did that last one Billy’, I don’t want to be the cricketer that should have retired before he got the elbow.

So the box set’s there and there’s still a number of people who come up to me and say ‘Billy, mate, I love your tapes, got all your tapes, when you doing another tape?’ So I say ‘well for starters you haven’t been able to buy a tape in ten years so you got into my stuff from a pretty early age’, because cassette was the big thing for my stuff when I first started and I figured the reason for that was that the 12th man , everyone wanted it to be portable. Dad would play it in the car so the fruity language wouldn’t offend mum or the kids, it was portable so you could take it over to Jacko’s BBQ you know, ‘we’ll have a few beers, we’ll whack The 12th man on’, and everyone start’s doing their Richie Benaud and their best Tonys and Bills.

Seriously most of those tapes have long melted on dashboards or have been played so often you can hear both side at once so I figured a good way to say farewell and didn’t we have some fun is to whack everything in a box set.

Absolutely, well tell us a bit more about the doco you’re putting together.

Well I’ve got lots of charming old home footage. I think Froggy started using one of those analogue video cameras, not the big mothers, but once cameras became small and compact. The first time was around 12th Man Again in 1990 or Marvellous in 1991, but certainly some of the funniest footage I’ve seen just over the last few weeks as I’ve been reminiscing has been John Farnham and I doing Marvellous back in 91. He offered to do it, he was down there in Jimmy Barnes studio doing… a duet for one of Jimmy’s albums, and what was it? Can you recall for a prize?

Errm… Diesel was on it right?

Yes Diesel was on there too

Something’s Wrong With My Baby?

Oh no, if only you had pressed the fucking buzzer!

Shit!

You had the answer but you just jumped in, just jumped in without pressing the buzzer, but yes that is correct. So Jimmy’s got Farnham down there doing that track, he rings me up and says (adopts a thick Barnesy voice) ‘listen, I’m doing vocals all day, I got Farnham hanging around like a stale bottle of piss, can you take him out for a game of golf?. So I say sure, I picked John up, we’re driving out to the golf course, he’s going (nailing the Farnham voice) “Hey Billy ya mongrel, so what’ve ya been up to?” So I said, ‘we’ll I’m actually in the middle of a very stupid idea; I’ve got an idea to have Ritchie, Tony, Bill and the boys singing a dance groove song’.

So I had a cassette of it and I played it to him and he laughed and said it was great, I mean it was a work in progress and then he says, ‘look mate that’s great, it’s gonna kill it, look I’m in town for a couple days if you want me to throw some BVs down for ya’, and I fucking thought wow, seriously, I nearly put him through the windscreen. Here’s the bloody heavy hitter of the Australian music scene, I mean him and Barnes, I ended up getting them both but Farnham, the big gun, offering to do backing vocals on my stupid, dipstick novelty song and I just said ‘nah fuck off Farnham, you’re not gonna hitch your star to my wagon buddy’.

So yeah, there’s John, such a lovely guy, the footage I saw of him the other day, mate he didn’t just come in and pop down a couple of vocals, the footage that Froggy shot might have been an hour, an hour and a half. It must have been some weird fashion thing of the nineties because we both turned up in faded denim jeans and faded denim shirts, we looked like the fucking Bobbsy twins; he had the mullet that should be in a museum, I had let my hair out for a long run there, it was half way down my back, but yeah, just watching that footage, he really got into it.

He was singing then going, ‘yeah just play that back to me again’ then he’s off again working out his bloody high parts like it’s a Farnham song. And then of course me being me, I thought ‘ok, if I let Jimmy know that John’s done this he’d be like ‘oh yeah Billy, I’ll do some vocals too eh’’. Sure enough he did and Jimmy decides to do his at 2 o’clock in the morning after he’s done a gig at Shell Harbour workers club in Wollongong. When we picked him up at his house at 2am, he’s standing in the fog on his doorstep with a cardboard box in front of him containing four bottles of vodka to go and do a backing vocal session, we knew it was gonna be a long night.

The 12th Man Box Set is out now through EMI Music – Marvellous effort that!