Kevin Borich: 'I’ll keep going until I can’t play any good anymore.'

Where do you start when you’re telling the Kevin Borich story? Is it that time he shared the stage with Carlos Santana? Or when Joe Walsh from the Eagles crashed on his couch? Or Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore jumped up on stage and jammed with him?

Or maybe we start this story at the beginning– on an orchard just outside of Auckland in New Zealand, where young Kevin would mime along to the hits of the day, playing a tennis racquet. “Mum and dad were like, ‘What do we do, get him some balls or a guitar?’”

They got him a guitar.

Soon after, Judy and Sue Donaldson, on the neighbouring poultry farm, heard him playing. Kevin was 12; the girls were younger, but soon they found themselves in a recording studio in Auckland. “The girls could sing perfect harmonies and we just stood around the one microphone and it was cut to an acetate.” That disc remains one of Borich’s prized possessions.

Judy and Sue later had a string of hits in New Zealand as The Chicks, while Borich relocated to Australia with The La De Das, who were hailed as New Zealand’s Rolling Stones.

More than five decades later, Borich says he’s “balancing on the fence” when asked if he’s a Kiwi or an Aussie, “though I do like to see the All Blacks getting beaten by the Wallabies”.

If he had his time again, however, Borich says he would have gone straight to the US. “Back then [the late ’60s], the world was a huge place. Going to Australia was like wow. But Max Merritt and Ray Columbus had gone to Australia, so that’s what we did. But it’s a numbers game, and New Zealand bands would now be going, ‘Let’s go to America.’”

In their new home, The La De Das found a residency at the Here Disco in North Sydney, which was a formative gig for legendary record producer Charles Fisher (Radio Birdman, Hoodoo Gurus, Savage Garden).

“I would go there when I was in my last year of high school,” Fisher recalls. “I would sit in a corner at the back and listen to this amazing band, dreaming of being a part of whatever it was The La De Das were doing. I didn’t want to be in a band, that wasn’t it for me, but I wanted to be a part of that freedom of spirit that these people had. That was just mind-blowing to me.”

The La De Das was also the first gig for Triple R’s Neil Rogers, who has been hosting the station’s Australian music show The Australian Mood for more than three decades. In 1974, Rogers paid 10 cents to see the band do a lunchtime show at his Sydney high school, Normanhurst Boys High, when they were promoting their single Too Pooped To Pop. A few years later, Rogers would sneak into Parramatta’s War & Peace Nightclub to see the Kevin Borich Express.

Rogers has called on ARIA to induct Borich into the Hall of Fame. It’s an honour that’s overdue. Not that Borich is one for looking back, though he has just released a career retrospective called Legacy. The three-CD set is arranged by mood – Hot, Chill and Live. “I think it works well,” he says. “If you want to party on, you don’t want a slow song popping up.”

The Hot disc opens with Borich’s biggest hit, The La De Das’ 1971 smash Gonna See My Baby Tonight, which Borich created in the tour van, coming home from Queensland.

“In those days, there was great rivalry and camaraderie between roadies and their respective bands,” Borich recalls.

The La De Das’ roadie was Wayne Jarvis, known as Swampy. He had decked out his dual-wheel Ford Transit van with aeroplane seats, and Borich was sitting behind him, strumming his acoustic guitar. “I started pretending I was a sleazy nightclub singer in a sequined gown singing to Swampy: ‘I’m gonna love you all night long but when the street lights die, I’ll be gone, woah yeah.’”

As everyone in the band laughed, Swampy said, “So, what happens next?”

Two hundred kilometres later, Borich had finished his first Top 10 hit.

“It’s one of those songs that defies the age it was produced in,” Spectrum’s Mike Rudd says. “It could’ve been written years before or years later. It’s just a good song. I love every time Kevin Borich plays it.” 

Pseudo Echo’s Brian Canham is another big Borich fan. “Kevin is a hero of mine,” Canham reveals. “I love his guitar playing. I went to a clinic he did at Dynasound in Swanston Street [Melbourne] and couldn’t believe I was standing like a metre away from Kevin Borich.”

In 1978, Canham saw the Kevin Borich Express play at Dallas Brooks Hall with Mother Goose. And years later he got to jam with Borich at the Tivoli in Sydney. “I had a lot of hi-tech stuff,” Canham recalls. “Kevin just had his quad box and Marshall head and amp, but, man, his guitar sound was about 10 times the size of my guitar sound. It was such a humble set-up, but as soon as he played, I thought, that’s a guitar sound.”

When News Corp polled Australian musicians to rank the nation’s 25 best guitarists, Borich came in at number nine. You Am I’s Tim Rogers voted for him, saying: “I first saw him play when I was about 14. I just love his approach to everything, including music. He has always impressed me as a human.”

Borich was also immortalised in a trio of TISM tracks – Kevin Borich Expressionism parts 1, 2 & 4 – on their Hot Dogma album.

It’s been a long, strange trip over 60 years, but Borich still loves making music. “It’s a wonderful thing to have a passion for something you can make a living out of. And the passion makes you thirsty for new things.

“The magic of playing music is not work, it’s not a drudge. It’s rewarding and enlightening.”

Borich acknowledges he’s a different guitar player these days. “You’re not as flexible when you get older, but you learn to live with that and do things differently.”

He adds simply: “I’ll keep going until I can’t play any good anymore.”

The Borich fandom is not limited to Australia. In the ’70s, Borich was invited to perform with Carlos Santana, and he became great mates with Joe Walsh when the Eagles guitarist came to Australia in 1984 to play with The Party Boys.

After the first rehearsal, Borich received a phone call. “Hey man, you got a couch?” Walsh stayed on Borich’s couch until they went on the road (a tour that led to the live album You Need Professional Help).

“I guess a hotel wasn’t as interesting as meeting some of the locals,” Borich smiles.

Walsh – Ringo Starr’s brother-in-law – is one of rock’s greatest characters. He was known to travel with a chainsaw, which unnerved hotel managers, and he ran for President in 1980, promising “free gas for everyone” and vowing to make his solo hit Life’s Been Good the new national anthem.

Was Walsh as crazy as the press led us to believe? “Nah, he was just doing what we were all doing back in those days,” Borich laughs.

“He’s got that drawl and he’s so laidback, so everyone thinks he’s a little weird. But he’s actually incredibly intelligent. He sounds like a good ol’ boy, but he’s very switched on.”

Borich bonded with another guitar hero when The La De Das played at the final Sunbury in 1975, the year that AC/DC refused to play after getting into a fight with Deep Purple’s roadies. 

But Deep Purple dug The La De Das. After their set, Borich was walking backstage where he saw a guy in a caravan tuning a stack of Stratocasters. “Who was just on?” the guy asked.

“That was my band.” 

“Oh, Ritchie thought it was great.”

“Well,” Borich cheekily replied, “why don’t you tell him to come down and jam with us tonight?”

He thought no more of it until he saw a white Stratocaster dancing through the crowd at Bombay Rock. Ritchie Blackmore jumped on stage, plugged into a Marshall amp “and away we went”.

Yep, it’s been an eventful life. Borich is now busy putting the finishing touches to his autobiography, which he plans to release in 2024.

He also has a duets album ready to go (one song, Call A Friend with Russell Morris, has already been released). “I was going to release the duets first, but I thought the Legacy album might lift the profile a bit – people will go, ‘Oh, he’s still going’,” Borich laughs.

With a catalogue so varied and diverse, Borich is happy he now has an album that answers the perennial question when he’s selling merchandise after a show: “What’s your best CD?”

“It’s a pretty comprehensive spotlight on my work,” he says proudly. “One’s rock, one’s laidback, and one’s live. It pretty much sums up my entire career.”

Kevin Borich’s new body of work Legacy is available now on his website.