The Koi Boys' Kevin Keepa talks regrets, stardom and family

Friday, 14 June 2019

The Koi Boys are a pretty big deal. A beaming trio of Kiwi crooners on the Gold Coast, who've broken into the realm of reality TV.

Kevin Keepa, Danny Faifai, and Nuz Ngatai won fans on The Voice Australia – though didn't win the competition – and have of late been trailed by a camera crew from Māori TV. That docu-series comes to our screens on June 27.

Keepa, 49, is the Koi Boys' kaumatua. He's jovial over the phone, buoyant in his group's success, but his life's been marred by mistakes and tragedy.

'There's not a night that I don't sit on my own with a cigarette, thinking, 'man, I'd do a lot of things differently',' says Keepa.

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Keepa grew up in a house full of gangsters, in early '80s Picton. His dad was a hard man: 'great when he was good, but when he was bad he was exceptionally bad,' Keepa says. He and his brothers would steal from gas stations to survive and didn't even realise they were breaking the law.

Keepa ran away in his early teens and never went back. He pinched all the money he could from his dad's coat's pockets and started sleeping in a playground.

'I remember hiding out in this little park,' he says. 'There was this whale; you'd climb into its mouth and could slide down its tail. Well, I would just stay in its mouth.'

He joined a gang of fellow street kids and got sent to youth prison. He reckons he came out, six months later, a bit worse. He moved up to an uncle's place in Auckland.

When the uncle kicked him out, Keepa took up residence at a Mt Roskill boarding house. Slum-like and full of 'pretty freaky people', it convinced him to leave Auckland.

Next, he tried Wellington. An aunty swung him a job in a car yard. He got married and had two boys. There were parties long into the night and he would sing, strumming his guitar. Then he was made redundant.

Keepa started singing for money on Cuba Mall, because he didn't have enough to get home to Porirua after a night out.

'There was this guy busking already, so I thought 'let's see how I can do',' he says.

He did well. First up was the Commodores' 'Easy', then 'songs you might hear at a Māori hoedown'. Soon he was earning enough to support his family. It was the late '80s.

One fateful night, victorious after a karaoke competition, Danny Faifai sauntered up to Keepa and asked if he could play guitar.

'Yeah bro, course,' Keepa remembers saying. Faifai started belting out a Prince song - Kiss - in his three piece suit. Keepa, wearing a hoodie, thought to himself, 'what a smooth, smooth character'.

The pair met again a few months later, when a mutual friend invited them to join his band. That became Temperatures Rising and they almost made it.

It was a great time to be a Polynesian musician, says Keepa, with the New Jack Swing brand of funky R&B fusion coming out of the United States. Temperatures Rising packed out the clubs. It also got a few radio hits and an entourage of enthusiastic women.

In 1992 the group were invited to perform on TV's What Now. They flew down to Christchurch, had a wild night before the show, and didn't turn up to the studio the next day. The group imploded shortly afterwards.

'The wheels fell off: we thought we were already there, but clearly we weren't. I'd just gone from one world to another very, very fast,' he says.

'It got to me.'

His family life had imploded too, over the year and a half Temperatures Rising partied hard. Keepa lost touch with his wife and two young sons.

While Keepa languished in Wellington, Danny Faifai was headhunted by the entertainment director of the Gold Coast's Queen Island Showboats – a cabaret outfit where performers croon in an array of Pasifika languages.

The half-Samoan Faifai learned songs in Tahitian, Samoan and Hawaiian, and time management. Keepa says it was bootcamp for performers; if you didn't behave professionally, you were gone.

The waterborne cabaret business boomed. Tourists flocked. Faifai's boss asked if he knew anyone who might be interested in coming onboard as an MC.

'So Danny goes, 'yeah, but he's a bit of a f…..'. He was talking about me,' says Keepa.

Keepa flew to Australia immediately and says he owes his career to showboat bootcamp. He reckons he'd have wound up dead or in jail if he'd stayed in New Zealand.

​Faifai and Keepa graduated from the Island Queen to gigging around Queensland, part of a massive family of Polynesian musos 'doing the circuit'.

The high, for Keepa at least, didn't last. By the early 2000s, he was estranged from a second wife and three more kids. They fled him for New Zealand; he says he understands why.

'I remember walking down the street thinking, 'man, you have to start all over again, you silly silly bugger',' he says.

More blows followed. Keepa's oldest son committed suicide in 2006 at 16 years old. He carries guilt. Keepa's bandmate, Kiwi muso Tony Williams, was murdered in 2011. Beaten to death with a hammer by a girlfriend's ex in a jealous rage. Keepa sat in court throughout the trial.

But Keepa and Fai Fai stayed in touch throughout that time, still singing together regularly. And it was during that period they met Nuz Ngatai - another Kiwi muso, a generation younger than them. The three began jamming every Sunday at Koi, a swanky lounge bar in Surfers Paradise' Broadbeach, in 2008.

The Koi Boys - as they gradually became known - got a following. First at the bar, then on Youtube; they were beloved for their renditions of Motown classics and unique takes on Top 40 hits. In 2015, a talent scout for The Voice Australia spirited them into the world of reality TV based on a video of the men performing the Crew Cuts' Sh-Boom.

While the Koi Boys didn't win The Voice, they gained momentum and fans. Universal signed them up. They won a Vodafone Music Award for the highest selling album of the year, Meant to Be. Their jazzy take on Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass has more than two million views on Youtube.

The group are back on The Voice's all star season this year, and excited about the docu-series following them around the Gold Coast and New Zealand.

Now married for a third time, Keepa feels his life is finally on track. He has two children with his current wife and has reconciled with three of his older kids, which makes him 'extremely happy, eh'. The Koi Boys' success has helped.

'Are we Justin Beiber famous? No. We haven't climbed Everest but we have climbed a few smaller hills, and that's pretty cool,' says Keepa.

'For me, as far as coming out the other side… that might be too presumptuous, but I'm trying.'