It’s an overcast Saturday morning in Dublin and Flight of the Conchords – AKA Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement – and I are in a coffee bar discussing how the pair ended up being in one of the most successful musical comedy bands on the planet when they are not actually fans of the genre.
“I love watching bands play and I love watching comedians perform, but I don’t go out of my way to watch musical comedians,” says McKenzie, the smaller and more serious of the two, with implied heavy understatement.
Clement, the brawnier and gigglier one, agrees: “Yeah, we love doing it, but we wouldn’t watch it.” He makes a delighted honk of a giggle.
Many others, however, do watch it – so many that I couldn’t get into their show in Dublin the night before. All 13,000 tickets had sold out for the first night of the band’s rescheduled tour, which was postponed after McKenzie broke two bones in his hand earlier this year. (“I fell down some stairs. It’s not a very good story, is it?” “Yeah, you should work on coming up with a funnier one.”) The rest of the tour sold out immediately, such is the public’s love for the Conchords’ supremely skilful and loving musical parodies, including Inner City Pressure, their take on West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys (sample lyric: “No one cares, no one sympathises / You just stay home and play synthesisers”) and their anti-seduction song, Business Time (“Then you go sort out the recycling / That isn’t part of the foreplay / But it is very important.”) They have had to add on some dates to meet the demand, which is not bad going for a band that just celebrated its 20th anniversary, but hasn’t released an album in more than a decade.
Despite themselves, Flight of the Conchords are still huge, although, heaven knows, they try not to be: they rarely give interviews and tour only when they feel like it. They are the only band I have ever interviewed who undersell themselves, repeatedly underestimating how many tickets and albums they have sold. Their main complaint about this tour is that the venues are too big. “I like an opera hall … 1,500 people. Perfect,” says McKenzie who, alas, finds himself playing stadiums.
“Fame is only an impediment,” Clement agrees.
Come on, surely they get something good from fame?
“Mmm … sometimes someone gives you a free ice-cream.”
Another thing their fame bequeathed them was the status of sex symbols. Today, McKenzie, 41, and Clement, 44, look a little more grizzled than they did on their eponymous sitcom, which they walked away from in 2009. A dad-like steadiness to their bearing has replaced the floppy late-twentysomethings they once played on TV. (Both are married with children and live with their families in Wellington; Clement has a nine-year-old son and McKenzie has three children, ranging in age from three to eight.) Back in the 00s, when they won a Grammy and their albums were in the Top 20, there was much talk about how the pair represented a new kind of anti-sexy sex symbol; I have friends who still, on a quiet Saturday night, crank up some of their old videos, such as Sugar Lumps, in which Clement and McKenzie gyrate all over a Chinese restaurant as they sing about how women love to stare at what they call “the family jewellery”. (“My dungarees make [the ladies] hun-ga-ree / They’re over the moon when I don pantaloons.”)
If they don’t care for fame, do they enjoy being lusted over by the ladies? McKenzie rolls his eyes so hard he nearly falls out of his chair.
“We’re retired sex symbols,” Clement says with a snort.
Clement has described himself, not inaccurately, as resembling “an ogre in a library”. When trying to describe McKenzie, he opts for a similarly Middle-earthian comparison: “If you go to the set of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings when they’re filming an elf scene, you will see 100 people who look exactly like Bret.” (As it happens, McKenzie did play an elf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit; his wife was working for Jackson at the time.) (...)
And yet when Flight of the Conchords debuted on HBO in 2007, it looked like nothing else anyone had ever seen. They played a pair of New Zealand musicians called Bret and Jemaine whose banal lives contrasted with the ridiculous grandiosity of their music videos, which would suddenly interrupt a scene as the characters broke the fourth wall and sang to the viewers. It was like an MGM musical for Gen X and millennials, but with more Prince references and songs about failed sexual encounters. At the time, the show was seen as part of the new wave of comedy of embarrassment, along with Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. But Flight of the Conchords always had more optimism and innocence than those shows; it certainly had none of the cynicism that was then so popular in comedy. (...)
Clement and McKenzie met at university in Wellington, when they were in a theatre group and realised they were the only two in the troupe who couldn’t play guitar, and so decided to write songs to learn.
But how do you go from a New Zealand university theatre group to an HBO hit show in a decade? The Conchords are so averse to trumpeting their successes that their answer takes some decoding.
“I love watching bands play and I love watching comedians perform, but I don’t go out of my way to watch musical comedians,” says McKenzie, the smaller and more serious of the two, with implied heavy understatement.
Clement, the brawnier and gigglier one, agrees: “Yeah, we love doing it, but we wouldn’t watch it.” He makes a delighted honk of a giggle.
Many others, however, do watch it – so many that I couldn’t get into their show in Dublin the night before. All 13,000 tickets had sold out for the first night of the band’s rescheduled tour, which was postponed after McKenzie broke two bones in his hand earlier this year. (“I fell down some stairs. It’s not a very good story, is it?” “Yeah, you should work on coming up with a funnier one.”) The rest of the tour sold out immediately, such is the public’s love for the Conchords’ supremely skilful and loving musical parodies, including Inner City Pressure, their take on West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys (sample lyric: “No one cares, no one sympathises / You just stay home and play synthesisers”) and their anti-seduction song, Business Time (“Then you go sort out the recycling / That isn’t part of the foreplay / But it is very important.”) They have had to add on some dates to meet the demand, which is not bad going for a band that just celebrated its 20th anniversary, but hasn’t released an album in more than a decade.Despite themselves, Flight of the Conchords are still huge, although, heaven knows, they try not to be: they rarely give interviews and tour only when they feel like it. They are the only band I have ever interviewed who undersell themselves, repeatedly underestimating how many tickets and albums they have sold. Their main complaint about this tour is that the venues are too big. “I like an opera hall … 1,500 people. Perfect,” says McKenzie who, alas, finds himself playing stadiums.
“Fame is only an impediment,” Clement agrees.
Come on, surely they get something good from fame?
“Mmm … sometimes someone gives you a free ice-cream.”
Another thing their fame bequeathed them was the status of sex symbols. Today, McKenzie, 41, and Clement, 44, look a little more grizzled than they did on their eponymous sitcom, which they walked away from in 2009. A dad-like steadiness to their bearing has replaced the floppy late-twentysomethings they once played on TV. (Both are married with children and live with their families in Wellington; Clement has a nine-year-old son and McKenzie has three children, ranging in age from three to eight.) Back in the 00s, when they won a Grammy and their albums were in the Top 20, there was much talk about how the pair represented a new kind of anti-sexy sex symbol; I have friends who still, on a quiet Saturday night, crank up some of their old videos, such as Sugar Lumps, in which Clement and McKenzie gyrate all over a Chinese restaurant as they sing about how women love to stare at what they call “the family jewellery”. (“My dungarees make [the ladies] hun-ga-ree / They’re over the moon when I don pantaloons.”)
If they don’t care for fame, do they enjoy being lusted over by the ladies? McKenzie rolls his eyes so hard he nearly falls out of his chair.
“We’re retired sex symbols,” Clement says with a snort.
Clement has described himself, not inaccurately, as resembling “an ogre in a library”. When trying to describe McKenzie, he opts for a similarly Middle-earthian comparison: “If you go to the set of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings when they’re filming an elf scene, you will see 100 people who look exactly like Bret.” (As it happens, McKenzie did play an elf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit; his wife was working for Jackson at the time.) (...)
And yet when Flight of the Conchords debuted on HBO in 2007, it looked like nothing else anyone had ever seen. They played a pair of New Zealand musicians called Bret and Jemaine whose banal lives contrasted with the ridiculous grandiosity of their music videos, which would suddenly interrupt a scene as the characters broke the fourth wall and sang to the viewers. It was like an MGM musical for Gen X and millennials, but with more Prince references and songs about failed sexual encounters. At the time, the show was seen as part of the new wave of comedy of embarrassment, along with Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. But Flight of the Conchords always had more optimism and innocence than those shows; it certainly had none of the cynicism that was then so popular in comedy. (...)
Clement and McKenzie met at university in Wellington, when they were in a theatre group and realised they were the only two in the troupe who couldn’t play guitar, and so decided to write songs to learn.
But how do you go from a New Zealand university theatre group to an HBO hit show in a decade? The Conchords are so averse to trumpeting their successes that their answer takes some decoding.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
