Business Time

You can call the guys from Flight Of The Conchords many things, but you certainly can't question their courage. They may have moved up in the world since their years spent as New Zealand's self-proclaimed 'fourth most popular folk-parody duo' – a swag of shared awards including a Grammy, as well as individual accolades including an Oscar for Bret McKenzie and an Emmy nomination for his partner-in-crime Jermaine Clement would surely attest that they've climbed a few rungs on that particular pecking order – but the pair haven't been to Australia since their eponymous TV show became a massive worldwide smash, debuting on US comedy giant HBO in 2007 and wrapping up two years later, having made the pair virtually household names on a global scale.

But it's not just the tyranny of distance that makes their imminent live tour of Australia so daunting for the cocky Kiwis; they're more concerned about how they're going to live down the incessant Aussie bashing and anti-Australian rhetoric that liberally littered their TV show. Who can forget characters like conniving Aussie sheila Keitha, the cloyingly smug Australian diplomat Maxwell or the montage of the Conchords guys flipping the bird at the Australian Embassy in New York (where Flight Of The Conchords is based), a cross-Tasman rivalry best summed up by their description of Australians in the first series as a “bunch of cocky a-holes descended from criminals and retarded monkeys.” Them sounds like fighting words...

“We do not hate the Aussies!” Clement roars laughingly when confronted about their treatment of our nation on the small screen. “Although when we were doing the show – because we have a quite a few Aussie jokes – we did get a bit worried. We were worried about how it would be received, but in general Australians have taken to it with great humour. We thought we'd be ostracised in both New Zealand – for how we made New Zealanders appear – and Australia, and we'd have to live on an island. We're coming over to apologise for all of the terrible stereotypes we purported. We're just going to apologise profusely and then leave.

“But you know what I find the funniest thing – with all the Australian characters we had we did play around with them a bit, but we always made you guys the winners. We were always the losers. But when Australians make fun of New Zealanders it's always the same way around too – you guys are the winners and New Zealanders are the losers. So we're just kidding.”

The Flight Of The Conchords' quest for contrition finds them returning to their roots, performing live and relying primarily on their hilariously whimsical songs to offset the duo's naively stunted 'fish out of water' worldview and twisted inter-personal relationship. It's how they started performing in their native Wellington back in the late-'90s, building up the premise to the point where they were offered a BBC2 radio show in the UK in 2004, which in turn was tweaked to form the basis of their riotous TV series.

“Yeah, except our shows when we started were very much like our shows in the TV show – there were hardly any people,” Clement chuckles. “They were more dedicated than in the TV show – we had fans, but they would fit on two couches that would be at the front of the venue. I remember Bret's dad seeing us early on and saying, 'You guys are world class!' and I laughed at him. I thought, 'That's a nice dad! That's a nice thing for a dad to say about his son's stupid band!'”

The 'Conchords relied on this marriage of music and comedy from the get-go, but in the beginning each brought a particular skill set to the table. “We were just learning guitar, so it was mainly about learning how to play a guitar,” Clement smirks of the pair's early material. “Actually, at my first gig I was so nervous that I couldn't move my hand! I'd done comedy stuff before but no music and Bret had done music before but no comedy. Fortunately Bret – having played music gigs before – was confident enough to move his hands, so some sound came out.

“We met doing comedy stuff – theatre stuff – in Wellington. Our first songs were just weird songs; they didn't necessarily have jokes, they were usually about people dying and stuff. I think our very first song was actually the French one that we still do sometimes, Foux Du Fafa, which wasn't about anything – we just wanted to sound like Serge Gainsbourg. Most of that song only has two chords and then Bret wrote some more chords to go on the end of the song.

“Our first gig, we were doing auditions and stuff and Bret was playing in several bands. We were both really poor – we were flatting together – and then a friend of mine got a job booking comedy at a local club. It was the only comedy night in Wellington – it was once a week – and he said, 'Do you want to be the band at this comedy gig?' so we did that. Our songs had a few jokes in them [at the outset] and we just got more and more jokes, until eventually it was all jokes almost. But we were never serious, we were always doing stuff that amused ourselves at least and then eventually we started doing stuff to try and amuse others as well as ourselves.”

And amuse others they did, with the duo's two albums to date – 2008's Flight Of The Conchords and 2009's I Told You I Was Freaky – being released on seminal US indie Sub Pop to much acclaim. Now, after years spent making the TV series and some serious forays into the film world – most recently McKenzie worked as music supervisor for The Muppets movie, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for his tune, Man Or Muppet, while Clement stars as the lead villain in Men In Black 3 – the pair are looking forward to once more treading the boards.

“When we're well-rehearsed and everything, it's the easiest and the funnest and the most interesting thing to do. It's strange doing really big venues now though. Plus people know all the words now. Last time we toured was about two years ago, in Europe mostly. The biggest one we've done is Hollywood Bowl: it's a massive leap going from ten people in downtown Wellington to playing to 15,000 people at Hollywood Bowl – mostly doing the same stuff! That was so exciting. Usually we're pretty blasé; it's really great touring but it's not like we get amped every show or anything like that, but that time we were actually running around pretending to be rock stars and talking in our stupid rock stars voices, which is like this [approximates grizzled old rocker], 'Alright, Hollywood!' That was before the show, before we'd even started!

“We used to do that a little bit when we first started doing shows in Wellington, sometimes we'd do this joke and put on these rock star personas before we'd go on and once I did it so much that I lost my voice. It was like the time where Bret had to cover with the guitar, except this time he had to cover with all the singing – I could only talk in a very weak, very distant-sounding freaky voice.

“So some things are the same [as the old days], just the amount of people is different. And we get paid now! We used to get paid for those little gigs, but it would just cover the guitar strings that we'd bought for the show, so we'd break even.”

With all of this recent film work under their collective belts there's been strong talk of a Flight Of The Conchords movie in the offing.

“Yeah, if we come up with one,” Clement smiles of the prospect of a movie project. “It's the same as with songs – we only do it if we come up with it. If we don't come up an idea for it, we won't do it. But it probably won't be [a continuation of the TV series], although we'd probably use the same cast. Like Monty Python I guess, where the movies aren't really related to their TV show. But that's only because we've talked about three stupid ideas so far: 'What if we're in medieval times? What if we're astronauts?' We haven't even thought of one really where it's, 'What if we continue on from the TV show?'”

Irrespective of where their movie project takes them, Clement won't be bringing too much of his experience filming Men In Black 3 to the table. “I haven't seen it, but it was a really weird experience, because it was such a different scale – it's just massively huge,” he recalls. “Both Bret and I would talk often when he was working on The Muppets and I was working on Men In Black about how it's really hard going from being the boss to not being the boss. It's really hard for me – I would just tell Will Smith alternative story lines the whole time and he was so sick of me! And the director too! I'd go up to him and go, 'What about this? What about this, Barry? I've got an idea for this!' When we do Conchords, if I say that everyone just has to make it happen, as long as I get Bret to agree, but it's a bit different in Hollywood. I don't think I learnt that until I was thinking about it in retrospect; 'Oh, they were really sick of me for suggesting things.' I don't want to spoil anything, but generally bad guys in movies don't get the call up for the next sequel anyway, so it's not the end of the world.”

And despite all of their massive success so far, Flight Of The Conchords aren't really getting ahead of themselves – they're not even all that surprised at how well things are going.

“No, when we were starting out and playing small clubs we were thinking, 'Why aren't we really successful? We're handsome, we can play guitar, sort of...'” Clement deadpans. “I think we had delusions of grandeur even then and they just happened to come true.”