10 May - Birmingham, UK (The National Indoor Arena)

gezyka wrote:OMG. I did the "
!1"
thing. That's how excited [size=100:bs8cvcpa]adorable I was.

[size=100:jlr164c0]Vesna25: "
Ladies from the easties and ladies from the westies are checking out my testes!"
-Jemaine during Sugalumps. Hilarious! #fotc

gezyka wrote:

[size=100:tcjujx5h]Vesna25: "
Ladies from the easties and ladies from the westies are checking out my testes!"
-Jemaine during Sugalumps. Hilarious! #fotc

gezyka wrote:

[size=100:kmx8xak9]Vesna25: "
Ladies from the easties and ladies from the westies are checking out my testes!"
-Jemaine during Sugalumps. Hilarious! #fotc

[size=100:hnp8ogga]FOTCfanbase: Amazing setlist, fantastic sound, fabulous audience tonight. So very funny.

Amily wrote:

[size=100:m8nc72pi]FOTCfanbase: Amazing setlist, fantastic sound, fabulous audience tonight. So very funny.

[size=100:qu76phn0]Krispeh: @FOTCmb just got back to the hotel after seeing @fotc in Brum, were BRILLIANT. Hecklers made the show amazing but the woman who did a mel!

FOTCmb: @Krispeh Yay! Glad you enjoyed the show! " title="" border="0"/> What's the story w/ "
the woman who did a mel"
?

Krispeh: @FOTCmb brett was playing his guitar and a woman from front row ran up to hug him and he ran away - security was called and she danced off

gezyka wrote:

[size=100:em7alcch]Vesna25: @FOTCmb Bret and Jemaine received their Flighty cookbooks! Yay!

So soon!!! Can't wait to hear about it!1

lukeyboy wrote:Hi boys and girls!

I'm new here so helloooooo from me. I'm a big Conchords fan and caught them in Brum yesterday - amazing show, seeing Florence and the Machine tonight but does she have a song about epileptic dogs? Erm, NO!

Anyways, I write for a music site called The Music Fix and am in the process of writing a review. I was just wondering if anyone could recall the setlist from last night? I have a list of all the songs used but can't for the life of me remember the order, would be great if anyone could help out as I'll add it at the bottom of the review so folks can check it out and remember the ace track listing. Already tried setlist.fm, the most recent set is from 2009.

Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor)
The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)
Hurt Feelings
Jenny
Think About It

(this is where the order becomes sloppy)
Ladies of the World
Woo song
Epileptic Dogs
I'm Not Crying
Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros
Foux du Fafa

Bowie
Demon Woman

Encore

Business Time
Busdriver's Song
Albi the Racist Dragon
Mutha'uckas
We're Both in Love with a Sexy Lady
Sugalumps

Any help and any additions would be MUCH appreciated! :-)

[size=150:zs63054q]Flight Of The Conchords 2010 tour
[size=100:zs63054q]Live Review
Birmingham NIA

This can’t be right. Flight Of The Conchords TV series revolves around their abject lack of success. Yet here they are, selling out arenas in minutes, being reviewed by serious rock critics and attracting adoring fans who scream out requests. Can their delicate comedy of modesty survive such phenomenal success?

Thankfully, it can. They play Birmingham’s NIA – one of just a handful of British gigs the Kiwi duo are performing this year – with the same intimacy as the small bars they played at the start of their career. Indeed, sometimes the sense of scale only adds to the joke, as their supposedly ribald tales of rock-and-roll excess – confined to little more than diet-busting muffins – certainly aren’t what most bands would tell 10,000 or so people. It’s a delightful juxtaposition.

Their earnest songs share this low-key aesthetic. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie aspire to the clichés of rap, rock and funk – yet cannot get beyond their mundane reality. Where most musicians invoke hyperbolic images of either perfect, everlasting love or rampant sexual conquest with the most stunning girl in the world, their ideal is a realistically awkward fumble someone so beautiful they ‘could be a waitress’.

Track after hilarious track over this delightful two-hour set exposes the unrealistic clichés of songwriters, from the preachy poseurs intensely highlighting global ills to Boyzone-style ballads. Mostly they avoid direct parody – save for the keenly accurate Bowie and the T-Rexish Demon Woman, complete with Seventies Top Of The Pops visual effects on the big screen. Instead they affectionately tease the very roots of all music, an ambitious brief.

They wouldn’t be so huge, though, if the songs weren’t brilliant pieces of music in their own right, hence the audience calling out for their favourites. Like Kirsten Schaal’s Mel in the TV series, several fans seem to think they’re best mates with the duo, and there are sporadic interruptions throughout.

The pair, Jermaine especially, bat away the distractions with good grace – even the tediously inevitable sheep noises mere mention of New Zealand elicits. Because for all their humble shtick, they are charismatically uncharismatic, coolly uncool. The gig feels intimate, and the banter, whether between themselves or directed at the audience, always polite and disarming. Even when they trash the set, they do it very carefully, so as not to cause too much trouble.

For all their reserve, the duo have an impressive vocal range, calling on anything from Barry White bass to Bee Gees falsetto to make their jokes. They’ve brought in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – aka a cellist named Nigel – to add to the musical richness – but they’re versatile musicians, even able to make playing a recorder funny, as they get medieval on our arses with the spoof madrigal 1353.

Lyrics radiate wit, from the brilliantly ingenious rhymes to observations a stand-up would envy. Their song Jenny, about an awkward chance meeting in a park, would be a classic comedy sketch in its own right;
even before the added impact and timing the perfectly pitched melody adds. This is one of their lesser-known tracks, and all the better for being less familiar, but all the hits are here too, as demanded.

For those who need to know such things, the full set list was: Too Many Dicks On The Dancefloor, The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room), Hurt Feelings, Jenny, Think About It, 1353, Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymnoceros, Ladies Of The World, Song For Epileptic Dogs, Not Crying, Foux du Fafa, Bowie, Demon Woman – with an encore of Business Time, Bus Driver’s Song, Albi and Mutha'uckas.

That’s an impressive catalogue, crossing genres but never losing sight of their aims of holding songwriting up to gentle but incisive ridicule, while paying affectionate tribute to the unrealistic ideals musical icons promote. They do it so well, with songs as funny as they are catchy, that they deserve every minim of their incredible success.

[align=right:zs63054q]Date of live review: Tuesday 11th May, '10
Review by Steve Bennett[/align:zs63054q]

[size=150:ag6pj72y]Flight of the Conchords at the Birmingham NIA, review
[size=133:ag6pj72y]Once describing themselves as 'New Zealand's fourth most popular folk-parody band', the Conchords treat the Midlands arena to their brilliantly deadpan comedy

[size=100:ag6pj72y]By Dominic Cavendish
Published: 3:22PM BST 11 May 2010


High tech, Kiwi-style: Bret and Jemaine embrace the digital age

[size=100:ag6pj72y]Thank heavens for this emergency comedy rescue package from New Zealand, just landed in the UK. At a time when all most of us can do is look on in dismay, disbelief and outrage as the post-election settlement devolves into something between cock-up and stitch-up, the need for light relief, and a distraction from the slings and arrows of outrageous politicking, could hardly be more pressing.

I have to confess that when I first encountered Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement back in 2003 on the Edinburgh Fringe, I loved the concept - “formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo”. And I relished the jokes, as this slacker pair expertly sang and strummed their way through ingeniously irreverent pastiches of instantly recognisable popular song genres. They were laid-back, dead-pan, and cool in their knowingly nerdish fashion, but all the same, I couldn’t quite see where they were going to go with it: in its own way, it felt curiously one-note and niche.

Two immensely accomplished series for HBO - which planted their lo-fi act in the fleshed-out scenario of two Kiwi no-hopers trying to “make it” in New York - demonstrated that the Conchords have the comic mileage necessary to become a globe-trotting success. Even though this new touring show sheds the appurtenances of the sitcom, reverting to the unplugged rock-gig format of their earlier appearances, there’s an ingrained confidence about the partnership now that takes the whole thing to another level.

In Birmingham, the between-songs banter between the bearded good-looker McKenzie and the taller, grumpier-looking Clement is pricelessly understated - as they trade non-anecdotes about life on the road (“We got stuck in the elevator! We hadn’t pressed the button!”) and gently chide inaudible hecklers. The songs themselves, though, are the real marvel - with their subtly embedded storylines and fine-tuned lyrics spiking everything from the vanity of rap and the empty rhetoric of the protest number (“They’re killing each other with knives and forks!”), to Bowie, heavy metal and the formulaic conventions of the 70s love-track, most brilliantly in their unashamedly suburban take on Barry White, “It’s Business Time” (“Conditions are perfect for sweet weekly love”).

After 90 minutes, my only hope, given the sorry brevity of this stop-off, was that all flights out of the country will be cancelled because of further volcanic ash disruption and they’ll be forced to stick around, lay on some extra gigs, and perk us all up.

Amily wrote:Albi

[flash=350,287:b53clzfz]https://www.youtube.com/v/qOHkvJ6tgwY&hl=en&fs=1[/flash:b53clzfz]
[/youtube]

onlyalways wrote:The show was amazing you guys!! Seriously the best single live show I've ever seen. Bret and jemaine looked so happy and smiley throughout the whole show and the audience I think did just the right amount of heckling. Eugene was absolutely wonderful too. So happy I kept so much a surprise- my legs were flailing during demon woman.

I feel like I'm geeking out too much saying this but it was the perfect show for me.

Vesna, Sarah, Sara, and myself met the guys and Eugene after the show by their buses. The whole experience is still surreal because they all just popped out of a van passing us! Hahaha. Gave the cookbooks and the shirts (Sara and I got Bret a shirt in London) and it was all spectacular...

More details and pics once I'm home in a week.



Cloud 9 forever.   

luckym wrote:The show was AMAZING!!! They both seemed very energetic and happy...it was really nice to see. I'm glad someone got video of Albi because that remix cracked me up. I hope someone also managed to get Sugalumps- Bret jumped off the stage to start dancing and he started to sing about how he hurt his spine and then Jemaine's tear away pants fell off as he was dancing. I wish I could go into detail, but I'm trying to type this from my iPod...

Got to give Bret and Jemaine the cookbooks and other gifts after the show. They didn't have time to look through the cookbooks, but they seemed happy to get them.

Also, the set list that was posted earlier in the thread looks correct.