NZ Listener Interview - January 6, 2007

In-Flight entertainment

by Sarah Barnett

Music comedy duo Flight of the Conchords have cracked the tricky US scene, but refuse to lose their Kiwiness.

Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement call themselves New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo, though they must have reached third – or maybe even second – by now. With nothing but a couple of guitars, they have charmed Kiwi comedy club audiences since 1998.

Embraced by the UK press after their first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002, they were nominated for best comedy act the following year.

Across the Atlantic, they were invited to perform a half-hour set for HBO’s televised One Night Stand series in August 2005. They walked onto the New York stage with ducked heads and half-waves to the audience, and hit the big time.

Clement: “It’s really exciting to be here, in, um … [he checks the back of his guitar] … America.”

McKenzie: “We’re really quite popular in New Zealand.”

They had them at “America”. The six songs included the lilting “Jenny”, a tale of mistaken identity; “Business Time”, a soulful, catchy groove about love in a long-term relationship;
and “Albie the Racist Dragon”, a morality tale in which a dragon with issues learns a valuable lesson. If the lyrics don’t get you, the tunes will – not to mention the dry-as-a-hydro-lake banter.

McKenzie: “That’s the song we used to stop racism in New Zealand.”

They’re ones to watch, if you can. TV3 is hoping to screen One Night Stand this year. TVNZ passed on it; the state broadcaster had also nixed a sitcom pitched to them by the Conchords a few years ago. HBO – home of Deadwood, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, and a network rich with Emmys and Golden Globes – wasn’t going to let the Conchords get away. Of the 10 acts that performed on One Night Stand, Clement and McKenzie’s is the only one to be picked up for a series. The show, tentatively titled Flight of the Conchords, will also star London-based Kiwi comedian Rhys Darby, and will take New Zild to Noo Yawk – though they’re writing it in LA.

“I find it ironic,” Clement tells the Listener, “that we probably wouldn’t have got a show in New Zealand ’cause we’re too New Zealand.”

You could blame the ghost of Melody Rules. The phrase “local sitcom” is enough to send a shudder down the nation’s spine, but, Clement says, “there’s lots of great New Zealand comedy in the live scene”. If the networks were a bit more proactive in looking to that live scene for talent, he argues, “everyone would win. The TV companies would have better shows, the comedians would have a new medium to work in, and we’d get, y’know, less crap.”

They are both frustrated by the approach to comedy they have seen in New Zealand, where programmers “will just say, ‘Make something like Little Britain, but set in New Zealand.’” In the US, TV networks put their comedians on TV. Think Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and Robin Williams. In the UK, they put them on the radio first, and then on TV. See Ricky Gervais, John Cleese and the guys from Little Britain.

“It’s an obvious way for New Zealand TV to develop,” McKenzie adds. It’s so obvious they’ve been saying it forever but, lacking opportunities here, they made the radio show happen on the BBC instead (Radio New Zealand broadcast that series last July). Local audiences will just have to hope that a local TV network coughs up to buy the sitcom when it comes out in the middle of this year. Which will be, they point out, more expensive than just making the show here in the first place.

In the meantime, the Conchords will probably remain better known here for their other projects: Clement’s voice graces the nostalgic L&P Stubbies ads and he has a lead role in Taika Waititi’s feature film Eagle vs Shark (out later this year). McKenzie is a member of Wellington band the Black Seeds, has released a solo album, Prototype, and was an elf extra in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Their first gig as the Conchords was in 1998. They met as poor students at Victoria University, and in their abundant spare time taught themselves guitar. At that stage, they were a band first and a comedy act second – it was only after being hired as the band for a comedy night that they gained a following in Wellington for their humour – “but we’re still technically a band,” McKenzie says.

Film-maker Gemma Gracewood, a Wellington neighbour and bandmate of McKenzie’s in the Wellington Ukulele Orchestra, agrees.

“Their musical and songwriting prowess is stunning. If you put the gags aside and just listen to the composition of the songs, two guys on guitars, without a drum kit, with a full venue dancing to them – not just laughing along, but actually grooving to the music … I think that’s one of the biggest keys to their success, but it sits behind the comedy.

“You listen to one of their songs and there are shades of Bowie, shades of the Velvet Underground, the Beatles. They know their music. There’s a real magic there.”

Very few people got to experience the Conchords’ magic the first time they took their act overseas, in 2000. They played to largely empty Canadian venues then, and to largely empty Edinburgh venues in 2002, when they attended their first Fringe Festival. However, they were spotted by a talent scout from NBC, and began to develop a series with that network, a series that eventually fell through. It was their entry to the US, though, and they haven’t looked back.

Further evidence of their growing fanbase came when they attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Texas last May. Gracewood accompanied them and together they made a documentary, Flight of the Conchords: A Texan Odyssey, that aired on TV3 in October. She had been to SXSW before and knew that “more and more New Zealand bands have been going, thinking it’s the holy grail”. But “the hype at home far outweighs the reality of being there and fighting amongst 1300 other bands to get yourself noticed”.

Thanks to HBO, the Conchords already had a higher profile there than the other Kiwi bands – their audiences were full of people pre-empting their lyrics.

The Conchords also met some of their more dedicated fans at SXSW. “Fandom over there is such a different beast from in New Zealand,” Gracewood says. When the Conchords turned the microphone on some of them after one gig, they found out just how different.

“We’re in Austin, Texas,” a girl called Lisa tells McKenzie on tape, then adds: “Although I think I might be in heaven ’cause I’m standing next to you.”

Another fan, on a pilgrimage to see the Conchords at SXSW, had photos to show them: “This is what I carry in my wallet all the time. Got my oldest daughter, my second daughter – and Jemaine’s lips.”

Sherry de Andres, who runs a Conchords website (see box), says “Jemaine’s lips have actually got their own thread on the [website’s] forum. He took it with good grace when he found out about it, but he was as baffled as I was.” Clement is still embarrassed six months later when the Listener brings up the lip appreciator. “What do you want to know? I didn’t get together with her, if that’s what you’re asking!”

They dissipate what could be some fairly rabid behaviour from their fans, Gracewood says, “just by absolutely being themselves and being really normal”. De Andres agrees that fans are attracted by the fact that “they’re accessible, you can meet them, you can chat with them, have a hug, have your photo taken and they’re such nice guys about it”. Whether they’ll have time to give to their fans when the show rolls is another matter, but for now, McKenzie says, the Conchords appreciate their fans for how committed they are. “Should be committed,” Clement adds.

What’s disconcerting about the growing cult is that their lives are really “very ordinary”, they insist, even more so now that they’re embarking on their sitcom adventure in LA, as touring and other projects have had to make way for the show. They have been in LA for two months when the Listener calls them, and things are “good”, Clement says. “And you can quote me on that.”

Gracewood knows they were looking forward to “having a normal life where you get up and make your own breakfast, go to work, come home …” and writing the show has allowed that. “It’s like a government job,” McKenzie reports. And they have made their own breakfast, as it happens. “Um, I don’t want to sound too Hollywood,” Clement offers, “but the cereal we’re having is called Go Lean. That’s all they had left in the cupboard, ’cause they finished all the Cinnamon Harvest.”

There are some Hollywood touches. Dakota, the production company where they are based, looks after them very well. The cereal is just a start, Clement says. “We have barbecues every week … they try to find us places to live, stuff like that.”

“Ergonomic chairs!” McKenzie interjects, and they’re off. There are popcorn machines and hotdogs and bagels on Fridays. A basketball hoop. Clement used to read about US writers shooting hoops to beat writer’s block, “and I thought, when I was working for the Gibson Group [writing for Telly Laughs and Skitz], there was going to be a basketball hoop – but they didn’t have one. This place has one. So it’s a real move up.” There was even a deep-fried turkey for Thanksgiving, which they each celebrated with different American families.

McKenzie: “It was a lot like Christmas dinner.”

Clement: “Slightly different dishes, sweeter. Turkey, pumpkin pie, they have this sort of sugar-glazed ham. Honey-glazed, something like that. Sweet corn.”

McKenzie: “They have bowls of sugar on the table. You’ve got salt, pepper and sugar. You sprinkle it on all your food.”

These Kiwi fullas have found themselves an all-American writing office, and although the hours can sometimes make it feel as if they could be in any office anywhere in the world, they’re actually in Burbank. Which is “very dull”, Clement says.

McKenzie: “The Hutt Valley of Hollywood.”

Clement: “Oh … don’t put those two quotes together.”

They have already filmed the pilot – it’s what secured them the following 12 episodes. And they’ve delivered their second script, which has been well-received. “It’s kind of what you’d imagine, I guess, if you imagine a sitcom with us in it,” McKenzie explains, which makes it very easy to imagine that they don’t have to work hard at it. But although every work day starts with a good half-hour’s Googling and checking out stuff.co.nz (“I was pretty excited to see they sheared Shrek on the iceberg”), they have a huge workload. They have shared out some of the scriptwriting duties with US writers like Paul Simms (NewsRadio, The Larry Sanders Show) and Eric Kaplan (Futurama) and local writers Duncan Sarkies and Taika Waititi, but they are also writing original songs and the incidental music for the series, which of course they will be acting in – and, since they are also producing, will see right through the editing process to the finished product.

Their director, James Bobin, is an Emmy and BAFTA nominee for Da Ali G Show and The 11 O’Clock Show. “He’s polite, because he’s English,” Clement says encouragingly. So, what have they been like to work with? Bobin’s reply is initially drowned out by the Conchords’ laughter. “A delight, obviously. They’ve been a delight to work with. Very hard working,” he replies, politely.

Despite getting a sitcom onto one of the biggest networks around, the Conchords are still devoted to trying to get TV comedy made in New Zealand. Even if they go to a second season with Flight of the Conchords, Clement says, he’ll still be back pitching ideas for shows, and has no intention of settling down in the US, “though Bret’s bought a couch, so that’s quite a commitment. I won’t be doing that.”

They hang out with a small band of expats in LA to try to maintain as Kiwi a lifestyle as possible – Melanie Lynskey, Dean O’Gorman – they have lunched with Cliff Curtis and catch up with Neil Finn and the Phoenix Foundation whenever they are in town. They refer to Lynskey’s fiancé, US actor Jimmi Simpson, as an honorary Kiwi because “he likes Wattie’s products”.

The show will mirror that kind of alternative whanau set-up that New Zealanders have in foreign lands. “Our families won’t be there,” Clement says, “Me, Bret and Rhys Darby are the family. We’ve sort of made a different type of family.”

Perhaps now that they are making their Kiwi comedy in the US, they’ll get a better reception at home. HBO “have been awesome”, Clement says. “We told them what our idea was and they just helped us make it. Some companies have a bad reputation [fake cough], TVNZ – for controlling the product. And I know when I’ve worked on TV in New Zealand before, we’d always get told to dumb things down or make it simple for ‘middle New Zealand’. It’s good not having to do that.”

“Maybe,” McKenzie says, “we’ll finish this and come back to start a comedy channel in New Zealand.”

“We’ll star in the imitation Flight of the Conchords,” Clement offers.

Like Flight of the Conchords, but set in Wellington. Brilliant.

“Maybe,” McKenzie says, “we’ll finish this and come back to start a comedy channel in New Zealand.”

“We’ll star in the imitation Flight of the Conchords,” Clement offers.