Harp Magazine Interview - September/October 2007

Flight Of The Conchords: HBO’s Resident Hack Macks
By Randy Harward

The word on the street, as Harp prepares for its rendezvous with Flight of the Conchords, is they want to be taken seriously as songwriters and musicians. For real? Isn’t this the same pair of Kiwis that sing, on “If You’re Into It” from their debut EP The Distant Future (Sub Pop), “In the buff/Being rude/Doing stuff/With the food/Getting lewd/With his food/We heard that’s what you are into?”

“I, uh, I don’t really. I don’t want that. I never said anything like that,” says Jemaine Clement, the Conchords’ bespectacled bass guitarist and baritone vocalist. “I would say our manager told them that. He wants us to be taken seriously as musicians.”

“I think the idea is that we want people to know we write and perform the music,” says Bret McKenzie, the dulcet-voiced co-vocalist and guitarist. “We put a lot of love into the songs.”

There is merit to taking these goofballs seriously. Both have been writing songs for nearly half their lives, starting with the requisite silly love songs for crushes. “I wouldn’t sing them to them,” says Clement, laughing embarrassedly. “They were so awful.” Asked to share, he stammers, “I-I couldn’t.” He blurts out a title—“In My Dreams”—and giggles. “Sorry. Horrible.”

As for McKenzie, “One of my first songs was about a parking warden giving me a parking ticket. My songs have always ended up a little weird.” He has written serious songs with reggae-funk-soul band the Black Seeds (he left in 2005) and solo as electronica artist Video Kid. “I still write songs that don’t have jokes in them, but at the moment I tend to sing them to myself.”

Clement and McKenzie were roommates in Wellington, New Zealand, when they began writing together around 1998. Clement had been doing comedy with the Humourbeasts and McKenzie was playing music, but at a time “when we didn’t have much work on,” Clement says they picked up guitars to learn David Bowie and Leonard Cohen songs. “We’d never remember them,” Clement says, “so we started making up our own songs.” Although these had funny parts, they weren’t necessarily comedy songs. They played them at an open-mic comedy night anyway.

“They were usually about murder,” he continues. “Almost every one. I guess we [thought] about writing songs through a character or story point of view… more like a play, I guess. ”

Lately the characters in the songs are Clement and McKenzie themselves, albeit in slightly exaggerated caricatures. Both are generally portrayed as dim, hapless and horny—in a very likable sense. In “Beautiful Girl,” they endeavor to praise a woman’s grace and looks, but end up paying her backhanded compliments like “You could be a part-time model/But you’d probably still have to keep your normal job.” In the funky R&B tune “Business Time,” they’re hack macks: “When I’m down to my socks/You know…/It’s business time.” Other songs poke fun at hip-hop (“Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous”), inner-city living (“Inner City Pressure,” “Think About It”) and the progression of society (“Robots (Humans Are Dead)”).

Although no longer expressly story-oriented, the smartly crafted songs provide the framework for the band’s HBO series Flight of the Conchords. In the show, the duo appear in their caricature personalities, bumbling their way through relationships and their career (they have one obsessive fan, charmingly played by Kristen Schaal, and an inept manager who shepherds the band from his office at the New Zealand consulate). After the season finale airs on Sept. 2, the band will prepare to release their full-length U.S. debut, consisting of songs culled from their 2002 Folk the World live album, 2005 BBC radio series, and the HBO show.

As the series grows in popularity, with both guys gaining the animal magnetism inherent to TV and music stardom, do they note the irony that their silly songs, not their initial lovelorn sonnets, are the ones that will get them laid? Are they, uh, taking requests?

“We were offered a threesome in Scotland once,” McKenzie says. “She called it a ‘spit roast’—we thought it was a dinner invitation.”

Truly for both Clement and McKenzie, it boils down to the music. Their songs are in fact not simple School-of-Yankovic parodies but smartly crafted tunes that span a variety of genres and work on both musical and lyrical levels, with jokes both subtle and obvious going off like fireworks. What, to them, makes a great song?

“It’s hard to say,” ponders Clement. “I think people fall in love with the tune first. It’s pretty rare for you to like a song just for the lyrics.” Adds McKenzie, “Great songs are honest and delicious. Like chocolate cake that’s been injected with truth serum.”

At press time, we’ve only seen four episodes of Flight of the Conchords and it’s a bona fide classic—but the willpower they’ve shown in resisting the opportunity to lend their haggis to that Scottish chick’s spit roast is simply amazing.

At what classic arcade game do you kick ass?

Bret: I spent my pocket money on Pac-Man and Defender, but I passed most of my time playing war with my friends. If you got shot by one of the invisible bullets you had to lie on the ground and count to twenty. Then you miraculously came back to life. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to be in the army. You have to die all the time.

Jemaine: I wouldn’t say any, really, but I did love Galaga. My uncle had a fish-and-chips shop in New Zealand and they had Galaga. It was one of two games, and he would open the coin slot so we could use the same coin over and over again. It made me and my brother unstoppable. We were invincible because we had endless credits with the same twenty-cent piece.

hellomyfriend wrote:I love that Jemaine is hiding behind Eugene.   So cute.  

hellomyfriend wrote:I just noticed Eugene's hand on Jemaine's leg. Wasn't there an SP20 pic where Eugene had his hand on Jemaine's waist?

Amily wrote:

hellomyfriend wrote:I just noticed Eugene's hand on Jemaine's leg.  Wasn't there an SP20 pic where Eugene had his hand on Jemaine's waist?

Looks like there may be something going on that neither Bret or we were aware of before..... hmmmmm.

Amily wrote:

hellomyfriend wrote:I just noticed Eugene's hand on Jemaine's leg.  Wasn't there an SP20 pic where Eugene had his hand on Jemaine's waist?

Looks like there may be something going on that neither Bret or we were aware of before..... hmmmmm.

saladdazed That time I did a photo shoot with these 5 guys: Flight of the Conchords, Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt and David Cross. Lesson learned: never try to be the funny guy in a room full of comedians. #davidcross #eugenemirman #pattonoswalt #flightoftheconchords