Beat Magazine Interview - May 21, 2008

Flight Of The Conchords
by Daniel Zugna
Date: 21 May 2008

Bret McKenzie, one half of New Zealand musical comedy stars Flight of the Conchords, and split-second star of Lord Of The Rings (web search: Figwit), has just bought a new keytar. He certainly isn’t afraid of bringing the cheese, and it’s something he and fellow Conchord Jemaine Clement offer in hilarious spades on their full-length, self-titled musical debut. We spoke with Bret in the lead-up to the release, and as he explains, they relished the freedom of relentlessly mining the myriad clichés offered by popular music.

Congrats on the Grammy – are you finding yourself dropping that into conversation a fair bit?

“Yeah, that will be a funny detail to put on posters, when we play dive bars in a few years time.”

You were able to hire some high end production talent in Mickey Petralia for the album – what sort of sound were you going for?

“Each song kind of eludes to a different genre, so we pushed each song in different directions, from hip-hop, ‘80s synth-pop, to cheesy funk. Then for each song, we filled in the details like a colouring-in book. We tried to make each song a more accurate representation of the genre. The album veers all over the place, there are lots of different sounds. Mickey has worked with Beck, Peaches, Ladytron, and he’s done a lot of programming. He’d create a lot of the beats.”

I guess with each song being a caricature of sorts, you didn’t have to worry too much about going over the top with the cheesy genre clichés?

“Yeah, there was a lot of freedom in the studio ‘cos you don’t have to avoid being cheesy. We tried to keep the acoustic guitars present in most of the tunes. We also made very good use of a late-70s Roland drum machine. If we were having trouble with a tune we’d get the drum machine out, it was studio guru.”

So much of the humour in the songs seems to stem from the delivery and the physicality – did you have any techniques for getting that across on the record?

“What the tunes lose in terms of the live performance, hopefully the production will fill in some of those gaps. We’ll find out when it comes out, but it’s more of a soundtrack to the TV show. I’m a pretty big fan of live comedy albums, and we’ve talked about doing a live album. But at the same time I still like this cos it’s so different to a comedy album.”

Are most of the songs from the HBO TV show?

“Yeah they are, but going into the studio really helped us fix them up. A lot of the songs got rushed onto the TV show cos of deadlines. It’s a collection of our favourite songs that came together in the studio. But at the same time, it’s such a random place, the studio. When the songs are broken up into their different pieces, they can just as easily fall right apart.”

You guys seem to be willing to tackle just about any subject in your songs – how do you know when something’s ripe for a comic treatment?

“It’s not difficult! Listen to most of the pop tunes floating around today – sometimes they’re unaware of how close to a comedy idea they actually are.”

How’s the second season of the HBO show coming along? Did you get caught up in the writer’s strike?

“Yeah we did. For most people it was a stress, but for us it was a godsend. We went back to New Zealand for 5 or 6 months. The downtime was great, and I had some time to work on some other projects. I think we both got back to America with a new energy.”

It seems to be common in the world of comedy that style, tone and content needs to be tweaked to suit an American audience – did this happen?

“Nah, not at all. We probably changed, like, two words – tap became faucet. Cellotape doesn’t exist in America, so we found ourselves using boring old sticky tape instead.”

I’d be amiss if I didn’t ask you about Figwit, your background character from Lord of the Rings – how did it feel when you realised that you were an obscure internet phenomenon?

“Haha, yeah it was amusing. I’m really glad that Flight of the Conchords has been so successful, cos I was always worried I’d be remembered as that elf guy.”

Is New Zealand proud of you? I know a newspaper named you Wellingtonians of the Year last year…

“Yeah, that was great fun, we took the award over scientists and politicians and health workers. It was pretty embarrassing. There were people who had dedicated over 40 years to education in New Zealand, and we just cruised and got the award. I guess, like in Australia, people tend to be extra proud of you if you’re successful overseas. But we’re still B-list celebrities at home.”

Who’s in the New Zealand A-list?

“Well, OMC, definitely are – you know, the guys who did How Bizarre. There’s Neil Finn, of course, and Sir Edmund Hillary was in, but he’s dead now. Rounding out the group are Peter Jackson, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Sam Neill.”