July 2009

Flying High

They bill themselves as New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk parody duo, but Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords have really taken off

WORDS CARRIE HUTCHINSON

Take two complete nerds from New Zealand, add guitars and a repertoire of songs that parody everyone from David Bowie to R&B star Kelis and, chances are, the best you could hope for would be a bit of underground success at comedy festivals.

Tell that to Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, otherwise known as Flight of the Conchords, creators of one of the world’s hottest TV shows and unlikely sex gods. Yes, that’s right: 35-year-old Clement (he of the glasses and lips) and 33-year-old McKenzie (he’s, well, the other one) represent the new archetype in male hotness.

Mention them to a group of women and you’re likely to get one of two reactions: bafflement from those who’ve never heard of them and breathy tributes from those who’ve rejected the Hollywood notion of alpha males and are in the midst of a geek crush.

The only part of the equation that could change in the coming months, as series two of Flight of the Conchords hits the small screen in Australia, is that you won’t fi nd as many people who’ve never heard of them.

If you’re still in that ever-decreasing group, however, a brief backgrounder: McKenzie and Clement are Kiwi musos, based in New York, who play comedic tunes in a hilariously deadpan fashion. So are their characters — also called Jemaine and Bret — in the hit HBO comedy that features them alongside stalker fan Mel (Kristen Schaal), manager Murray (Rhys Darby), and buddy Dave (Arj Barker).

The biggest difference between life and art, it would appear, is that the real Jemaine and Bret are no longer struggling for recognition or riches. Success, however, doesn’t appeared to have gone to their heads.

“When we heard we got the fi rst series, I couldn’t sleep for three nights,” says Clement. “Halfway through the first series, they [HBO] asked if we’d do the second one and Bret had heart palpitations.”

“I’ve never had such a physical reaction to a piece of information,” continues McKenzie. “I had a panic attack.” Certainly, the pressure was on. The two had met at drama club at Wellington’s Victoria University in 1998, where their first play about body image featured flesh-coloured bike shorts, pink hair and velcro — ahem — appendages.

“Then we both dropped out of university,” explains McKenzie, “and lived in a fl at in Wellington with about eight people where we started writing songs to entertain our fl atmates.”

Conchords started as an irregular fi ve-minute act on a comedy night, but was always well received and so the show went on the road. Some of the songs featured in series one were developed during that era.

Since then, they’ve gone on the comedy festival circuit, appeared on TV in New Zealand and Australia, created a series for the UK’s BBC Radio 2, and recorded the Grammy Award-winning EP The Distant Future. Still, their confidence wasn’t high when it came to round two for HBO.

“I think ‘difficult second album’ is an appropriate term [for this series],” says McKenzie, “because we’d spent years developing the first songs with no time pressure and suddenly we had to write 20 new songs in six months.”

This time, they had to weave songs into a preconceived narrative rather than writing around pre-existing songs. There is, however, a common thread that runs through most of their songs and shows: women and their general lack of luck in that department.

That’s where art and reality part company. “I went out the other night,” Clement told a UK newspaper earlier this year, “and four girls came up to me, and they were giggling and jumping up and down, and it was quite weird. Especially because I’ve never really been that…confident in that…way.

“And to have girls treat me in that way, it was really different. And… it’s kind of my dream come true.” Not that women reading this should get too excited: in the past 12 months, both men have married their long-term girlfriends.

Inspiration for the show’s themes often comes from situations they found themselves in during the early days of their career. “There’s one episode this season that’s loosely based on when we stayed at a fan’s house,” explains McKenzie. “We’d run out of money — it was a complicated situation. We’d gone to LA to do some shows, but we’d paid for ourselves and we literally didn’t have enough money to pay for the hotel.”

“Bret did a brief cameo in Lord of the Rings,” says Clement, continuing the story, “and the first thing the fan wanted to do was watch the extend DVD of LOTR, which she’d just got.”

McKenzie adds: “So the three of us were sitting on the couch watching my deleted scenes, which was pretty weird.” Clement laughs at the memory. “She’d say things like, ‘Bret, there’s another 40 seconds of you in the ‘Making of’.”

She could easily be Mel, one of the show’s most inspired characters, except that guys admit that Mel — married to the ever-patient Doug (David Costabile) — is an amalgamation of about a dozen slightly rabid fans they’ve attracted during their careers. “But it’s growing,” says Clement. “More women are being added to the character the more we tour. I got a ceramic bust of just my lips the other day.”

According to McKenzie, the duo also receives hundred of pictures and illustrations of themselves. “We should open an art gallery. But what’s fun is when you meet guys from other bands. Like we met the guy from OK Go and he said, ‘We’ve got a real-life Mel.’ I think most bands have a Mel.”

Set to ramp up this series is the rivalry between Aussies and Kiwis, with Sarah Wynter playing Keitha, an Australian girl who dates Jemaine, much to Bret’s horror. Every stereotype in the book is hauled out, from a criminal family past to posters of Men At Work on Keitha’s bedroom wall.

Americans seem to have got the joke about the animosity between the two nations after the first series featured a fruit seller who wouldn’t serve Bret and Jemaine because he thinks they’re Australian, and the boys being dumped by a girl for an Aussie suitor. “We can only judge it by the MySpace comments,” says Clement, “and Americans will go, ‘We love you guys, Australia sucks!’”

Series two of Flight on the Conchords can be seen on SBS TV, Mondays at 9pm.