Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie promised they’d put more practice in for the rest of their tour. Let’s hope they don’t.
Few things are more Wellington-coded than the folk-comedy singing locals selling out (in eight minutes) a four-night run at a church-turned-music-venue in the city. Eight years since their last performance, Flight of the Conchords made their comeback at the capital’s Meow Nui on Thursday night in the messiest fashion possible. There were missed cues, forgotten lyrics, restarts on songs, off-tempo drum machines, an entire song skipped because it felt too hard – making for a shambles of a show which ultimately struck all the right chords.
An opening night full of snags where almost no song is performed perfectly would typically described anywhere between a bit bad to completely oh-my-God-these-people-should-quit-forever awful. But even when fumbling through openers ‘Father and Son’, ‘A Kiss is Not a Contract’ and ‘Mutha’uckas’, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s ability to breeze through the awkwardness and brush over the bumps with banter only amplified the comedic charm.
Within the first 15 minutes, Clement had to assure the crowd that “this is hopefully the worst we’ll ever be”. Mckenzie quipped that “this band has a lot of potential,” and both singers pledged to put in a bit of work before they return for the rest of their tour, which will eventually take them to the US. Let’s hope they don’t; the show works perfectly as just two dudes doing some band shit.
Now, I say all of this while openly admitting this was my first real exposure to Flight of the Conchords. I’ve never seen their hit HBO show, nor have I ever really listened to their music at all, except for ‘Feel Inside (And Stuff Like That)’ because I was 12 when that song came out so it was absolutely my shit. But you didn’t need to be a die-hard fan to recognise the missteps, because the duo were adept at pointing it all out, providing for a solid hour-and-a-half of that good old sardonic and self-deprecating New Zealand humour that they wear so well.
Maybe it works because I’m hearing all of the jokes for the first time, too. Or maybe it was the energy from the hometown venue, where punters laughed at every gag, sang along to the hits and were generally the politest crowd I’ve ever experienced in this piece of shit dumbass mean spirited country. Some were already here two weeks ago, to watch McKenzie perform a solo show. The band couldn’t have asked for a better comeback crowd; hundreds of clearly die-hard fans who didn’t need a production of Sabrina Carpenter proportions – it’s enough to watch the local jokesters take too long to tune a guitar and drop the same jokes they’ve been dropping for about two decades.
As well as the classics (‘Business Time’, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)’) the band reached back into the archives to deliver deep cuts like ‘Frodo, Don’t Wear The Ring’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Think About It’ and ‘Bus Driver’. One of the things you must worry about as musical comedians rehashing jokes from the 2000s is whether or not they’ll withstand the test of time. By McKenzie’s own admission, “some of the stuff’s dated quite badly, but that’s cool.”
‘Robots’ had a few lines updated to reference artificial intelligence, which would have seemed like proper sci-fi shit when the song was originally released way back in the distant past of 2008. They kept “were you ever called a homo in school because you took drama?” in ‘Hurt Feelings’, mostly because McKenzie wasn’t quick enough on his feet to think of something else. And when the duo performed ‘Carol Brown’ and Clement got around to singing that “Bruce turned out to be a man,” he immediately corrected himself: “We’ll change that.” And for “Britney” who “hit me”, as well. “If you wait long enough, your jokes will become edgy, too,” McKenzie assured the crowd.
When the set ended, they returned only a few minutes later for an encore which included ‘Ladies of The World’ and ‘Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros’. Across the hour and 40 minutes that Flight of the Conchords were on stage, they served up a pretty heft chunk of their discography, striking a good balance between the old fan favourites and the big hits like ‘Hurt Feelings’.
It’s clear that this run of four hometown shows is meant to work as a warm-up for when the duo takes the stage at Los Angeles’ The Greek Theatre for the Netflix Is a Joke Festival in May. It’s hard to say whether the shambles experienced in Wellington would go down as well with an American audience at the world’s biggest comedy festival. But bugger them – if it takes Flight of the Conchords until their fourth and final New Zealand show to finally get everything right before they head overseas, they will still have saved the best of themselves for us.
Clement and Mckenzie will return to the sold-out Meow Nui stage again tonight (Friday). Expect to see Wellingtonians, from the Gen Xers to the Gen Zers, queuing along Ghuznee Street and spilling over to Taranaki St. Envy them: they’re about to experience the best musical comedy set of their lives, from New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-comedy duo and the capital’s most beloved musical dorks.
