After eight long years, the Flight of the Conchords will reunite for a string of live shows, and according to Bret McKenzie, there might still be more to come.
The iconic New Zealand music comedy duo will perform together for the Netflix is a Joke Festival in LA this May with three live shows booked, following newly-announced warm-up shows in their home country later this month.
Appearing on the latest episode of the Rolling Stone Uncut podcast during his recent Australia tour, McKenzie discussed how the reunion came to be.
“There’s always offers simmering around, but we haven’t done anything for a while. But we had been jamming a little bit last year, just trying to write some new ideas and with no intention of booking a tour or anything, but just for fun,” he said.
“We’ve got a great booking agent, Nick, and he said, ‘Oh guys, there’s this offer. It’s in LA. What do you think?’ And it just sort of was the right type of gig for us. Like, it’s not too big… we’re not going on the road for six months. I think it was just one gig and then they added a second show. So we were committing to one gig. And so we were like, we can manage one gig!
“We’ve got a song called “Jenny” which is about two people. The song’s about a guy and a woman, Jenny. Anyway, we were like, ‘Let’s just have a go, see how much we can remember.’ And the song is about him struggling to remember, and both of us are just struggling to remember! And we got halfway through the song like, ‘I don’t know what happens… I mean, I know there’s a baby, but I don’t know how we get to that bit about the baby.’ And so then we just have to pull up the recording, and you can actually just Google our own lyrics… and then we were laughing at jokes that we’d forgotten.”
Though there are currently no plans for the Conchords post the festival dates, McKenzie said there is a chance there will be more shows to follow, including Australia, which would be their first shows here in almost 15 years.
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“It would be fun to do some more, [but] we’re just gonna take it and see as we go. Playing live is pretty fun for us… Jemaine [Clement] has a really busy schedule with a lot of film work, acting and stuff. The live shows are quite good because you can go, ‘Oh, we can get a week, so maybe we could do something there within those few weeks,’ or it seems more realistic than blocking out a year or two.”
“The audience is just psyched, man, it’s cool. I mean that’s one benefit of not playing for eight years! It builds up a little bit of interest.
“It’s amazing that the TV show keeps kind of… new people discover it. So there are people who were children when the show was on, you know what I mean? A lot of our audience has never seen us play… the time that’s gone by. The last time we played in Australia was 2012. It’s so long ago that a lot of people have never had a chance to see the live show.”
