THE DUO WHO FLEW

Henry Oliver recalls the early days of New Zealand’s much-loved comic pair, 10 years on

If it’s 10 years since the first episode of Flight of the Conchords aired in the United States, that means it must be about 11 years since I was an extra on the first episode.

I’d vaguely known Bret McKenzie for about as long as I can remember. He’s a good friend of one of my sisters and I think another of my sisters was his babysitter. His mum has taught most of my family ballet. Bret and Jermaine’s comedy troupe with Taika Waititi, So You’re A Man, did a lunchtime show at my high school in flesh-coloured nudie suits with woollen pubic hair and detachable penises.

I went and giggled at my sister’s friends running around, pulling their dicks off to play women and then putting them back on to play men again. Wellington is a small city.

I largely ignored my family’s recommendations about Bret’s new comedy-folk band (“sounds great!”), so didn’t really “get” them until every other festivalgoing type in the world did too. I hardly ever saw Bret in New Zealand, but would cross paths with him while I was on tour with Die! Die! Die!, the band I was in at the time. Every time I saw him something incredible was happening for the Conchords. When he came to our show in London in 2005 (at a bar called the Spread Eagle), they were recording a radio series for the BBC. Early the next year, when they interviewed us (three vegetarians) at George W. Bush’s favourite barbecue joint in Austin, Texas for their SXSW documentary A Texan Odyssey (we didn’t make the cut), they had just announced their HBO deal. And when we met up in New York later that year, they were about to shoot the pilot. At the time, Die! Die! Die! existed on a kind of low-budget, never-ending tour. We’d leave New Zealand for as long as possible, play as many shows we could get in a row and then decamp somewhere until we booked another bunch of shows. My then-girlfriend/now-wife was living in New York, so between tours we tried to see if we could make it work there, playing whatever shows we could play in between trips to the UK, where we got paid ever-so-slightly better. Bret and Jemaine came to a show we were playing at a shitty bar on the Lower East Side and, after we’d played, Bret introduced me to James Bobin, an executive producer and co-writer on the show. He told me a bit about the premise of the show, and became increasingly interested in what we were doing and how we were scraping by. He thought it was funny that we were living the reality of the TV show he was making: a band of naive New Zealanders with small T-shirts and fluffy hair, often sleeping in the same room, trying to make it in the big city a long way from home.

A few days later, we were invited to be extras in a couple of scenes they were shooting: one at a party and one just sitting around. It was hot and we were lazy — we went to the one just sitting around. So, for one summer’s afternoon in New York, me and my bandmates (plus a friend from The Brunettes, who were also touring the US at the time) sat outside a pawn shop on the Lower East Side, drinking coffee and eating bagels, trying not to eat and drink them too fast, because they needed to last a few takes, but definitely eating and drinking all of them because we were broke and ate and drank all the free food and drink we could at every opportunity.

About a year later the series aired and soon I was back in New York visiting friends. The first time I went to the States, everyone had asked about The Lord of the Rings.

“Do you know Peter Jackson?” they’d say, thinking that everyone from a country as small and remote as New Zealand must know everyone else. Now they’d ask, “Do you know Flight of the Conchords?”