Flight of the Conchords

“One of New Zealand’s most successful bands has potential.”

So Bret McKenzie implored reviewers to write after Flight of the Conchords made another hilarious mistake at their first gig in eight years – minus a few warmup shows at Meow Nui back in April.

“I’ve got an idea, Bret,” Jemaine Clement quipped around the halfway mark. “We should do some warmup gigs in a smaller venue before we do this one.” His next idea was that they should “rehearse more than once every eight years.”

Every moment like this just added more mango to an already mother-ucking delicious fruit salad. Sprinkled with dry Kiwi comedy cornflakes and stirred with self-deprecation, Flight of the Conchords’ hallmark deadpan humour was in full force from the first fzzzfz of the opening number The Distant Future. This ‘recently written’ song about the year 2000 had been updated to include references to AI and how rude we are about its art. Afterwards, Bret told us our applause was “probably a bit generous for what we just did.” “Yeah,” Jemaine informed us, “that wasn’t a good start.”

Clearly, we begged to differ.

I didn’t mean to get straight down to business time – before Flight of the Conchords took the stage to rapturous reception, we were surprised and delighted by Wellington’s iconic saxophonist tree. Woody played three songs with aplomb and the occasional hip wiggle before shuffling off the stage. How much more Wellington can you get?

Quite a bit more Wellington, actually. Not only did Woody come back onstage for The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room and a red-lit, raunchy rendition of Business Time, but another local icon stepped in for Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros: King Home Boy. A certifiable Beatboxosaurus! Another surprise – this one unplanned – was the crowd-wide Happy Birthday singalong for Sadie, an audience member who kicked off a tea-towel distribution chain. “If it’s your birthday take a tea towel, if it’s not pass it on,” Bret said, and we happily complied.

Highlights were too numerous to mention, so sticking to my top five seven, I enjoyed the other ‘recently written’ track Frodo, Don’t Wear the Ring, which the band hopes to hear in the first Lord of the Rings movie; Jemaine’s assertion that “We’re vincible” in Hurt Feelings; Bret’s warning not to touch the banana in Iain and Deanna, where they tried something new – “one of us standing up”; multi-instrumentalist Nigel Collins’ ukelele moment; Jemaine’s bellowed line “There’s microplastics in my semen”; the appearance of the 1985 Casio SK-1 in Inner City Pressure; Brarbra Streisand; and every second of my new favourite song, Seagull.

I might be in the business of words, but no matter how many unhinged specifics I give you, I don’t think I can come close to conveying how much fun, how wonderful, the Flight of the Conchords concert was. More than once, I caught tears of laughter streaming down cheeks that ached from smiling. I’ll remember it always as one of the best live shows I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing.