Flight of the Conchords are pleased to announce a 2009 Spring US Tour!
Tickets go on sale to the public on Friday & Saturday, February 6th and 7th, but as a very special Flight of the Conchords fan you have access to the exclusive pre-sale beginning this Monday, February 2nd at 10 AM.
Just find the link to your city's venue and enter the password "sugalumps."
4/06/09 – Tampa, FL – Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center * TICKET INFO
4/07/09 – Coral Gables, FL – University of Miami BankUnited Center * TICKET INFO
4/08/09 – Orlando, FL – UCF Arena * TICKET INFO
4/10/09 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium * TICKET INFO
4/11/09 – Atlanta, GA – Fox Theatre * TICKET INFO
4/13/09 – Washington, D.C. - Constitution Hall * TICKET INFO
4/14/09 – New York, NY – Radio City Music Hall * TICKET INFO
4/17/09 – Boston, MA – Agganis Arena * TICKET INFO
4/18/09 – Philadelphia, PA – Tower Theatre (2 shows) * Show 1 TICKET INFOTICKET INFO
4/19/09 – Kent, OH – Kent State University * TICKET INFO
4/21/09 – Toronto, ON – Massey Hall ** TICKET INFO
4/22/09 – Toronto, ON – Massey Hall ** TICKET INFO
4/24/09 – Detroit, MI – Fox Theatre ** TICKET INFO
4/25/09 – Bloomington, IN – IU Auditorium ** TICKET INFO
4/26/09 – Madison, WI – Overture Center for the Arts ** TICKET INFO
4/28/09 – Chicago, IL – Aerie Crown ** TICKET INFO
4/30/09 – St. Louis, MO – Fox Theatre ** TICKET INFO
5/02/09 – Milwaukee, WI – Riverside Theatre (2 shows) ** TICKET INFO
5/03/09 – Minneapolis, MN – Northrop Auditorium ** (no listing as yet)
5/05/09 – Dallas, TX – Nokia Theatre ** TICKET INFO
5/06/09 – Houston, TX – Jones Hall ** TICKET INFO
5/07/09 – Austin, TX – Bass Concert Hall ** TICKET INFO
5/10/09 – Vancouver, BC – Center in Vancouver for the Performing Arts *** TICKET INFO
5/11/09 – Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre *** TICKET INFO
5/12/09 – Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre *** TICKET INFO
5/14/09 – Portland, OR – Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall *** TICKET INFO
5/16/09 – Denver, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre **** TICKET INFO (no listing as yet)
5/17/09 – Salt Lake City, UT – Abravanel, Hall % TICKET INFO
5/19/09 – Phoenix, AZ – Dodge Theatre *** TICKET INFO
5/20/09 – San Diego, CA – RIMAC Arena *** (no listing as yet)
5/22/09 – Santa Barbara, CA – County Bowl *** (no listing as yet)
5/23/09 – Las Vegas, NV – The Joint *** TICKET INFO (no listing as yet)
5/24/09 – Los Angeles, CA – Greek Theatre *** TICKET INFO (no listing as yet)
5/25/09 – Berkeley, CA – Berkeley Community Theatre (2 shows) *** Show 1 TICKET INFO Show 2 TICKET INFO Show 2Special Guests:
* = Kristen Schaal
** = Eugene Mirman
*** = Arj Barker
**** = First support act= Iron and Wine/ second support act = Arj Barker
Info located from Musictoday
Friday, January 30, 2009
2009 US Spring Tour Schedule
Monday, January 26, 2009
Flights of fancy - NZ Listener article
An exclusive interview on the New York set of the second – and could it really be the last – series of Flight of the Conchords.
Consider the joys of being Flight of the Conchords. A cultish show filming a second series on a major cable network in the United States, which must be like having a hit anywhere else. (It’s not actually, but we’ll get to that.) Your fans are engaged, artsy-crafty, inclining to spooky. They send you knitted wool animals that look like you. Bret’s Jesus beard and gentle tortured eyes; Jemaine’s vigorous sideburns and primate sensuality.
Fan art, too! Paintings and hand drawings and the like, enough to fill a small room at Te Papa. You write in LA, film in the People’s Socialist Republic of Brooklyn, and sometimes dream of Newtown. You go out dancing with Drew Barrymore; Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins drop by at one of your shows, dragged there by their kids. You used to be broke; now you’re not. People know you. They want to be funny with you. Sometimes, they want to be you. Recently, Rhys Darby, who plays Murray Hewitt in the series, was signing autographs outside a New York comedy club; a man in his 50s blundered through the crowd, shouting: “I’m the real Rhys Darby! I’m the real Rhys Darby!” He was, to use the appropriate phrase, forcibly restrained.
It’s like the theme from Cheers: “Everyone knows your name, everyone’s glad you came.” Put it another way, the Public Enemy way: “Ice Cube is down with the PE/now every single bitch wanna see me.”
“One of the funniest things I saw on tour,” says Jemaine Clement, “was this woman in the front row and she had a T-shirt with a womb on it and a fetus with glasses and sideburns, and my face.”
All of which goes to prove three points that on reflection are self-evident: 1) people are strange; 2) they form intimate attachments with characters on the boob tube; 3) they love a laff.
Flight of the Conchords, contenders for the best comedy album at the 2009 Grammys, are successfully mining the double-act seam of comedy, one that stems not from the tradition of speaking opposites (funny man v straight man – eg, Morecambe and Wise) but the setup in which similarity, and irony, loves company. The Blues Brothers and Cheech and Chong are part of this line, but neither expresses the minimalism, the texture of Conchord humour. Being a nerd. Being broke. Being useless with girls. It’s being and nothingness; some awkwardness but little angst. They’re like life, they’re like us, only they’re … different.
“Jemaine’s more staunch than me,” says Bret McKenzie. Slim and pale, he is slumped inside a large blue Swanndri. Call time for this morning’s filming was 5.30am, which is bad enough, and made rather worse if you’ve spent the night lying awake, worrying about sleeping through the alarm.
“When we deal with other people,” says Clement, “I’d expect Bret to be naturally diplomatic, whereas I wouldn’t like the person.”
“And that’s what we play off on the show,” adds McKenzie.
“It’s like a five-year-old and a three-year-old,” says show co-creator James Bobin, who has also worked with Sacha Baron Cohen, otherwise known as Borat. “Jemaine’s the five-year-old, and Bret’s the three-year-old. They’re both wrong, but the five-year-old thinks he’s right.”
McKenzie continues: “If we didn’t like the way HBO was doing something, even though we’d both agreed we didn’t like it, Jemaine would be the one who would probably say” – his fist thumps the table lightly – “we’re not doing it!”
So, the difference between them is good cop, bad cop?
“Mmmm, more like polite cop, less polite cop.”
Would you like fries with that drollery, sir? We’re sitting at a French joint near their studio. It’s a working lunch, one of these multi-tasking monstrosities that people who haven’t had a day off for four months must endure, as must those who want to talk to them. The Conchords are being served up to the world’s entertainment press: your own reporter, a chap from the Daily Telegraph in London, a woman from Time Out, and a Swede who, in the car coming here, leaned across to me and asked, “Are these guys any good?”Well, yes, they are. The lunch/interview, filled with badinage, is how one imagines an orgy might be: nervously energetic, special moves being ventured and withdrawn hastily, abrupt changes in partner, some fumbling and groping to get from one sequence to the next. And that’s just the journalists.
McKenzie, as you’d expect, is the fret-artist; Clement swings casually from riff to riff. They footnote one another’s sentences. Fracturing, rather than cracking each other up, seems to be the MO, although Clement’s laugh can rise to a goofy full-throated bellow. McKenzie seems to like to hang on just a little, to keep something in reserve. But it’s a free-ranging session of target practice, a flurry of bullseyes: America, themselves, their fans, New Zealand. They describe how they created the name for bumbling manager Murray Hewitt, by cross-fertilising the names of former All Blacks Murray Mexted with Norm Hewitt. Then they googled the name, which produced two people who both lived in New Zealand. McKenzie says when he was back home at Christmas time, he actually met someone called Murray Hewitt.
“Good-looking guy, was he?” deadpans Rhys Darby.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Pre-Order season 2 now on Amazon.com
I'll keep everyone updated on the pre-order of the second full length CD, but all that we know about it, is that it'll be released on April 14th. Look for a pre-order sometime soon, hopefully.
One new Flight of the Conchords song every week!
Yep, it's true. After every new episode, subpop will release the song featured in the show in the iTunes store. Also the new album is scheduled to be released on April 14th. So I'll be ready to pre-order it. That's almost 3 months away, can't wait!
Season 2 of the Flight of the Conchords HBO TV show begins this Sunday night, January 18th! And, in a radical, full-body, immodest embrace of modern technology, we will be releasing, through the iTunes music store, one song from each episode on the Monday morning after that episode airs!
So, for example, on Monday, January 19th, you will be able to purchase the Flight of the Conchords song [spoiler alert!] “Angels,” from the previous night’s Season 2 premiere.
It’s what we’re calling our “See It on Sunday, Buy It on Monday (Please)” promotional ploy. And, we really think it’s possible you might like it.
So, should you want new Flight of the Conchords songs (and who don’t?), please visit the Flight of the Conchords iTunes page right here.
Further info! The entire new Flight of the Conchords album will be released on April 14th. It will include all ten of the songs released through iTunes, plus several more (probably 15 or so tracks total). It will also include an album title, some (we’re confident) very nice and very palpable artwork, and either a large shiny black disc, or a smallish silvery one, depending. On the album’s release date, if you’ve bought some or all of the songs throughout the season on iTunes, you’ll have the option to “Complete the Album” through iTunes, and won’t have to repurchase anything. You could also just buy the complete album from us on or after April 14th. We view that option favorably as well.
In other Flight of the Conchords news, we would still like to sell you their Grammy Award-winning EP The Distant Future and/or their self-titled and currently Grammy-nominated full-length debut Flight of the Conchords. There will also be a humongous Flight of the Conchords North American tour throughout most of April and May of this year.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Entertainment Weekly article
It's a short article, but hey, if it has something to do with FotC, I'll post it.
Flight of the Conchords
Where it left off: Folk-rock duo Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie split with hapless, hopeless Murray (Rhys Darby).
What's coming up: In spite of a handful of Emmy nods last year, the single-fanned Conchords haven't suffered the growth or popularity that can ruin a music group. "The success of the Flight of the Conchords' band [in the real world] has no impact whatsoever on the failure of the TV band," assures exec producer James Bobin. (And failure is all but assured when Murray returns as manager.) The 10- episode season features new songs ("Hoping You'll Stick Around," about Jemaine's ex-girlfriends, and "Sugar Lumps," about his teticles),quirky guests (24's Mary Lynn Rajskub and SNL's Kristen Wiig), and new devotion to the Conchords from perpetual quitter Bret. Says Bobin, "Bret is much more faithful to the band this year." Being replaced by a bongos enthusiast will do that to a man. - AW
So the sounds even more awesome. Tomorrow, be ready, we'll all be graced with a new season of FotC. It's going to be a great start for 2009.
Article in January 23rd issue of Entertainment Weekly.
Friday, January 16, 2009
National Post Article
'Thank you, internet': The harmonious hijinks of Flight of the Conchords
Mark Medley, National Post Published: Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Once, many years ago, Flight of the Conchords played a concert at a Vancouver club, for which only a single person showed up. The lights went down and, even with the minuscule audience, the New Zealand musical-comedy duo gamely performed an hour-long set.
"When they turned the lights on," recalls Jemaine Clement, one half of the musical comedy duo, on the phone from Los Angeles, "the person had left."
Certainly more than one person will be watching on Sunday night, when the Conchords' eponymous TV show returns for a second season. In the year and a half since Season One's finale, Clement and partner Bret McKenzie have released a best-selling album, earned four Emmy nominations and garnered a host of critical acclaim for the show, which concerns two New Zealand expats named Jemaine and Bret -only slightly fictionalized versions of the real-life pair - living in New York while trying to find success as a band.
Clement and McKenzie met while attending the Victoria University of Wellington - they were both in a play written by Duncan Sarkies, who now writes for the show - and formed Flight of the Conchords in 1998. The band toured various fringe and comedy festivals before enjoying a short-lived series on BBC Radio 2 in 2004. But the transition to television, says McKenzie, was never a goal.
"When Jemaine and I were flatting in New Zealand, we were both auditioning for New Zealand soap operas and B-grade films, and we weren't doing very well," he says. "We decided to start a band to get out of trying to be on TV."
If the show sounds strange, that's because it is; Flight of the Conchords may be the definition of an acquired taste. But the band's popularity has skyrocketed in the lapse between seasons, propelled at least in part by the band's visibility on the internet. They are a group born of the YouTube age; the songs translate into net-ready clips, which attract millions of views online; the group also boasts over 167,000 MySpace friends, though "165,000 of those are me with aliases," admits McKenzie.
"The internet's really part of the way the show has spread," agrees Clement. "Thank you, internet."
Perhaps as a way of saying thanks, the first episode of the season was leaked online in December. Early Season Two episodes find Clement resorting to prostitution to pay the bills and McKenzie starting up a gang to protect himself from rappers he dissed during a performance at the library. New songs - the musical numbers, interwoven into the plot, are often the highlight of each episode - range from operatic epics to Broadway show tunes to island-tinged calypso, making one wonder what they were listening to while writing this season's music.
"Andrew Lloyd Webber plays Bob Marley," jokes series co-creator James Bobin, the man partly responsible for bringing Da Ali G Show to North America and whom McKenzie has dubbed "the third Conchord" in past interviews.
"We've been listening to a lot of Harry Nillson," says Clement, referring to the American musician behind such odd songs as Coconut. "And he goes from style to style all the time. He goes calypso, a bit of reggae - he never did rap."
The songs will be collected on an untitled new album, due April 14 on Sub Pop Records, and the band will launch a North American tour later this year. There are currently no movie plans - "What have you heard?" asks Clement, though he is starring in Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess's next film, Gentlemen Broncos.
The band's popularity has also increased the profile of co-stars Rhys Darby, who plays their manager, Murray, and comic Kristen Schaal, who plays the band's only fan, Mel. Schaal scored a recurring gig on The Daily Show, while Darby - a fellow New Zealand native, who they've known for years - recently appeared in the Jim Carrey comedy, Yes Man.
"That was our plan from the beginning: try and get Rhys into a Jim Carrey film," says McKenzie.
"And we succeeded!" says Clement. "I'm really proud to be involved with those guys, and think they deserve every success."
New Zealand is certainly proud of them; they are the biggest cultural export since Lord of the Rings - in which McKenzie had a small role - which makes them the most visible Kiwis this side of Peter Jackson.
Says McKenzie: "The pride that they have for our success overseas overshadows ..."
"... the embarrassment," says Clement, finishing his partner's sentence.
• Season Two of Flight of the Conchords premieres Sunday, Jan. 18 at 10 p.m. on HBO Canada.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A.V. Club Interview
by Sam Adams January 13, 2009
When Flight Of The Conchords debuted on HBO in 2007, the musical sitcom about a pair of unknown New Zealanders struggling for success felt as if it might be based, however faintly, in real life. But a Grammy, two Emmy nominations, and a platinum record later, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are hardly unknowns. Their sleepy deadpan delivery and scruffy charisma have made them low-key heartthrobs, and their low-tech music videos are tailor-made for the YouTube era. The show's second season, which premières Jan. 18, finds their fictional selves as downtrodden as ever, penning jingles for a women-only toothpaste and being neglected by their manager, Murray (Rhys Darby), who's preoccupied with million-selling novelty act Crazy Dogggz. During a break from filming in a Brooklyn warehouse, McKenzie and Clement sat down at Murray's desk with The A.V. Club, which resisted the urge to call the roll.
The A.V. Club: I remember seeing the first episode and thinking, "Wow, this is really funny. I'm glad they got a full season, because that's obviously going to be all there is." The next thing I know, you guys are selling out 3,000-seat theaters.
Bret McKenzie: It could have slipped by. There are a lot of good shows that don't get picked up. Like that Ben Stiller pilot, Heat Vision And Jack? That would have been a great show, but somehow it slipped by.
Jemaine Clement: That's even weirder than our show, really.
AVC: You'd already done a version of the show for BBC Radio, so you hit the ground running. Even the pilot is fully formed, in terms of visual sensibility and the characters' identities. Were there things you wanted to do differently in the second season?
JC: I think we made the same mistakes again.
BM: I think we learnt, but we probably didn't—
JC: Apply our learning.
BM: Apply our lessons, yeah. One thing we did learn was that the transition to song is a really crucial moment in the musical format. It's easier if the song somehow slips into the scene, rather than a hard cut to a music video. So we kind of played around with different ways of transitioning from the real world of the show into the surreal world of the music videos.
AVC: The first season is almost an encyclopedia of the New York alternative-comedy scene, with Kristen Schaal and Eugene Mirman in recurring roles, and guest appearances by Todd Barry and Demetri Martin. Was there a thought that that might be a good way to get the show to an American audience?
BM: No.
JC: It can go a long time with just New Zealanders, but we try to make sure there's American characters in it. I'm always aware when we're looking through the script that in the first few scenes, there should be an American character.
BM: We didn't cast them to try and break into a market or anything. We cast them mainly 'cause we knew them. And we didn't want to have people that were well-known.
JC: It really is like, "Who do we know?" Todd, Demetri, Arj [Barker], and Eugene are all the Americans we knew.
AVC: Every comedian who's ever opened a rock show, basically.
BM: Yeah, that's true, it's the same circuit. John Hodgman is another one. This season, we ran out of people we knew.
To read the rest of the interview, than please go here: A.V. Club interview with FotC
Really Arty Poster Search
I was checking my e-mail today, and I was updated to some new contest being run by HBO. The contest is simple, create the best arty poster you can, send it in before 11:59 AM ET on February 20th, 2009. You'll have enough time. I myself might even try it out, and I'll post my best artistic ability when the contest ends.
Anyways, the winner gets their own poster back, signed by both Bret and Jemaine, and in a nice frame. Also, HBO might make them available for sale.
Go to the contest page here.
And for more details on the contest, go here.
Photo aquired from HBO FotC wiki page
Time Out New York cover/interview
Source - Time Out New York
The Hot Seat
Time Out New York / Issue 693 : Jan 8–14, 2009
Flight of the Conchords
The Kiwi comics are No. 1 in Brooklyn!
By John Sellers
They came from New Zealand armed with songs about killer robots and racist dragons—and, improbably, they scored. Since June 2007, when their cultish musical-comedy show debuted on HBO, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, better known as Flight of the Conchords, have garnered a Grammy, two Emmy nominations and a No. 3 spot on the Billboard album chart (for their self-titled debut). Plus, this week’s cover! In advance of the January 18 launch of the second season of their HBO series, we spoke to Clement and McKenzie on the Flight of the Conchords set in Greenpoint.
Time Out New York: The new season debuts just two days before the presidential inauguration. How have you changed to pander to the Obama generation?
Bret McKenzie: The second season’s more optimistic.
TONY: Is that because of Obama, or is it because your album went to No. 3?
McKenzie: Well, it was No. 1 in New Zealand.
TONY: That changes everything. How many copies need to sell to earn that honor?
Jemaine Clement: Two.
McKenzie: There are only 4 million people in New Zealand.
TONY: Well, that’s bigger than Brooklyn.
McKenzie: So by that measure, our album was No. 1 in Brooklyn.
TONY: A lot of your fans are female. How many hearts have you broken?
McKenzie: Seven hearts. That’s combined.
Clement: It’s sad.
McKenzie: Jemaine’s more the heartbreaker. He’s broken four.
Clement: Bret’s trying to catch up.
TONY: You used to be so much chunkier when you were performing under the name Tenacious D. How hard was it to lose all that weight?
Clement: HBO insisted on liposuction.
McKenzie: That’s funny. We met [Tenacious D’s] Kyle Gass in L.A. and he said, “You guys are like a skinny version of us.”
TONY: How often do you hear the comparison?
McKenzie: Not as often as we expected when we first started over here.
Clement: Yeah. When the previews started, everyone said it. There were lots of “Tenacious D Light” comments. But it disappeared after the show debuted.
TONY: Like the D, you guys bill yourself as a duo. But you’re more of a quartet, if you count Jemaine’s sideburns.
Clement: Are you saying that my sideburns are two extras? I haven’t really thought about that. I’m so used to them that I don’t think of them as people, I suppose.
TONY: Bret, you appear as an elf in the first Lord of the Rings movie for, like, four seconds.
Clement: If that.
McKenzie: Well, five.
Clement: Have you really timed it?
McKenzie: No.
TONY: There’s a fan site describing your character, Figwit, as “perfect, pouty and gorgeous.” Wow.
McKenzie: Yeah. A group of fans from all around the world flew to Edinburgh to meet me and to watch us play at the Fringe Festival.
Clement: It was a little creepy because they’d get so nervous. They would be quivering. Jealous much, Jemaine?
Clement: Nah, I wasn’t jealous.
McKenzie: Yeah, he was jealous. He just got over it, like, five years ago.
TONY: How did the Concorde plane crash in Paris in 2000 affect the band?
McKenzie: We had the name before the terrible Concorde crash. But we were worried that people would think it was a joke based on the tragedy. Which it had nothing to do with.
Clement: I think some people did think that. But we soldiered on with it.
McKenzie: We just didn’t play in Paris.
TONY: Are you bummed that the Concorde is no longer in service?
McKenzie: It’s a shame. I always wanted to do a photo shoot with us in the Concorde. We’ll have to do that on Photoshop now.
TONY: Do you ever miss the days when no one knew who you were?
Clement: We shot a scene yesterday, a gig at a bar, where there was only this one guy and his shopping bags. At the end, they turn the lights on and there’s no one there. That was based on a real gig that we did in Canada.
TONY: That must have been painful.
Clement: Yeah. We don’t even know when that person left.
Flight of the Conchords premieres Jan 18 at 10pm on HBO.
FotC in TV Guide
"Last year we didn't think we would do another season. It killed us." Says Bret McKenzie, one half of the singing duo Flight of the Conchords, whose escapades are chronicled in the HBO comedy of the same name. Luckily, he and partner Jemaine Clement recharged and are back on January 18 for season 2 with more financial woes, romantic mishaps and some injuries that occur during a misguided self defense session. And of course, their wry ditties are interspersed through the episodes. The pair, who won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album last year, write all their songs together. "Jemaine thinks he knows more about music," says McKenzie, "but I Do. - Nicki Gostin
Get your FotC tunes sooner
Source
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
FotC live at Amoeba Records
Here's the set list:
1. Intro
2. The Reliable DG-20
3. The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room
4. Inner City Pressure
5. Mutha'uckas
6. Albi The Racist Dragon
7. The Prince of Parties
8. Time Tripping (Interlude)
9. Bowie
10. Robots
Please check out Amoeba Records.
You can also check the video out on Amoeba Records website, here.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Flight of the Conchords On Set - Season 2
Friday, January 2, 2009
Arj Barker's FotC Promo
I was unable to post the video from HBO, but I found a recorded video of it on youtube, I hope you all like. Anyways the video is of Dave rapping about his pawn shop, pretty funny stuff.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Murray's Street Team
How would you like to make your own FotC t-shirts? Well now you can. After checking out the FotC HBO page, I noticed an area called "Murray's Street Team". This area allows you to download a zipped file. In this file is various FotC templates to use on making your t-shirt. There's also directions and so on. Anyways, have fun.
FotC HBO Community Page
Download the zip here.
Photo obtained from HBO
FotC Lipdub
To check out the promotion, watch the videos, or upload your own, go here.