Bret McKenzie: ‘It was different writing songs that weren’t d*** jokes’

After finding fame with comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealander is leaving the laughs behind on his debut solo album ‘Songs Without Jokes’. He talks to Kevin E G Perry about winning an Oscar with The Muppets, pissing off Morrissey with The Simpsons, and Taika Waititi’s detachable penis

Bret McKenzie: ‘Everyone is trying to work out how to live with this doom around us and still try to have a good time!’ (Rebecca McMillan)

Early in 2010, Bret McKenzie decided it was about time he started guitar lessons. The New Zealand-born actor and songwriter enrolled himself in a class at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, a music school founded in 2001 by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. McKenzie’s new guitar teacher was naturally curious about what had inspired him to head back to school alongside children and beginners. He told him he had a show coming up. “He was like: ‘Oh that’s good, where are you playing?’” recalls the 46-year-old in his broad Kiwi accent. Sitting in the light and airy home studio above his garage in Wellington, he contorts his more-salt-than-pepper beard into an awkward grimace. “I was like: ‘Er, yeah... we’re playing the Hollywood Bowl.” He bursts out laughing. “Something very strange happened there.”

Such was the unstoppable rise of Flight of the Conchords, the two-man group McKenzie formed in 1998 with musical partner Jemaine Clement. Sardonically billed as “New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo”, the pair made a name for themselves on the stand-up circuit before earning global acclaim with a wildly popular HBO sitcom that ran from 2007 to 2009. The series spawned a Grammy-winning album and infectiously catchy viral hits like “The Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room)” and “Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros”.

Soon the pair were performing to thousands at venues such as London’s massive O2 Arena, where their lack of technical proficiency proved to be part of the charm. “We probably wouldn’t have been a comedy band if we’d been able to play our guitars better,” says McKenzie, who remembers realising at a one-off show with a top-class backing group that a more accomplished performance made the songs less funny. “We were aspiring to be a band, but there was something about the failure of our aspirations that was really the heart of a lot of the comedy.”

Flight of the Conchords: Jemaine Clement and McKenzie performing together in 2018 (Colin Hutton/HBO)

Since the Conchords turned down the chance to do a third season of their Emmy-nominated show in 2009, McKenzie has built a career as Hollywood’s go-to writer of funny songs. His smart, witty tunes have soundtracked two Muppets movies (2011’s The Muppets and 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted) and several episodes of The Simpsons, along with many other film and television projects. Privately, however, he’s spent the last few years working on songs that don’t necessarily land on a lyrical punchline. His debut solo album has the expectation-resetting title of Songs Without Jokes. “For me, it was different writing songs that weren’t d*** jokes,” he says. “Songs about feelings weren’t something I was familiar with [writing], even though that’s pretty much most other songs. While 99 per cent of songwriters write about their feelings, my career has been writing songs about characters and jokes.”

The album captures McKenzie revelling in the influence of 1970s musical heroes like Steely Dan, Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. It’s appropriate, then, that McKenzie recorded it in LA with some of Hollywood’s most revered session musicians. “Down the corridors in Ocean Way Studios they have all these gold records, and these guys walk along going: ‘Yeah, I did that one. And that one,’” he says reverentially, still a little awestruck at having the likes of Joey Waronker (drummer for Beck and REM) and Steely Dan sideman Dean Parks playing his music. “I was telling Steely Dan’s guitarist to play more like Steely Dan,” he laughs. “That was a real highlight!”

Lyrically, McKenzie frequently finds himself caught somewhere between Wellington, where he grew up and is now raising his family, and the glittering lights of Hollywood, where he works and has lived on and off for the better part of 10 years. “I started living between the two places in a very outrageous bi-coastal lifestyle with a 12-hour commute,” he says. On opener “This World”, he reflects on the fate of the planet and wrestles with the knowledge that frequent long-haul flights aren’t exactly helping. “There’s a real crisis for New Zealanders, because it’s very common to travel a lot for work but it’s completely irresponsible for the climate and the planet,” he says. “There’s a feeling that how we’re living is not sustainable. I think everyone’s feeling that. All my friends are. Everyone is trying to work out how to live with this doom around us and still try to have a good time! That’s the feeling I’ve been carrying around, and it comes through in the songs.”

McKenzie has been making music for as long as he can remember. Born in Wellington in June 1976, he grew up surrounded by the arts. His mother Deirdre was a ballet teacher who ran a contemporary dance company. His father, Peter, was a lawyer and musical theatre singer who, as McKenzie puts it, “gave up law for the more reliable income of training racehorses”. As a teenager, McKenzie played in a string of bands including the James Brown-indebted The Blue Samanthas and a reggae funk band called The Black Seeds. “I played in so many different groups,” he says. “It was one of those towns where the joke was [that] every Wellington band was the same musicians with a different name. It was all crossing over, and out of that sort of tapestry came Conchords.”

He first met Clement while studying drama and film at the Victoria University of Wellington. They were thrown together in a five-strong sketch comedy group that also included future Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi. “We had to devise a 10-minute piece about male body consciousness,” McKenzie recalls. “The costumes were skin-coloured bike pants with velcro detachable penises. We talked about what it was to be a man while naked. It was a very funny set-up.”

McKenzie (right) with Taika Waititi at the New York premiere of the director’s 2007 film ‘Eagle vs Shark’ (Amy Sussman/Getty)

McKenzie and Clement hit it off and got a flat together, where they lived while auditioning for various hospital-based soap operas that filmed in Auckland. “We started the band because we decided ‘To hell with these hospital dramas!’” he says. “We were just sitting around not getting parts as doctors or nurses.”

Waititi remained close, too, and would come round to paint in their flat while the Conchords were writing songs. “He was painting these quite dark, moody artworks,” says McKenzie. “Ironically he’s also probably the best guitarist out of all of us. He played in a ska band and he could shred, but he’d solo over the top of the band.” Waititi would go on to direct four episodes of Flight of the Conchords, including the finale. “Then he went through Sundance and kind of evolved,” explains McKenzie. “I think it’s great he’s had so much success. He’s a brilliant artist.”

That student flat produced not one but two Oscar winners. McKenzie won Best Original Song for “Man or Muppet” (from 2011’s The Muppets), a soaring power ballad performed by Jason Segel and mixed-up muppet Walter. He keeps the statuette on top of the piano in his lounge, a reminder of the night he got to live out all his Hollywood fantasies. “People think Los Angeles is just glamour, parties and celebrities,” he says. “It’s not like that. You maybe see one celebrity occasionally. It’s mostly very lonely and a lot of driving. For that night, winning an Oscar, LA was like what people imagine LA to be like. We were at one of the cocktail things and my friend goes: ‘This is like being at Madame Tussauds but everyone’s real.’ Then the next day, you’re back in the supermarket going: ‘Where’s George Clooney?’”

McKenzie after winning the Oscar for Best Original Song in February 2012 (Kevork Djansezian/Getty)

As well as his work with The Muppets, McKenzie has become something of a regular on The Simpsons. He first appeared on the show alongside Clement in 2010, with the pair cast as Lisa’s performing arts camp counsellors. Since then he’s written music for two further episodes, and reveals he’s currently at work on “an R&B song” to be featured in a fourth. Last year he wrote loving parodies of The Smiths – “Hamburger Homicide” and “Everyone Is Horrid Except Me (and Possibly You)” – for an episode that guest-starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Quilloughby, the Morrissey-esque frontman of fictional band The Snuffs. Morrissey himself failed to see the funny side, complaining: “In a world obsessed with hate laws, there are none that protect me.”

Quilloughby and Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons/Twitter)

McKenzie seems bemused by his reaction. “I’m a huge Morrissey/Smiths fan but, you know, I have some issues with Morrissey’s political positions,” he says. “We didn’t really anticipate Morrissey’s anger, and his public anger. If you get ridiculed by comedians, usually the best thing is to laugh it off and enjoy the joke. Try to acknowledge that everyone has something people can laugh at. He took it very seriously and publicly, and that blew it up! People probably wouldn’t have noticed it. Because of his furor it was the most press The Simpsons had in years.”

In news to delight fans of both the Hiphopopotamus and the Rhymenoceros, McKenzie hints that there could be more to come from New Zealand’s fourth most popular funk-comedy folk combo. “I think we’ll do something,” he says. “But I don’t think we know what yet.” It probably won’t be a long-rumoured Flight of the Conchords movie (“We don’t have a movie script”), but he’s feeling confident that the future after Songs Without Jokes is most likely a few more songs with them. “I was kind of obsessed that these would be songs without jokes,” he says. “Now I’ve come out the other side going: ‘You can relax a bit mate, you don’t need to be quite so serious.’”

‘Songs Without Jokes’ by Bret McKenzie is out now