David Bowie dead: Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement on what inspired 'Bowie's in Space'

"We had never heard a parody song like this before, that fawned over the artist instead of mocking them. Would people laugh if it wasn’t mean?"

A part of what hit so hard emotionally in Bowie's death was the realisation of exactly how expansive his influence was. Seeing friends, family, colleagues; posting vastly different remembrances, but each just as treasured as the next. Between favourite songs, between Modern Love, Heroes, or Lazarus; Flight of the Conchords' loving parody Bowie in Space cropped up again and again in people's tributes.

Somehow, this giddy tribute sums all of it up. Loving, teasing; creatively joyous and "pretty far out, man". Or perhaps because it's easier to just think Bowie's not left, just returned to his home turf in space.

The Conchords' own Jemaine Clement took to Spinoff to pay heartwarming tribute to his hero, talking warmly of the influences which brought about Bowie in Space; "In 1999 Bret McKenzie and I were sitting with our guitars in our dingy flat in Wellington trying to learn David Bowie songs. They were catchy, which usually translates to being easy to play. Not David Bowie. He’d taken Paul McCartney’s style of making an epic medley song and made it more subtle, parts seamlessly changing without you even realising it. You’d just feel the change like a change in your own mood."

"We continued to play our guitars, imitating him anyway. That was the solution. We would make up our own Bowie song and play it in our stupid hobby band that had a gig every second Thursday in Wellington. Despite being technically unable to carry off the originals, we would create our own David Bowie song."

"We started by asking him questions and referencing his lyrics as if we were sending transmissions to our hero through space. Do you read me Boweeeh!? Did you ever end up going to Mars, Bow-way? Was there life on it?"

Clement continues by regaling a hilarious conversation the pair had with a local radio DJ, still in the Bowie characters; phoning in to exclaim "It's Bowie... and Bowie!", before returning home to write the song beloved by fans today for its warm reflection on the musical legend, "We had never heard a parody song like this before, that fawned over the artist instead of mocking them. Would people laugh if it wasn’t mean? We didn’t care if they didn’t laugh, we were obsessed. We were in some kind of writing fever."

Fast forward 7 years later, and the production for the Flight of the Conchords TV show. Fans will of course know well that the Bowie in Space song was integrated into the season 1 episode 'Bowie', in which the star visits a low self-esteem suffering Bret to reassure him that all skinny rock stars need to do to achieve glory is develop some flair. Which to Bret apparently involves wearing an eyepatch and revealing himself to the head of a musical greeting cards company, complete with "lightning bolts down his wanger."

What fans may not know, however, is that Bowie himself nearly made a cameo appearance on the show; "The someone we knew talked to the someone they knew’s friend of someone who represented him and possibly approached him about it. And he (or quite possibly merely a representative) said that he’d just done Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Extras and didn’t want to do another thing acting as a version of him. He’d rather just continue being the actual him. Fair enough, so would we. We wouldn’t be meeting our hero. Through the disappointment I was extremely relieved. As exciting as it is to meet your hero, the relief of not having to meet them is another, quite different and pleasant feeling."

Clement's piece also beautifully articulates Bowie's influence on his musical development; reminiscing on the 70s-born Conchords duo both looking back through his catalogue with a certain spirit of adventure. As he phrases it, "we were Bowie time travelers."