Bret McKenzie on reforming Flight of the Conchords: 'We're like a bad covers band of ourselves'

Bret McKenzie is feeling both excited and intimidated to rejoin Jemaine Clement for their folk-comedy duo's first live outing in eight years.

"We were in hysterics trying to remember our own songs, and we ended up watching ourselves. We have to pull up YouTube clips to remember how to play our songs. We're like a bad covers band of ourselves."

The Wellington musician talks to Music 101 about writing songs for movies, improvising lyrics onstage and the acting "pro tip" Rhys Darby gave him for the upcoming TVNZ series New Zealand Spy.

Although he's also performing four NZ shows for his latest solo album Freak Out City soon, McKenzie's main gig these days is writing songs not for himself to sing but for soundtracks to movies like The Minecraft Movie and The Muppets (for which he won the 2012 Academy Award for Best Original Song for 'Man Or Muppet')

"It's a great job, because I can work in Wellington… I can live in New Zealand, but work on these great big movies."

Considering how much money is spent on making movies, the process is "surprisingly disorganised" and "quite chaotic", McKenzie says.

Right now, for example, he's under the pump writing songs for an animated Christmas movie that won't come out until at least 2028.

"They need the song now, ASAP. They keep telling me, 'Hurry up'."

After the international success of Flight of the Conchords and their hit HBO show, McKenzie says he learnt how to perform music for a live audience without delivering comedy when he toured his debut solo albumSongs Without Jokes in 2022.

"I lead the audience through, because they need a bit of help. Otherwise, it's a bit too much for them going, 'When are you going to play 'Business Time?'

At his recent live shows, McKenzie, who likens songwriting to flying in a dream, requests a theme from the audience and writes a song on the spot. He's said to his wife Hannah recently that he doesn't know if he can keep doing it because of the high stress.

"You're right on the edge, you know, on the edge of not knowing what's going to happen because you cannot plan it. You can't think, you've just gotta let it try and open up, let the song appear. It's incredibly stressful, but it's also exhilarating for everyone in the room."

McKenzie made his screen debut as the background elf Figwit in Lord of The Rings. He'll appear on our TV screens later this year as the boss in the upcoming "retro" TVNZ comedy series New Zealand Spies.

His character, who is only seen suited-up behind his office desk, is not unlike Rhys Darby's character Murray in Flight of the Conchords, he says.

"I was like, 'Rhys, how do I remember all these lines?' There's so many lines because I'm telling [the spies] about these long missions.

"Rhys goes, 'Oh, dude, what I do is just write them on bits of paper all over the desk, and then you pretend to move your bits of paper'. I got a pro tip from Rhys Darby."

This "pretty strange little song" was a favourite of McKenzie's dad, who was a horse trainer.

"He had a baritone voice, so he had exactly the same timbre of voice as this guy, so he could sing it exactly like the recording. It's got some funny lines like, 'I've got one fist of iron and one another of steel. If the right one don't get you then the left one will'.

"I love the song. It's the song that I sang when I was a kid, and it's the song Grandad sang to my kids, so it's a special family song."

This is one of the songs McKenzie partied to a lot in late-'90s Wellington - a "really cool time" in the city when artists and creatives got cheap rent on government-owned buildings set to be demolished by the new motorway.

He and Clement shared an open-plan warehouse space opposite Te Papa with writer Jo Randerson and filmmaker Taika Waititi, and Toby Laing from Fat Freddy's Drop next door.

Big enough to host a party of 300 "with heaps of room", at one birthday party for McKenzie, a bunch of friends choreographed a flash-mob dance number as a gift.

In the late '80s, McKenzie was living in Wellington with his mum Deirdre Tarrant, a ballet teacher who ran the Footnote Dance Company, when Don McGlashan of the Front Lawn came to stay.

The band arranged for 13-year-old McKenzie and his brother to be ushers at their "really imaginative and playful, super-funny and kind of Kiwi" musical theatre show, whose mix of storytelling and song had had a formative influence on his career.

"It's really lucky to be the usher or backstage because you get to watch the show over and over again, and it really sinks in what they're doing and the techniques and the magic and how it's made."

McKenzie remembers covering this James Brown song as a drummer with The Black Seeds at a couple of successive New Year's shows in Gisborne.

"Weirdly, James Brown, when I was a teenager, was one of the first pieces of music that really opened my mind to music.

"I was staring at the speaker, going, 'What is this? How are they doing that?' I think it was the first time I heard really amazing musicians killing it."

"There's something about this song... I just completely love it.

"There's just so much integrity to the music and the song and the performance that it's breathtaking. It's so beautiful. It's a really cool song. This version is so special."

"I got to meet The Beths last year in LA. Liz [Stokes] did a warm-up show at Largo, this really cool theatre, and I sang a couple of songs there.

"I remember that night hearing this song, and I was just really blown away by how beautiful the song is, and her voice is crazy good. It's one of those magic combinations of a great song, great singer, and yeah, I think the recording captures it … It sounds amazing with the band as well. It's a special song. I think this one will be around for a long time."