Celebrating NZ music throughout May: 13 – Flight of the Conchords and other musical comedy

Last weekend, I featured our beloved Topp Twins, still hilarious after all these decades. If you missed it, trundle along here and check them out. Let’s have some more laughter with other kiwi musical comedy.

Flight of the Conchords

I’ll start with a duo you may already know - Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie. Best known outside NZ for their HBO TV series of the same name, which also starred NZ comic Rhys Darby and US comics Kristen Schall and Arj Barker.

“Inner City Pressure” is from Episode 2, and is about the hard financial times they’re finding themselves in. Here’s a minute or so from the show, then into the song.

“Business Time” featured in Episode 5, Season 1, but here they are performing it live.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of their talent. Wikipedia describes Jemaine as “a New Zealand singer, comedian, musician, actor, voice actor, director, writer and multi-instrumentalist.” His movies include “Eagle vs Shark”, “Dinner for Schmucks”, “Men in Black 3” and “What we do in the Shadows” which he wrote and directed with Taika Waititi. Read more about him here.

Bret is described as a “comedian, actor, musician and producer”. He was formerly a member of The Black Seeds, who were featured by @conradt in his post on NZ dub and reggae. His movies include “Austenland”, “Two Little Boys” and “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”. Read more here.

Fred Dagg

Fred Dagg is the farmer alter ego of comedian John Clarke. When he passed away recently, I featured the Gumboot Song in this post. But let’s check out another one - We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are.

Marcus Turner

A favourite with my Arthritis class (and their grandchildren) is Marcus Turner’s “Spider in the Bath”. Alas, it’s nowhere to be found on Youtube. But I did find his “Chocolate Song” on Vimeo. This is a little long, and for my class I edit it down from 5 verses to 3!

Gish

While I was having a look about to see if I’d forgotten anyone, I came across Gish, who is a stand up comic, specialising in parodies of well known songs. This first clip is 8 minutes long, and not all music – but hey, it’s Sunday, you can spare 8 minutes, and I thought he was funny.

At 4 mins 10, he parodies Dave Dobbyn’s song “Loyal” which you can see the original of here and at 5 mins 40 he covers Hotel California. If you’re easily offended, you might stop watching at that point. If you’re not a kiwi, you might not pick up all the references. Just ask me in the comments if anything goes over your head.

If you liked him, here’s his version of Poi-E, which you can listen to here if you want a refresher before his parody.

Other comic / novelty songs

@ravenruis has featured a few in her Nostalgia series, including:

• “Put Another Log on The Fire” by Bill and Boyd – see it here
• “Life begins at 40” by Dave & The Dynamos– see it here
• “Puha and Pakeha” by Rod Derrett – see it here

Thanks for listening

Videos from Youtube. Top image is the official logo and appears everywhere. This copy came from Eventfinda.

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