Flight of the Conchords

Last week we watched the very first episode of a series called ‘Flight of the Conchords’ and honestly, I loved it. The humour of this series was just fitting my taste and naturally I wanted to see more. Luckily, YouTube offered quite some clips of them to amuse me. While watching I started to wonder what Flight of the Conchords actually is. Of course it is a TV-series, but who are the people behind it and is there a deeper meaning behind the name?

To start with, Flight of the Conchords is a comedy band who originated in Wellington, New Zealand. The band revolves around the duo of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. In 1996, McKenzie and Clement met at the Victoria University of Wellington where they were flatmates. However, they didn’t start their career as a duo. In fact, they started out as a group consisting of five men as they were to create a short theatrical piece for their University Drama Club. And it was this group who started to perform outside of University under the name ‘So You’re a Man.’

It wasn’t before 1998 that Bret and Jemaine decided to start a band. Their first song was ‘Foux Du FaFa’ and back then they called themselves ‘Moustache.’ At the time, they performed this song at the Wellington Fringe Festival late night club which was more or less a success. They got quite encouraging feedback what lead to them continuing to write songs, and before they knew, the pair was getting more and more famous. And eventually they got not just their own American television series, but also were they the basis of a BBC radio series.

Now on to the maybe most interesting part about the band: their name. Where did it come from? To make it short, they made up the name just before a gig at the Thursday night Comedy Club. The duo was in dire need for a name as they realised that every band needs a band name. Apparently, Clement went to the bathroom before the gig and noticed the flat toilet was called ‘the Concorde’ which lead to him suggesting their current name. It might not be an amazing story, but in my opinion it is a quite fitting story for a band like them.