Q9 Playboy: Is it true you met in a college performance-art show about body image?

CLEMENT: Ah, you’ve been Googling us, haven’t you? Yes, that show was at Victoria College in Wellington, New Zealand. It wasn’t the first time we’d met, but it was one of our first shows together. It was specifically about male body image.

MCKENZIE: The experience of being a man in the modern world and all the problems that come with it.

CLEMENT: It had an all-male cast. There were five of us, and we needed somebody to play the women.

MCKENZIE: That was usually left up to me. I was the most feminine in the group.

CLEMENT: We put on live demonstrations throughout that show, like on how to interact with the opposite sex. We gave tips on finding the clitoris. And we had a scene about the female orgasm. It sounds pretty juvenile now. We were young. I was just 21 at the time.

MCKENZIE: I was 11.

Q10 Playboy: Do you remember when you started writing music together? Was it instant magic?

CLEMENT: When we started we didn’t know much about music. We weren’t very good guitarists. Our first song had only one chord. And then we did a second song with two chords. It started with one chord and then a bridge to a second chord and then back to the first chord. It was called “Rock Beat,” I think.

MCKENZIE: After that we got ambitious. We went up to three chords, and then four, and then five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. We eventually wrote a song with 11 chords.

CLEMENT: It was exhausting.

MCKENZIE: We finally went down again because it got too complicated. We stripped it back. Now our songs are usually only four chords.

CLEMENT: That seems like enough. Any more than that and you’re just showing off. That’s as much as the brain can handle.

Q11 Playboy: One of your first big breaks was in 2005, when Flight of the Conchords starred on its own BBC radio show. Did you think radio would be your ticket to stardom?

CLEMENT: [Laughs] Well, to be fair, radio is a much bigger deal in England than it is here, and it seemed enough for us at the time. We didn’t think of it as a stepping-stone to anything else. We’re very short-term planners.

MCKENZIE: It’s kind of a British tradition to make a radio show long before you make a television show. It helps you iron out the flaws in your ideas.

CLEMENT: And it’s ridiculously cheap.

Q12 Playboy: Before getting picked up by HBO, you briefly developed a TV series for NBC. What happened?

MCKENZIE: They never called us back. We finished the script and handed it to NBC, and that was the last we heard from them.

CLEMENT: They never told us they didn’t like it. They always said they liked it.

MCKENZIE: They never phoned us to say, “Yeah, uh…no thanks.”

CLEMENT: Is that how people do business in America? They just don’t call you back?

MCKENZIE: It doesn’t matter. HBO is a much better fit for us.

Q13 Playboy: Although your songs are satirical, they can also be musically complex. You’ve mastered genres as diverse as R&B, country and straight-ahead rock and roll. Is there any musical style you can’t conquer?

CLEMENT: We tried to do metal once, but it didn’t work out.

MCKENZIE: Not loud enough. I’ve always wanted to try Queen. Does that count as a musical genre?

CLEMENT: I think so, yeah.

MCKENZIE: Freddie Mercury is beyond us. I don’t know how he did it. Maybe it was the tight pants.

Q14 Playboy: You’ve also dabbled in hip-hop, giving yourself the rap names Hiphopopotamus and the Rhymenocerous. Will you get into a freestyle battle for us right now?

CLEMENT: We could do some freestyle, but we’d need a day or two to prepare.

MCKENZIE: We can’t just do it off the top of our head. We need some time to think about it.

CLEMENT: That’s the way we freestyle. It’s less improvisational and more…not in any way improvisational.

Q15 Playboy: You’re one of the few guitar-based rock acts to use the glockenspiel, a German-style xylophone. What’s the appeal?

MCKENZIE: You mean the rockenspiel. We call it the rockenspiel because it rocks more than any other instrument.

CLEMENT: Especially the marching-band one. Have you heard of it?

MCKENZIE: The marching-band glockenspiel—I’m sorry, rockenspiel—you can march with it while you’re playing, which obviously isn’t all that essential when you’re in the studio.