Flight of the Conchords isn’t actually a band. New Zealanders Bret McKenzie, 30, and Jemaine Clement, 33, have only been parodying a folk-rock-rap-funk duo the past nine years. “Everyone knows that world of really low-rent bands doing gigs in bars with only their family and friends watching,” explains McKenzie. “The idea was we were these two deluded, useless, failed musicians who thought that we were a lot more successful than we were.”

Failure, it seems, is the key to success for the onetime roommates at Victoria University of Wellington. Featured on a 2005 episode of HBO’s comedy showcase One Night Stand, the group’s sarcastic humor shined (One song’s lyrics: “Makin’ love for two minutes / When it’s with me, you only need two minutes, ’cause I’m so intense”). HBO gave them an eponymous musical comedy series, premiering in June, in which they play a band from NZ struggling to make it in NYC. The duo collaborated with Emmy-nominated writer/director James Bobin (Da Ali G Show) for the show, and Sub Pop Records is releasing an album of their songs later this year. In June, Clement also stars in the film Eagle vs Shark, an awkward love story in the vein of Napoleon Dynamite.

The bigger the Conchords get, the harder it may be to believe their “starving artist” shtick. “When we started, we didn’t have any following at all,” remembers Clement. “We’d say, ‘When you parody folk music, you find a lot of women want you.’ People were going, ‘Yeah, sure guys.’ Now we say, ‘We’ll meet the girls over there,’ and actually get some girls to do that. The first time we pulled that off, I couldn’t believe it.” Like we said, they’re not actually a band.

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