Jemaine Clement Stars in New Comedy The Festival

One half of the world’s favourite (and only) digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy-folk double act, Jemaine Clement has more than a Flight of the Conchords reunion tour on his plate this year. He’s been working on getting Wellington Paranormal on to British TV and stars in music-and-mud comedy The Festival. Clement talks to Time Out magazine.

The Festival is from the creators of the Inbetweeners and according to IMDb, is “a movie about friendship, growing up, and going mad in a field”.

“[In The Festival] I’m the overly keen stepdad who hasn’t been in the relationship with Nick’s [Joe Thomas] mum for very long. He’s trying to make a loving father-son connection, even though they don’t know each other that well. It’s very suspicious,” Clement explains.

“I went to an electronic music festival for the millennium, but I don’t take the necessary drugs to enjoy that music. Flight of the Conchords played in the comedy tent at Glastonbury [in 2004]. I remember saying, ‘Belle And Sebastian are on in half an hour, let’s get over there.’ And we got there for the last song.”

Time Out’s Phil de Semlyen asks Clement, 44, what is on the Conchords’ rider.

“It’s pretty boring – a lot of cheese,” he says. “One time we got a really exciting rider that had a lot of vodka and bourbon and brown bread and stuff. It turned out that Whitesnake were playing the same venue the next night and we’d got their rider. It was a funny mixture of hard liquor and health food.”

Clement tells the magazine that the Flight of the Conchords special, scheduled for HBO in the United States in October, was a mix of new material and “a few old bits that we haven’t recorded live before”.

Original article by Phil de Semlyen, Time Out, August 6, 2018.