“It was better when we practiced in the garage.” Bret McKenzie said that on stage at Meow Nui in Wellington. It came somewhere in a four-night run between 16 and 22 April. Jemaine Clement, mid-fumble, replied: “I could go get my phone and Google the lyrics?” The room laughed and they restarted the song. Stewart Sowman-Lund wrote it up for Boiler Room. By the time the same band reached the Greek Theatre on Saturday 9 May for Netflix Is A Joke Fest, they’d already played six warm-up shows to get there. Most reunion-tour coverage skips the warm-up ladder that gets a duo from a Wellington pub to a 5,900-seat festival headline, which is the bit I want to walk through here.

“This is hopefully the worst we’ll ever be.”

– Jemaine Clement, on stage at Meow Nui, Wellington, quoted by Stewart Sowman-Lund in Boiler Room.

Four nights at Meow Nui, then a Bowl

The Wellington shows went out as warm-ups in the act’s own announcement, no secret-gig framing or surprise-drop nonsense. The NZ Music Commission and Rolling Stone AU picked it up on 7 April. Four nights: Thursday 16, Friday 17, Tuesday 21, Wednesday 22 April. Presale code was “FOTC”, limit six per buyer, on Ticketek. Meow Nui is a few hundred capacity at the venue’s larger configuration. That means a few hundred friends, neighbours and a couple of music-press lurkers, in a town where Clement and McKenzie can walk into a coffee shop without being chased.

Then Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday 7 May. The Bowl seats just under 4,600 outdoors, which is sizeable but not a Greek-sized risk. Gates at 5.30pm, show at 7pm. That’s a single Southern California date with no festival branding on it, two days before the Joke Fest headline. From a booking perspective the run reads as a deliberate three-rung ladder. Small home venue x4, then a mid-size US warm-up, then a 5,900-seat headline x2. Six warm-up shows for two festival nights. Most acts I’ve watched do reunion tours skip rungs and pay for it in the first thirty minutes of the headline.

The Greek dates were Saturday 9 May and Sunday 10 May. Both sold out before the warm-up ladder was even announced, per the festival’s own listing. The warm-ups existed to stop Clement and McKenzie walking onto a 5,900-seat amphitheatre cold after eight years off; the tickets had moved on their own. Anyone who’s stood in a green room before a comeback gig will tell you that’s a sensible budget for nerves. The piece we already published on the eight-year gap and what it teaches comedy duos covered the big-picture maths; what I’m chasing here is who was actually in the Meow Nui room on those four nights, and how the set sounded by night four.

The Nigel Collins question

There’s a third Conchord on stage and his name is Nigel Collins. He’s been with the duo since 2008, plays cello, bass, keys, percussion and sings backup. He trades under the touring name The New Zealand Sympathy Orchestra (a joke they have never been asked to retire). Collins is the reason a Conchords show has working drum machine cues at all, and the reason the two leads can swap from acoustic to keytar to flute mid-bar without the song collapsing. If the warm-up ladder existed for anyone other than Clement and McKenzie, it existed for Collins, who hasn’t toured this material since 2018 either.

None of the official press talked about him much. The Consequence review by Liz Shannon Miller picked him out specifically: cello, bass, percussion, backup vocals, the lot. That’s the working detail. Honestly, a duo headlining the Greek without a third multi-instrumentalist is a totally different show, and it’s not the show anyone bought a ticket for. There’s a separate thread to pull on the off-camera labour of comedy reunions; we’ve touched on it covering Lenny Henry’s stand-up return after sixteen years, where the band and the crew did about half the heavy lifting.

Clement asked the audience if he could google his own lyrics

Clement’s first big admission at the Greek, per Miller’s Consequence review: “We could have benefited from another week of rehearsal.” Then a self-deprecating ICE joke (“ICE is going to get us, I’m already worried about how tan I got today”), and later: “We spent weeks getting ready for this, and this is what we achieved.” An audience member shouted that they looked like silver foxes. Clement is reportedly now a moustache man and someone yelled “sexy Einstein”, which he asked them politely to stop.

The setlist on setlist.fm is greatest-hits with no new material: “Father and Son”, “Hurt Feelings”, “Robots”, “Carol Brown”, “Business Time”, down through the back catalogue. Rhys Darby came out as Murray, Kristen Schaal came out as Mel. That cast revival has been covered elsewhere on Open Comedy. What I want to flag here is the texture the ladder produced. Booking a reunion act into a festival headline cold is the kind of thing that makes a Netflix taping crew’s editor earn their pay in post. The warm-up shows mean Saturday and Sunday at the Greek were already the seventh and eighth times this lineup had played the set in a month, which is why Clement could stop mid-song to make an ICE joke without losing the room.

No UK dates, and nobody’s whispering one

No UK dates. None. The official tour site lists Santa Barbara plus the two Greek nights, and that’s it. The Wellington run was four warm-ups at home, the US leg was three shows, and after Sunday 10 May the band has nothing else booked. British promoters who’ve been hopefully refreshing the act’s listing for a Hammersmith Apollo or Eventim announcement should probably stop. We’ve heard nothing from any of the agencies who’d book a UK run, and McKenzie has spent most of the post-Oscar decade scoring films, not writing duo material. If a second Conchords leg is coming, watch for a Live Nation onsale before any press release – that’s the order these things usually surface in.

The other contextual thing worth noting: Netflix is in the festival-as-special-pipeline business now. The same Joke Fest week put Jerry Seinfeld at the Greek on the Tuesday, hosted Seth Rogen’s Hilarity for Charity benefit, and ran a Kevin Hart live roast on a separate stage. The festival is now structured as a feed-the-streamer machine, and a Conchords reunion playing through warm-up shows in two countries to make sure the Greek footage was usable is exactly the kind of thing that ends up as a Netflix taping in 2027. None of that has been announced. But if you’re watching the Conchords’ Spotify songwriter credits or McKenzie’s IMDb for a tell, the camera positioning at the Greek is the better tell.

If anything stood out from the warm-up shows themselves it was Bret McKenzie’s tone in Wellington when he said “I’m scared of this one” before going into a song. He wasn’t joking. The Conchords work best when they sound like they’re slightly afraid of being on stage, which after eight years away they probably actually were. By the Saturday Greek crowd Clement was still telling 5,900 people they could have used another week of rehearsal, and the moustache joke had spread to at least one heckler shouting “sexy Einstein”.