Flight of the Conchords will play five shows in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland this November, the musical comedy duo’s first New Zealand tour since 2012.
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement announced the dates on Monday. “Kia ora Aotearoa! You asked, and we listened,” the pair wrote on Facebook, as reported by 1News. “We’re bringing the guitars out of the tall grass and heading your way this spring for three very special shows in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.”
The tour opens at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington on Tuesday 10 November. The duo then play Wolfbrook Arena in Christchurch on Thursday 12 November, return to the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday 14 November and finish with two nights at The Civic in Auckland on Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 November, according to promoter Eccles Entertainment’s tour page.
Tickets go on general sale through Ticketmaster at 1pm on Friday 18 September. An artist presale runs from noon on Thursday 17 September to noon on Friday, but Ticketmaster says fans have to sign up for it by 11.59pm on Monday 14 September, the same day the tour was announced. Buyers are limited to four tickets per show in the presale and six in the general sale. Every ticket is mobile-only and held in the Ticketmaster app, and the agency is asking fans to check the mobile number on their account before the sale opens, because a text verification code is needed to join the queue.
Demand is unlikely to be a problem. The tour follows a run of surprise warm-up shows at Wellington’s Meow Nui in April. A press release issued on 7 April announced four shows there, on 16, 17, 21 and 22 April. RNZ and 1News both report the duo ended up playing five, and that they sold out in minutes.
Those were their first shows after an eight-year break. The pair had not performed live since recording their HBO special Live in London in 2018, Variety reported in January. From Wellington they went on to two sold-out nights at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in May, as part of the Netflix Is A Joke festival.
Getting the act back into shape took some work. McKenzie told RNZ ahead of the Los Angeles shows that the pair had to relearn their own material. “We were in hysterics trying to remember our own songs, and we ended up watching ourselves. We have to pull up YouTube clips to remember how to play our songs. We’re like a bad covers band of ourselves.”
The last New Zealand tour looked very different. When the NZ Herald reported the dates in March 2012, it was a 10-show run starting at the Hawkes Bay Opera House in Hastings on 13 June and taking in Hamilton, Auckland, New Plymouth, Wellington, Dunedin, Queenstown and Nelson. Tickets were priced between $55 and $79. The duo had not performed in New Zealand since 2009, and the Herald noted that on the back of the HBO series they had played to crowds of 17,000 at the Hollywood Bowl and 12,500 at Wembley Arena. More dates followed, and Eventfinda’s listing for the 2012 tour shows extra arena shows in Auckland and Wellington at the end of June and the start of July.
Some things have not changed. In 2012 the presale was capped at four tickets per person, and promoters held back 300 tickets in each city for fans willing to queue at a box office, a move the Herald said was meant to give genuine fans a chance against scalpers. This year’s presale has the same four-ticket cap, but the queue is now online and the ticket lives on a phone.
The 2026 tour is also much shorter. Five shows in three cities means regional centres that hosted the Conchords in 2012, including Hastings, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Dunedin, Queenstown and Nelson, are not on the list this time.
Wellington gets two of the five nights, which suits a band born there. McKenzie and Clement were flatmates at Victoria University of Wellington, where they studied film and theatre, before forming Flight of the Conchords in the capital in 1998, according to Wikipedia. The Michael Fowler Centre is familiar ground, having hosted two of their 2012 shows. The Christchurch venue has a neat link to the band’s own history. Wolfbrook Arena in Addington opened in September 1998, the same year the Conchords formed, and was renamed after sponsor Wolfbrook Property Group on 1 June 2023. It can hold more than 7,000 people for concerts.
The duo’s rise ran from a six-part BBC Radio 2 series, made in 2004 and broadcast in 2005, to the HBO sitcom Flight of the Conchords, which ran from 2007 to 2009 and made songs such as Business Time and Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros known around the world. Their record The Distant Future won the Grammy for best comedy album in 2008.
Both have kept busy apart. McKenzie won the Academy Award for best original song in 2012 for Man or Muppet, from the film The Muppets, and released his debut solo album Songs Without Jokes in 2022. Clement has been writing for comedy horror television, RNZ reported.
For fans who missed out on the Meow Nui shows, November is the first chance in 14 years to see the Conchords on a New Zealand tour. Anyone planning to try for the presale has until midnight tonight to register.
Did you see Flight of the Conchords on their 2012 tour, or are you lining up for tickets this time? Tell us which song you most want to hear in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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