One Hollywood star, one gifted guitarist and a whole lotta sick jokes - heavy metal comedy duo Tenacious D talk to Brian Boyd.
Some musicians, tragically, fancy themselves as actors. Few actors, though, have the temerity to strap on a guitar and do the whole "Hello Cleveland!" thing and those that do, like Keanu Reeves, soon scurry back to the film set. What then to make of these two inter-disciplinary freaks: one is short and furry, the other large and bald; together they've appeared in dozens of movies, most of them forgettable, but the moment they stride out onto the stage with their acoustic guitars (not even "real" electric guitars), by some weird process of heavy metal alchemy, they turn into the best rock 'n' roll band in the world.
Tenacious D, or "the D" as they prefer to be known, are what happens when Spinal Tap, Derek and Clive and Iron Maiden get all mixed up together and mutate into the physical forms of Jack Black and Kyle Gass. To the untrained eye, they might seem like two Californian slacker slobs attempting a performance art piece as directed by the Farrelly brothers and incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't possess the entire AC/DC back catalogue, but thanks to some heavy duty self-mythologising, a rabid cult following, a fan base that includes Foo Fighter Dave Grohl and Radiohead, and the funniest songs this side of the new Whitney Houston album, the D are now so hot, you touch them and you burn.
They call it "folk metal", a weird unplugged sonic sensation of dumbed-down songs, the literary highlight of which is a "tribute" to rock screamer Ronnie James Dio. It's not just the songs, though: while recording their eponymous debut album, they left the tapes rolling to pick up their inimitable and skewed banter, wherein they treat of "adult" subjects in a childish manner. Both absurd and inventive, the sketches sound like outtakes from a Kid Rock press conference.
"You can hardly call the D the hardest working band in showbusiness," says Jack Black, as an actor best known for his scene- stealing appearance in High Fidelity. "It's taken us 10 years to get our album out. But now we want people to love the D, and fear the D. We rock hard. Well, the truth is we only rock hard half the time, the other half, we rock extremely softly."
What's with the acoustic guitars, you're supposed to be a metal/comedy duo?
"We're the D, we do what we want. We are rock with a capital R, no matter what instruments we use. Although it is fair to say it's a minimalist setup, and once people realise how much more we make without taking a full band out with us, they'd understand," he says.
That accepted, is it not a fact that you've got to be white, male and have a working knowledge of the collected works of Iron Maiden to understand the full D experience?
"No, no, no," he says, "we're not a metal in-joke . . . most of the time. Sometimes, though, we do get a bit more sausages than doughnuts (men than women) at the gigs, but we're crossing over now - who fears the D?"
A lot of celebrities now are looking for a bit of D action - ever worry that you'll be celeb-endorsed to death? "No, people like Dave Grohl worked on the album for free and appeared in the video, and people like Thom Yorke from Radiohead - well, he dislikes me intensely, I believe, but then a lot of people do."
Although nominally a "humorous" band, the D still have very good stand-alone songs that would be welcome in the "folk-metal" canon without the funny lyrics. What is paramount when writing - the tune or the joke?
"Kyle is the riff-meister in the band, he'll come up with something really good and I'll throw down some words over it - but we don't think of it in those terms. He's actually a classically trained guitarist - he taught me how to play the guitar, which was the most tedious thing on the planet, listening to someone playing the same three chords for 300 hours."
Black and Gass met in acting school. "We knew each other but weren't really friends, I was musical but couldn't play, but he could and had already written some songs. That was about 10 years ago and now we don't know if we did acting jobs between doing the D or we did the D between acting jobs - we've forgotten. We started off playing in small bars, then a guy who had a really weird TV comedy series saw us and started making small films of us.
"It was always a live thing, but then we ended up playing at a music festival, South by Southwest in Texas, and all these record companies were trying to get us to record an album. So after getting together as the D in about 1990, we brought out the album 10 years later. And all I know about the next album is its title: Unicorns and Rainbows."
Scatalogical and perverse, but with an undertow of Benny Hill-type humour, the album is a love it/loathe it affair. And despite its success, Black and Gass are still continuing as actors, although they're excited about combining the two skills in a Tenacious D film. "It's going to be called Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny and the only thing I can tell you about it now, because we haven't started filming or anything, is that it's going to be a quest movie."
Looking forward to playing again in Ireland, Black has fond memories of the D's last gig here, at the Ambassador in Dublin last summer, "although the gig was on the same night as Neil Diamond was, so obviously some of our fans were confused as to which show they should go to. The gig though was fine until we played Sunday Bloody D Day. I've got a message for Bono: Stop stealing our material . . . and lose the shades, man."
The album Tenacious D is on the Epic label. They play the Olympia, Dublin, on March 18th.