“We go, ‘Let’s go see if McDonald’s tastes the same in Scotland, because it might have Scottish roots because of the ‘Mc’ in ‘McDonalds’,” says Jack. Perhaps it was the uncommonly strong weed or the eight-hour jetlag, but on a walk about town, they decided that McDonald’s merited investigation. The frostiness melted completely during the summer of 1989, when The Actors’ Gang performed at the Edinburgh Festival. “I think he was a little threatened by the new kid trying to take his musical comedy spot, but then finally he realised that I just wanted to be his protegé.” “There was a weird kind of rivalry,” says Jack. The latter eventually landed a spot in the troupe, but ironically relations between the two men were initially frosty. Kyle was already a member, while Jack was, in his own words, “a fanboy”. They met at the end of the 80s through theatre company The Actors’ Gang. I don’t know, I just had some weird notion of music as a back-up plan.” “I figured I’d just keep practising and maybe I could play in bars.

“The music, for me, was kind of Plan B,” he says.

Kyle trundled down to Los Angeles from Northern California in the early 80s, harbouring dreams of becoming an actor. Kyle Gass – aka ‘Kage’ – is the yin to his partner’s yang: thoughtful, polite and possessed of a dry humour that dovetails perfectly into Jack’s sledgehammer flow (the pair’s real-life dynamic is really just a slightly toned-down version of their Tenacious D personas). You couldn’t avoid its dark magic and I didn’t want to live anywhere else.” “You could feel its hot, black, throbbing meat just emanating from the veins of Hollywood. Born in Hermosa Beach, California, his family moved to Culver City, just south of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Referred to in D-speak as ‘JB’ or ‘Jables’, he’s garrulous, passionate and prone to manic bouts of hyperbole.

“I liked being close to the excitement of the entertainment capital of the universe,” says Jack, speaking to Hammer with Kyle via Zoom. In the beginning, there was no Tenacious D, just a pair of would-be actors crossing paths in one of LA’s countless theatre troupes.

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