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Revolutionary French duo Daft Punk stunned the music world Monday morning by announcing their breakup via an elaborate video. The announcement was all the more surprising given that the has been largely dormant since their 2013 album, “Random Access Memories,” won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and has largely stopped performing in live after their triumphant world tour in 2007. The two songs they recorded with the Weeknd on his 2016 album “Starboy” could be their last high profile releases as Daft Punk.
However, around 15 years ago it looked like the band might be on their last legs: their 2005 album, “Human After All” was considered a flop, receiving lukewarm reviews and selling just 10%. more copies than its 2001 predecessor, “Discovery.” Plans for a much-discussed tour were put on hold until Coachella came calling with a six-figure offer, allowing Daft Punk to finally realize his ambitions on the concert stage – and on that dazzling stage, the songs of ” Human After All ”made sense. The result was an unprecedented audiovisual spectacle unlike anything seen in electronic music before, with many attendees calling it the greatest concert they have ever seen, and more than one reviewer calling the galvanizing Coachella gave birth to EDM.
In August 2007, the day after dazzling 12,000 fans at Keyspan Park in Coney Island, New York, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took off their robot helmets and sat down for their first interview. in the United States for many years. In these unreleased clips, they discuss how Coachella kicked off the tour, their plans to release a live album from the shows, and what they hoped to accomplish in the years to come.
Elements of this interview appeared on Billboard in 2007; Here’s an edited version of the full conversation.
Why do you think there was such a powerful reaction to this tour?
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: I think it’s a combination of factors. First of all, it’s rare: [Normally] when you make a record, you go on tour. The “Discovery” album was a pretty successful record but we didn’t tour after that. Also, I think especially in the United States, it took a long time for people to get to know the music. House music or electronic music in general was not [widely popular] in the United States 10 years ago, but now it’s spread everywhere, on the radio and in supermarkets. It always takes a lot longer for foreign artists in the United States to be known here, even though at the time they had a lot of fans.
It’s pretty unprecedented for an electronic band to perform in front of 12,000 people like you did last night at Coney Island.
Thomas Bangalter: Yeah, but we’ve played a lot of sold-out shows all over America and Europe. Maybe it’s the fact that we started playing concerts last year, like Coachella and in France. People were really excited about the shows, so more and more people are coming. Overall, I think this tour will have been between half a million and 650,000 people watching the shows. It’s definitely a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s just because we haven’t toured in 10 years.
Did you decide to shoot based on the offers you received or did you creatively think it was time to do shows?
Bangalter: It was a combination of the two. The interesting thing was that Coachella was a big offer financially, and that triggered the ability to take the show to the next level. We were ready to play again – we never did anything for the money or tried to gain an economic advantage. But we have some crazy ideas, and those ideas can get expensive. The ideas we had for this tour require 20 people on the road; it’s not like those big rock stars with hundreds of people. But it’s still very difficult – a lot of technology, computers and sets. Knowing that we could now do things that we couldn’t do when we were playing in a room of 1,000 people sparked crazier ideas and the ability to make it happen.
Like what, precisely?
Bangalter: We have 15 tons of equipment, including prototypes or modified standard technology – things that we have redesigned. We built the custom pyramid. We created a production company, Daft Arts, in Los Angeles, to work on [the duo’s 2006 film] “Electroma.” We really used it, the same way we would produce a music video, to make it a totally independent performance. There is a lot of troubleshooting and tech and custom computer building. We’re working with Ableton Live, which is really at the heart of the performance right now: we have the music and the lights in sync. It really brings the robots and the characters to life, in this universe we’ve been working on for 12 years.
So with all this technology, what are you actually doing up there during the gig?
Bangalter: We control the music and some of the signals with the lights. It becomes technical. We have synthesizers and remotes in the pyramid. All the equipment is on tall and tall towers to the side, with Ethernet remotes. It’s new. But it’s fun, because we tried to really approach it from scratch and rethink a whole rig that will allow us to do what we want to do. We want to be able to loop stuff, mix, filter the EQ, and transpose. It’s a bit chaotic. But what we focused on is what you get from the series: an intense experience of music, lights, and robots, with a fine line between fiction and reality. That’s really the concept of this tour, which was not the concept of what we were doing 10 years ago. We wanted to create an intense experience.
But if you suddenly decide, in the middle of the set, that you want to do a 15 minute version of “One More Time”, can you do it?
Bangalter: The program allows you to do this, but the show as it is currently does not. It works on a combination of music and visuals. So what we’ve been working on the most is the ability to change things within certain time frames, but we still have to move on to a certain point, or to the next song. Ten years ago, we weren’t interested in such a visual implementation of it: it’s a total representation of what we’re trying to express, and not just audio. We really see it as sort of abstract storytelling – an audio / visual revelation, from a very minimal monochrome start to a multicolored finish.
We really tried to reinterpret each song to connect with each other, in the middle of this mash-up concept. We have a very precise picture of the evolution of the three albums that we have produced [1997’s “Homework,” 2001’s “Discovery” and “Human After All”], despite the moderate response we got for the last one. A large number of tracks [“Human After All”], which has not been well received by critics and maybe not audiences, got a stronger response when we play them on the series. It was really important for us to try to express that – that kind of triangle that exists between the three records. I think the tour was a success in this way.
Kanye West’s new song “Stronger” is No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. What do you think of his sample of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?”
Bangalter: We did “Harder, Better” seven years ago, then he sampled it. We had used a sample of an Edwin Birdsong “Cola Bottle Baby”, and he then sampled the a cappella that we used. It’s funny. It’s pretty symptomatic of this sampling circle and being sampled and passing it on to the next producer, all the more coming from the white children of America and France and passing it on to the urban culture. We did the same in a different way with Busta Rhymes, which used a “Technologic” sample. We have always been very open and excited about unexpected connections.
Have you met Kanye?
by Homem-Christo: Yes. The song is really great and we really like it. When we met him he was as much a fan of his work as we are. It was as if we had collaborated on him in the studio. He was happy to see that we liked it so much. It’s not a studio collaboration, but the vibe of the music we do separately is tied to what he did with the song. It’s really super. On our way to San Francisco at the airport, we heard him on Power 106 in LA. The DJ had edited our song at the beginning, then it turned into his song.
What do you think of how branding has become so prevalent in dance music culture?
Bangalter: We are part of the older generation in a way, where people still sold millions of records. We were fortunate to present our name at a time when the process was perhaps easier than today. And we are lucky that we can still make a living, go on tour and work on experimental projects. We’ve really tried so far to stay out of the exclusive offers: “Robot Rock” was on “Entourage” last week and “Technologic” was in an iPod commercial. It’s just part of the culture. We are not rejecting it. It can be the soundtrack of everyday life. We are happy to be a part of it. But so far we are not officially sponsored by any brand on an exclusive basis.
How long do you think Daft Punk will not release an album or tour again?
Bangalter: This we can not answer. We don’t decide the release date until we make the music. I think what’s cool is that we’re still trying to do something that hasn’t been done, or ultimately, that we’re not doing on our own yet. This is how we felt about the film and this tour. It’s hard to come back to the studio and work with ideas that we’ve never expressed before. Some ideas take time, but some only take a few weeks. So we’ll see.
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