The innovative French duo Daft Punk surprised the music world on Monday morning by announcing their separation via an elaborate video. The announcement was even more surprising because the group had been largely asleep since their 2013 album, “Random Access Memories”, won the Grammy for Album of the Year and stopped performing live after their triumphant 2007 world tour. songs that they recorded with Weeknd on their 2016 album “Starboy” may be their last high profile releases as Daft Punk.
However, about 15 years ago, it looked like the group could be in its final stages: their 2005 album, “Human After All”, was considered a failure, receiving warm reviews and selling only 10% of the copies of its predecessor. 2001, “Discovery.” The plans for a long and discussed tour were shelved until Coachella came up with a six-figure offer, allowing Daft Punk to finally fulfill his ambitions on the stage of the show – and on that dazzling stage, the songs from “ Human After All “made sense. The result was an unparalleled audiovisual show, unlike any that had ever been seen in electronic music, with many participants calling it the best show they had ever seen, and more than one critic calling the Coachella galvanizer that defined the birth of EDM.
In August 2007, the day after dazzling 12,000 fans at Keyspan Park in Coney Island, New York, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo from Daft Punk took off their robot helmets and sat down for their first interview. in the United States in many years. In these unpublished passages, they discuss how Coachella started the tour, their plans to release a live album of the shows and what they hoped to accomplish in the years to come.
Elements of that interview appeared on Billboard in 2007; the following is 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 is a combination of factors. First, it is rare: [Normally] when you make an album, you go on tour. The “Discovery” album was a very successful album, but we didn’t tour after that. Also, I think that especially in the USA, it took some time for people to get to know the music. House music or electronic music in general was not [widely popular] in the USA 10 years ago, but now it is spread everywhere, on the radio and in supermarkets. It always takes a lot longer for artists from outside the US to be known here, even if they had a lot of fans at the time.
It is quite unprecedented for an electronic group to play for 12,000 people like you did last night on Coney Island.
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, but we have done many shows with sold out tickets across America and Europe. Maybe it’s the fact that we started doing shows last year, like Coachella and France. People were very excited about the shows, so there are more and more people coming. Overall, I think this tour will have between half a million and 650,000 people watching the shows. There are definitely a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s purely because we haven’t toured for 10 years.
Did you decide to tour based on the offers you were getting, or did you think it was time to creatively do some shows?
Bangalter: It was a combination of both. The interesting thing is that Coachella was a big financial offer, 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 take an economic advantage. But we have crazy ideas and those ideas can be expensive. The ideas we had for this tour require 20 people on the road; it’s not like these big rock stars with hundreds of people. But it is still very challenging – a lot of technology, computers and sets. Knowing that we could now do things we couldn’t do when we played in a 1,000-person venue triggered crazier ideas and the ability to make it happen.
Like what, specifically?
Bangalter: We have 15 tons of equipment, including prototypes or modified regular technology – things we redesigned. We built the customized pyramid. We set up a production company, Daft Arts, in Los Angeles, to work [the duo’s 2006 film] “Electroma.” We actually used it, in the same way that we produced a video clip, to come up with a totally independent approach. There is a lot of troubleshooting and technology and how to make custom computers. We work with Ableton Live, which is really at the center of the performance now: we have the music and the lights in sync. It really gives life to robots and personas, within this universe in which we have been working for the past 12 years.
So, with all this technology, what are you really doing there during the show?
Bangalter: We are controlling the music and some of the tracks with the lights. Become technical. We have synthesizers and remote controls in the pyramid. All equipment is in large side towers, with Ethernet remote controls. It’s a new thing. But it’s fun, because we really try to approach it from scratch and redesign an entire piece of equipment that will allow us to do what we want. We want to be able to do loops, mash up, filter EQ and transpose. It’s a little chaotic. But what we focus on is what you get from the show: an intense experience of music, lights and robots, with a fine line between fiction and reality. This is really the concept of this tour, which was not the concept of the things that we were doing for 10 years. 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 that?
Bangalter: The program allows you to do this, but the show as it is now does not. Works with a combination of music and visuals. So, what we’ve been working on most is the ability to change things within certain deadlines, but we still need to go to a certain point, or the next song. Ten years ago, we were not interested in such a visual implementation: it is a total representation of what we are trying to express, and not just in audio. We really see it as a kind of abstract narrative – an audiovisual revelation, from a minimal monochromatic start to a multicolored finish.
We really try to reinterpret each song so that they connect to each other, in the midst of this mash-up concept. We have a very accurate picture of the evolution of the three albums we made [1997’s “Homework,” 2001’s “Discovery” and “Human After All”], despite the moderate response we had to the latter. Many tracks [“Human After All”], which was not well received by critics and perhaps not by the public, got a stronger response when we played them on the show. It was very important for us to try to express that – that kind of triangle that exists between the three records. I think the tour was successful in that way.
Kanye West’s new song, “Stronger”, is in 6th place on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. What do you think of the sample of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?”
Bangalter: We did “Harder, Better” seven years ago and then he tried it. We had used a sample of “Cola Bottle Baby” by Edwin Birdsong, and he then tried the cappella we used. It is funny. It is very symptomatic of this circle of sampling and sampling and transmission to the next producer, even more coming from white children in America and France and transmitting to urban culture. We did the same thing differently with Busta Rhymes, who used a “Technological” sample. We have always been very open-minded and excited about unexpected connections.
Did you know Kanye?
of Homem-Christo: Yes. The music 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 with him in the studio. He was happy to see that we liked it so much. It is not a collaboration in the studio, but the vibration of the music that we do separately connected to what he did with the music. It’s really great. On the way to San Francisco, at the airport, we heard the Power 106 in LA. The DJ had edited our music at the beginning and then it became his music.
What do you think of how branding has become so prevalent in the culture of dance music?
Bangalter: We are part of the older generation in a way, where people were still selling millions of records. We were fortunate to present our name at a time when perhaps it was an easier process than now. And we are lucky to still be able to earn a living, go on tour and work on experimental projects. We have really tried so far to stay out of exclusive offers: “Robot Rock” was in “Entourage” last week and “Technologic” was in an iPod commercial. This is only part of the culture. We do not reject it. It may be the soundtrack of everyday life. We are happy to be part of this. But so far, we are not officially sponsored by an exclusive brand.
How long do you think it will take before Daft Punk releases an album or tours again?
Bangalter: That, we can not answer. We didn’t decide on the release date before making the song. I think the cool thing is that we are always trying to do something that has not been done, or at the end of the day, that we are not yet doing. That’s what we feel about the film and this tour. It is a challenge to go back to the studio and work with ideas that we have not expressed before. Some ideas take time, but others take only a few weeks. So let’s see.