The groundbreaking French duo Daft Punk stunned the music world on Monday morning by announcing their breakup via an extensive video. The announcement was all the more surprising because it has been largely inactive since their 2013 album, “Random Access Memories”, won the Grammy for album of the year and largely stopped performing live after their triumphant world tour in 2007. The two songs they performed with Having included The Weeknd on his 2016 ‘Starboy’ album could be their last high-profile releases as Daft Punk.
About 15 years ago, however, it seemed that the group was perhaps on its last legs: their 2005 album, “Human After All,” was considered a flop, received lukewarm reviews and sold barely 10% as many copies as its predecessor. 2001, “Discovery.” Plans for a long-debated tour were shelved until Coachella came in with a six-figure offer, finally enabling Daft Punk to fulfill his ambitions on the concert stage – and on that dazzling stage, the songs from “Human After All” made sense. The result was an unparalleled audiovisual spectacle not seen before in electronic music, with many in attendance calling it the best concert they’d ever seen, and more than one critic mentioning the rousing Coachella, heralding the birth of EDM.
In August 2007, the day after dazzling 12,000 fans at Keyspan Park on New York’s Coney Island, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took off their robotic helmets and sat in many years. In these previously unpublished excerpts, they discuss how Coachella kick-started the tour, their plans to release a live album of the shows, and what they hoped to accomplish in the coming years.
Elements of this interview appeared on Billboard in 2007; below is an edited version of the full conversation.
Why do you think there has been 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 a record, you go on tour. The “Discovery” album was quite a successful record, but we didn’t tour after that. Also, especially in the US, I think it took people a while to get to know the music. House music or electronic music in general was not [widely popular] in the US 10 years ago, but now it’s spread all over the place, on the radio and in supermarkets. It always takes a lot more time for acts from outside the US to be known here, even though they had a lot of fans at the time.
It’s pretty unprecedented for an electronic group to play in front of 12,000 people, like you did last night at Coney Island.
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, but we’ve played in many sold-out shows all over America and Europe. Maybe it’s the fact that we started playing shows like Coachella and in France last year. People got really excited about the shows, so more and more people are coming. Overall, I think this tour will have between half a million and 650,000 people watched the shows. That’s a lot of people for sure, but I don’t think it’s pure because we haven’t toured in 10 years.
Did you decide to go on tour based on the offers you got, or did you find it creative time to do some shows?
Bangalter: It was a combination of both. Interestingly, Coachella was a big offer financially, and that triggered the opportunity to take the show to the next level. We were ready to play again – we have never done anything for the money or tried to get an economic advantage. But we have crazy ideas, and these ideas can be expensive. For the ideas we had for this tour, 20 people were on the road; it’s not like these big rock stars with hundreds of people. But it’s still quite a challenge – a lot of technology and computers and sets. Knowing that we could now do things that we couldn’t do when we were playing in a 1,000-person venue created crazier ideas and the ability to make it happen.
Like what, specifically?
Bangalter: We have 15 tons of equipment, including prototypes or modified mainstream technology – things we’ve redesigned. We built the custom pyramid. We set up a production company, Daft Arts, in Los Angeles to work on [the duo’s 2006 film] “Electroma.” We actually used it, in the same way we would produce a music video, to give it a totally independent take on it. There is a lot of troubleshooting and technology and custom computer creation. We’re working with Ableton Live, which is really at the heart of the performance right now: we’ve synchronized the music and the lights. It really makes the robots and personas come to life, within this universe we’ve been working on for the past 12 years.
So with all that technology, what are you actually doing there at the concert?
Bangalter: We control the music and some signals with the lights. It’s getting technical. We have synthesizers and remotes in the pyramid. All equipment is on big, big towers to the side, with Ethernet remotes. They are new things. But it’s nice because we’ve tried to really approach it from scratch and redesign an entire installation that allows us to do what we want to do. We want to be able to repeat, mash, filter EQ and transpose things. It’s a bit chaotic. But what we focused on is what you get from the show: an intense experience of music, light and robots, with a fine line between fiction and reality. That’s really the concept of this tour, and it wasn’t the concept of the things we did 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 that?
Bangalter: The program allows you to do it, but the show as it is now doesn’t. It works on a combination of music and image. So what we’ve been working on more is the ability to change things within certain timeframes, but we still have to move to a certain point, or to the next track. Ten years ago we were not interested in such a visual implementation of it: it is a total representation of what we are trying to express, not just an audio version. We really see it as some sort of abstract storytelling – an audio / visual revelation, from a very minimal, monochrome start to a multi-colored finish.
We really tried to re-interpret each song so that they interact with each other, amid this concept of mash-up. We have a very precise picture of the evolution of the three albums we have made [1997’s “Homework,” 2001’s “Discovery” and “Human After All”], despite the moderate response we had to the latter. Lots of songs from [“Human After All”], which has not been well received by critics and perhaps not by the public, have received a stronger response when we play them on the show. It was really important for us to express that – this kind of triangle that exists between the three records. I think the tour was a success that way.
Kanye West’s new song “Stronger” hits No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. What do you think of his example of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?”
Bangalter: We did “Harder, Better” seven years ago and then he tasted it. We had used a sample of an Edwin Birdsong’s “Cola Bottle Baby,” and he then tasted the a cappella we were using. It is funny. It’s quite symptomatic of this circle of sampling and sampling and passing it on to the next producer, all the more coming from white children in America and France and passing it on to urban culture. We did the same thing in a different way with Busta Rhymes, using a “Technologic” sample. We have always been very open-minded and enthusiastic about unexpected connections.
Have you met Kanye?
from Homem-Christo: Yes. The song is really great and we like it a lot. When we met him, he was as much a fan as we are fans of his work. It was as if we had worked him in the studio. He was happy to see that we liked it so much. It’s not a collaboration in the studio, but the mood of the music we do is separately related to what he did with the song. It’s really great. On the way to San Francisco, at the airport, we heard it on Power 106 in LA. The DJ had made an adaptation of our song in the beginning and then it became his number.
What do you think about the way branding has become so widespread in dance music culture?
Bangalter: We’re in a way part of the older generation, where people still sold millions of records. We have been lucky enough to introduce our name at a time when it may have been a simpler process than it is now. And we are lucky that we can still make a living and go on tour and work on experimental projects. We’ve really tried to stay out of exclusive deals so far: “Robot Rock” was featured in “Entourage” last week and “Technologic” was in an iPod commercial. That’s just part of the culture. We do not reject it. It can be the soundtrack to everyday life. We like 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 it will be before Daft Punk releases or tours again?
Bangalter: We can’t answer that. We don’t decide the release date before making the music. I think the cool thing is that we always try to do something that hasn’t been done, or that we don’t end up doing something ourselves. That’s what we felt about the movie and this tour. It’s a challenge to get back into the studio and work with ideas that we haven’t expressed before. Some ideas take time, but some only take a few weeks. So we’ll see.