Daft Punk's lift-off

I was sitting in my cubicle at NME on a bleary London winter morning and the phone went. I picked it up. It was a press agent from Sony records.

“Hi Eve, do you have a moment to talk about a new album from one of our artists?”
Me: [Spoken with usual reticence at major labels] “Yeh yeh OK. Sure.”
“Great, cheers. I’ll just send over an NDA and then we can talk.”
Me: “Huh?”
“Yeah, it’s just for this artist. I can’t talk to you about it until you sign the NDA.”
Me: “You cannot tell me which artist you’re PR-ing me?”
“Check your inbox, and we’ll talk.” [Hangs up]

I remember thinking they could get fucked but I really wanted to know which artist demanded a multi-million pound NDA was signed before even being mentioned by name. If memory serves the NDA was to the tune of £3 million. So I signed it.

—

There was the world before ‘Get Lucky’. And then there was the world after ‘Get Lucky’, in which you could not go anywhere without hearing ‘Get Lucky’. From the instant you woke up, it was the soundtrack to every higlights loop on TV, it was being played in the gas station, it was on every radio show, it was in the grocery store, it was at the coffee shop, in the bars, and at the clubs. “We’re up all night to get lucky!” The titular night seemed to have no end in sight.

It was so aggressive, and yet so addictive, until eventually you never wanted to hear it again and would quite like to administer an Ambien to put everyone to sleep. Please stop. Is it time for a nap yet? Death by ‘Get Lucky’ was not yet a diagnosis but could well have been by Christmas 2013. Daft Punk featuring Nile Rodgers from Chic on guitar and Pharrell Williams on vocals, were sonically programming the human race in preparation for that year’s summer. The comeback and the single was teased on a screen at Coachella in April. It was but a snippet of the song. Hysteria ensued.

“I thought it was the second coming of Jesus for about ten glorious seconds,” wrote one commenter, recalling his I-Was-There moment underneath the YouTube footage.

I don’t need to write an essay on ‘Get Lucky’. I feel like people take entire university courses on that song. But I will write about how Daft Punk set its eyes on the NME, and for all intents and purposes made sure we would be mission assailants. We agreed to do the world exclusive cover story on their return. One journalist would have access and one photographer. The shoot would take place in Paris. The interview in Palm Springs, at the former estate of Bing Crosby. That estate last sold for $13.5m, and features a main property and multiple casitas.

I sent one of the best writers at NME at the time - Kevin EG Perry - to go to Palm Springs and hang out with the most clandestine robots not just in music, but in culture. He sat down with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, sans helmets. After a day of drinking and debating, they played Perry their highly secretive fourth album Random Access Memories by the pool, rum on tap. It wasn’t the norm at NME for the journalist writing the feature for an artist to also be the album reviewer (those are two separate pieces to avoid bias). But because Daft Punk were playing the album to virtually nobody, Perry was on double duty. Mid-way through his trip, he emailed the office with an update from the high life where the other half lived. He simply said: “ I just heard the album once. I can tell you it’s a 10/10 record.”

Me: “Are you sure, Kev? Is it a perfect record, or is that the pina coladas talking?”
“No I swear. Trust me.”
You know what? I did.

I saw it as an opportunity to build on the Daft Punk folklore. Yes OK the NME had only one writer listen only one time to the album while in the lap of luxury in the Californian desert and we will never really be able to determine if that was an objective score. So what? Isn’t that was rock journalism is about? Back in the day, we heard stories that Noel Gallagher would pick up NME editors in a stretch limousine, pass around the cocaine, and blast Be Here Now while careening the streets of London city. Why not continue the tradition. Besides, there exist so many is-it-or-is-it-not-true stories about the mystery French robots. Did you hear the one about how they travelled the world with the sole copy of one of their albums in a briefcase handcuffed to them to protect it from being leaked? I will neither confirm nor deny.

The interview was fanatastic:

Do they ever listen to the likes of Skrillex or Deadmaus for pleasure?

“Deadmaus? No. I wouldn’t listen to Deadmaus for pleasure,” says Thomas. “Skrillex we have a lot of respect for because in some sense he might be the kid. He’s said that he saw our live show with the pyramid in 2007 and it made him want to make music, but it feels like he’s not copying our formula. He might be the kid that breaks the cycle, but we don’t listen to a lot of electronic music. We never did…”

Guy-Man leans back in his chair and gives a Gallic shrug: “I don’t know the EDM artists or the albums. At first I thought it was all just one guy, some DJ called EDM.”

Because it all sounds the same anyway?

They both crack up. “A little bit, yeah!” says Guy-Man. “Maybe it’s just one guy called Eric David Morris,” suggests Thomas.

Guy-Man continues: “It’s high energy music that’s really efficient on the body. It’s like an energy drink or something. It really works, and I totally admit that’s what we did at the start. We were playing raves and we wanted that energy when we played. More and more I’m into the emotions that you can get from music. EDM is energy only. It lacks depth. You can have energy in music and dance to it but still have soul.”

I’m not sure it deserved the 10/10 but all things considered I probaly would have done the same. Random Access Memories is an exemplary listening experience for people who have exemplary sound equipment. If you are thus endowed, put this album on front-to-back. It was the first and only time the French duo employed real live musicians to make their music. The texture is alive. It was a revolution against the oversaturated method of making electronic dance music that had colonized the music landscape and the charts as far as the ears could hear.

It also boasted a stellar cast list of vocalists, including Julian Casablancas of The Strokes like you’d never heard him before (‘Instant Crush’), disco legend Giorgio Moroder (‘Giorgio By Moroder’), two servings of Pharrell Williams (‘Lose Yourself To Dance’) and Panda Bear of Animal Collective (‘Doin It Right’).

It saw the robots build a time machine back to before they were themselves pioneers of electronic music. They took funk, soft rock and disco and catapulted it all into a far off galaxy. They were no longer robots playing at being human. They were becoming human in order to counteract the legacy they had created. The wanted to rip the machine apart and start over. Snap the motherboard in half. It was an elegy to sound itself, as ambitious in scope as it was vulnerable in delivery.

Daft Punk were inarguably the most influential act in dance. And they weren’t really DJs. They embodied the essence of a rock band. Their three prior albums had inspired everyone from LCD Soundsystem to Kanye, Toro Y Moi to Phoenix. I’m sure Daft Punk is the reason Cher popularized autotune on ‘Believe’. David Guetta considered their 1997 debut album Homework “a revolution.” When Avicii was alive he said he listened to Daft Punk before he even knew what house music was. There’d be no possible Deadmau5, Skrillex or Swedish House Mafia without them. Without being overt French snobs about it, that was not the kind of endowment they wanted. Daft Punk’s music was built from love, and the new wave was like porn in comparison: superficial, mind-numbing and compeltely perfunctory. Instead of complaining about it, they crafted a response: Random Access Memories.

The most acute departure from the EDM trend happens at the very end of the album. It peaks and it finishes with an epic voyage titled ‘Contact’. There are no robot lyrics. Legend has it that when the duo played the final version of it in the studio, it blew out all of the speakers. ‘Contact’ was real dance music teeming with originality and courage in a universe of brainless, thoughtless wannabes. The track achieves lift-off. It's the moment the robots finally breach Outer Space. It’s where The Prodigy’s speed garage would go if it was checking into a five star resort beyond The Milky Way.

‘Contact’ begins with audio courtesy of literal NASA and the Apollo 17 mission. It’s the radio transmission of the astronaut observing a flashing object from a window of his capsule. This particular astronaut was the last man to leave the surface of the moon on that mission. It ends with him trying to discover what the “bright object” is and calculating its length in diameter:

“I don't know whether that does you any good but… There's somethin' out there…”

That something is Daft Punk, sent from beyond to bring the future back to dance music. The spirit of the track captures genuine human awe, and builds with a drum pattern that speeds up the beat of your own heart. It goes somewhere beyond music. It’s a cosmic event where dance floor becomes launchpad.

To me, ‘Contact’ is the climax of Daft Punk, period. It crosses a threshold from control into chaos, from fear into surrender, from gravity into zero gravity, floating free into neverending nothingness. The final momentary exlposion surges you upwards as though taking the human ear into unmarked territory. When I first heard it, I felt like I was flying. It’s frenzied. It’s wild. It’s overwhelming. So quite like life itself, then? And you are left by it in stunned silence in a new naked state, knocked totally off balance, with the naked hot sun blinding your face, wondering: did that just happen?

The signal is out there. You’re past the point of no return. Time to ride the frequency.