No oNe has beNt the rules of music like Daft Punk. thomas and Guy-Manuel are the most famous act in dance music, yet without their robot masks you wouldn’t recognise them if they looked you straight in the eye.

It’s a feat of cunning never before pulled off by any other pop star, and a move worthy of a dance music Keyzer söze. Daft Punk’s career has defied the normal laws of stardom at every step of the way.

they’ve made many fewer albums than peers like Underworld, the Prodigy, Faithless or the Chemical brothers, yet are more iconic than all of them put together. they turned dance music on its head with their breakthrough single ‘Da Funk’, prompted a bidding war for a debut album, delivered an animé classic for their second and even predicted the new wave of dance rock with their third. after almost a decade’s absence from live performance their 2006 comeback reinvented how dance music is presented, paving the way for the arena-slaying likes of Deadmau5, Plastikman and tiësto. and now they’re set to become movie stars thanks to their appearance in, and score for, the sci-fi match made in heaven, Tron. after 15 years of accolades, it’s safe to say Daft Punk have done it harder faster, better and stronger than anyone. Dance music in 2010 owes everything to their legacy.

The TakeoverClubland is brought to its knees in a blitzkrieg of gigs.On a cold January night in 1997, the great and good of dance music are crammed beneath the arches of The End in London, waiting to see one of the scene’s most hotly anticipated live gigs. Ever since the neck-breaking beats of ‘Da Funk’, Daft Punk’s breakthrough single, had wobbled forth across clubland like a groove tsunami the year before, magazine columns, club corners and record shops had been buzzing with talk of what to expect from the mysterious duo behind one of dance music’s most incendiary singles. ‘Da Funk’s success prompted a tooth and nail battle amongst the major labels to sign them. The Chemical Brothers’ label, Virgin, won the rights, although the win didn’t exactly amount to an average record deal. Instead of owning their music, the label can only licence the tracks, and the band refuse

to budge on one key principle: no pictures can be allowed to reveal their identity.

When the duo, still sans helmets, finally emerge to cower behind a rack of studio equipment, the assembled audience (described by The Independent as a music industry answer to the Groucho Club) can only stare in amazement at the two spindly young kids on stage. At a time when dance was dominated by older DJs like Masters At Work and François K, Daft Punk looked like a pair of five-year-olds behind the wheel of a car. But when the live set charges into life, all doubts about their capabilities go up in a puff of club smoke.

Take a look at their diary and Daft Punk’s assault on clubland in the run up to, and aftermath of ‘Homework’ is phenomenal. Prior to 1997 they’d only played a handful of UK gigs (if you add up all the people who claim to have seen them at Sankeys in Manchester, The Renfrew Ferry in Glasgow and the rest, it would fill Woodstock), only properly launching in the UK with a headline- stealing debut at Tribal Gathering in May 1996. When the album hit the shops, first in France at the end of the year, and then in the UK in January 1997, their diary expoded with dates. The UK was the first country to fall.

“They were totally unknown, but when they came on it was like an explosion,” says promoter Dave Beer of Daft Punk’s first gig at Back To Basics in January 97. “Everything else at the time was either really mundane, cheesy chart dance or proper underground house and techno: they just punched straight through the middle and pissed on everything.” By October and November later that year they were playing almost every night of the month.

how DafT Punk rePeaTeDly reinvenTeD The Dance music wheelWhen ‘Da Funk’ blew up in 1996 no-one had heard anything quite like Daft Punk. at the time oasis and blur were fighting the brit Pop wars in the charts, while dance music in the top 40 was caught between the stadium techno of the Prodigy and the chart cheese of the outhere brothers.

Somehow boiling the energy of rock and disco into a techno funk workout, ‘Da Funk’s appeal was universal, uniting everyone from indie-disco pissheads to house-loving drag queens. Kids bugged out to the intensity of the bubbling acid lines, while crate-diggers scratched their chins over the disco beats and it was almost impossible to find a DJ who didn’t play it.

In hindsight their genius might not seem so obvious. Trawling through the lengthy list of tunes they’ve sampled over the course of their career is like peering behind the wizard’s curtain to find someone else’s records playing through a Daft Punk jukebox. Like all great ideas, Thomas and Guy-Man’s musical blue- print for success is devastatingly simple. Take an expertly chosen sample, probably lifted from your famous disco producer father’s record collection, and re-pitch, chop, filter and effect the living daylights out of it. Add some vocoder every now and again and fatten it up with some licks from a Moog synthesizer or the odd guitar riff, and voilà, you have Daft Punk.

The magic, however, flowed through the way they cut and pasted their musical childhood into something new and timeless. As scruffy 12-year-olds, the pair say they bonded over “very basic cult teenager things like Easy Rider, the Velvet Underground”. The euphoric surf rock of The Beach Boys inspired their first, ill-fated band, Darlin’; an early review, in

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Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christoare back with the soundtrackto Tron, the biggest film ofthe year. We explore how theychanged dance music forever

before the helmets the duo appeared in silhouette

Guy-Manuel, left, and thomas, pre-’homework’

the music and videos of ‘Discovery’ as a full-length feature filmtiny.cc/interst

2010Daft Punk supply the soundtrack to

Tron: Legacy – and appear as house DJs in the movietiny.cc/trnlg

1992Guy-Manuel, thomas and Laurent

brancowitz (later of Phoenix) release an eP as Darlin’. Included on a ’93 release on Duophonic, their contribution is dismissed by Melody Maker as “a bunch of daft punk” tiny.cc/darlin

1994Daft Punk’s first release on soma

Recordings: ‘the New Wave’ tiny.cc/newwave

1995Manu Le Malin’s ‘12.02 (black Day)’, co-produced by thomas bangaltertiny.cc/blackday

‘Da Funk’ is Daft Punk’s break- through single. a year later it’s

released again as the first single from ‘homework’ with a video by spike Jonze, entitled ‘big City Nights’ tiny.cc/bigcitynights

1997‘around the World’ is released, with a classic video directed by Michel Gondry and choreographed by bianca Litiny.cc/aroundworld

1998stardust, thomas’ side project with alain braxe and benjamin Diamond, release ‘Music sounds better With You’, one of the biggest records of all time tiny.cc/strdst

1999the videos from ‘homework’ are released as ‘DaFt: a story about Dogs,

androids, Firemen and tomatoes’. It also features ‘Rollin’ and scratchin’ performed live in Latiny.cc/rollin

2000‘one More time’ is released, with a vocal by Romanthony signposting a poppier direction for Daft Punk’s second albumtiny.cc/OMT

2001‘Discovery’, Daft Punk’s second album,

is released, including singles such as ‘harder better Faster stronger’ – which inspires the internet meme ‘Daft hands’ tiny.cc/dafthands

the helmets appear! tiny.cc/helm

the duo make an advert for Gap with Juliette Lewis tiny.cc/gapad

2003the pair release their own Japanese-style anime film, ‘Interstella 5555’. supervised by manga legend Leiji Matsumoto, it showcases

2005Daft Punk’s third album, ‘human after

all’ is released. the remix album features rerubs from the likes of sebastian, Justice, and soulwax. tiny.cc/rbotrk

LCD soundsystem release their ultimate

hipster tribute, ‘Daft Punk Is Playing at My house’tiny.cc/mhouse

2006In april Daft Punk’s Pyramid live show debuts at California’s Coachella festival. that night, shaky mobile phone footage from the best dance music show anyone has ever seen is whizzing from inbox to inbox around the world.tiny.cc/coache

2007Daft Punk’s Electroma, the duo’s live action feature film is released

tiny.cc/electroma

influential music paper Melody Maker, branded their music “a bunch of daft punk”. Thomas’ other early foray into production, a blistering collaboration with hardcore producer Manu Le Malin entitled ‘The Memory EP’, was not notable – apart from a signature guitar sound that would later resurface in ‘Homework’. “‘Homework’ was more of a Chicago [house] sound, while ‘Discovery’ has influences from house to rock to heavy metal and classical,” Thomas told Mixmag in 2001.

Veteran house producers yearned to take a peek inside their studios to find out what gear they were using to make their iconic sound. The compressed filter funk of ‘Homework’ was taken a step further by Bangalter’s Stardust project, responsible for the colossal one-hit wonder ‘Music Sounds Better With You’. In its wake came a sustained onslaught of vocal filter disco anthems. Chart toppers like Modjo’s ‘Lady’, Phats n’ Small’s ‘Turnaround’, Armand Van Helden’s ‘U Don’t Know Me’ and Spiller’s ‘Groovejet’ all used the pumping vocal disco- house template to blow house music into the mainstream and sell more records than it ever had – and probably ever will do again.

The musical ricochets didn’t end there. 2004’s ‘Human After All’ might not have set the charts or reviews sections alight, but it summed up the bastardised dance-rock sound that would later deliver the likes of Digitalism and Justice, and it bridged the gap between techno and the indie dance of people like Erol Alkan and LCD Soundsytem (who, just to prove the point, had a club hit with 2005’s ‘Daft Punk Are Playing In My House’).

Nearly a decade after their last successful album ‘Discovery’, Daft Punk’s influence is reverberating onwards. Busta Rhymes raided the Daft Punk sample chest in 2006 and gave hip hop a much-needed shot in the arm by lifting the hook from ‘Technologic’ to use on top 10 single ‘Touch It’. A year later the Gallic robots turned up in the video for Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ (the song samples the vocal from ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’), setting the stall up nicely for their comeback world tour later that year. Both tracks also set the hip hop trend of regurgitating house and trance synth sounds into the mutant chart rave rap of producers like Will.i.am. And the influences extend beyond music. Daft Punk’s success in transforming from ordinary Joes into dance music icons thanks to a pair of helmets must have tickled the imagination of DeadMau5: another average-looking studio geek who became instantly recognisable thanks to an iconic piece of headgear.

men vs machine‘homework’ proved it was possible to release a major label album without selling your soul.Daft Punk’s contractual coup with Virgin pulled off the rare feat of signing a major record label deal that didn’t involve having their integrity gang-raped by a board of directors. “They came from everywhere,” Thomas told Mixmag in 2006, “but we decided to wait – partly because we didn’t want to lose control of what we had created. We weren’t interested in the money, so we turned down [many] labels that were looking for more control than we were willing to give up.”

Instead of signing their rights and creative control away, they retained ownership of their music by licensing it to Virgin on a deal by deal basis. “We have fun changing things from inside the system,” Thomas told us. “The main factor [for us] is independence, to be self-financing and self-producing. We said, ‘Look, we don’t want to do pictures and if you don’t like that then we won’t sign the deal.’”

“Even [when they signed their first deal] Guy-Man and Thomas knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it,” says Soma Records’ then label manager Richard Brown. “They are brilliant guys – very, very sussed. Thomas’s dad [Daniel Bangalter, aka Daniel Vangarde, who was responsible for many 70s disco tracks, including the Gibson Brothers’ ‘Cuba’ and Ottawa’s D.I.S.C.O.] is a really intelligent man, and I think he definitely advised them along the way.”

When the threat of illegal downloading first reared its head, Daft Life, the production company responsible for everything, were ahead of their time in responding with Daft Club. The online, password-protected portal offered music for free, an ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ marketing tool that’s now in everyday use by everyone from Radiohead to Matthew Dear.

the album ‘Daft Club’ is released, a collection of remixes from

the likes of the Neptunes, basement Jaxx, and (on the Japanese version only) Dominique tortitiny.cc/domtor

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“They were totally unknown, but when they came on it was like an explosion”

the robots are taking over the world...

Daft Punk debut the Pyramid at Coachella

sTar warsDaft Punk solve the dance music riddle of how to turn geeks into celebritiesThomas Bangalter was already all too aware of the costs of fame prior to releasing ‘Homework’, thanks to his famous disco producer father. The prospect of success posed a difficult problem. “We are just regular people,” Thomas told Pete Tong. “We don’t look special and we are not performers or dancers.” From the beginning of Daft Punk Thomas and Guy-Man pursued the then unlikely goal of becoming successful artists without the baggage of celebrity.

At first they wore masks in interviews, but given the huge press interest that ‘Homework’ bought them, it was clear regular masks were not going to be enough. Dance music had always struggled to penetrate the mainstream because the majority of its key players were faceless studio geeks rather than flamboyant stars. If they were going to break out of the house and techno ghetto they were going to need to use their imagination. “When we started hiding our faces it was something less to give the audience, so we decided to give more back – by creating a universe around the music that’s close to how we think,” Thomas explained.

Prior to ‘Discovery’ in 2001, they hired an LA props company to design the robot helmets (reputedly at a cost of $14,000, money which the company later charged the public $65,000 to replicate). In typical Daft style the LED- toting converted motorbike helmets debuted during an advertisement on The Cartoon Network that featured Hedi Slimane, then chief designer for Dior Homme, who in 2004 designed biker-style leather suits for the duo. Laced in the kind of comic-book superhero mythology they idolised from an early age, the robot helmets gave the fans something to latch onto. “The robots began as a reaction to being shy, but then the idea of being an average guy with some kind of superpower became exciting from the audience’s point of view,” explained Thomas. When ‘Discovery’ topped the charts in 2001, the robots acted like a Trojan horse that propelled the pair deep into the heart of pop culture.

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Pt: Is there a better way of underlining how far dance music has come than the story of how Daft Punk are doing the score and soundtrack for a $180 million hollywood movie?

Jb: You know, it’s funny to think that the Daft Punk guys gave their demo to Stuart McMillan of Slam back at Euro Disney back in ’93… and 17 years later they’re scoring Disney’s huge 3D blockbuster for the holiday season 2010...

Pt: the idea of these two mavericks working with hollywood – a place which is notoriously conservative –is a strange one. how did Daft Punk get in the chair?

Jb: It took them a year to commit. When I got the call from Joseph Kosinski, the director, we came up with a shortlist of artists who were interested, and Daft Punk were always on top of the list. So we got them together for a series of meetings. Once they did commit – and it was really about the chemistry with the director – my first job was to take them around to see and meet all the top composers in Hollywood: Hans zimmer (Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception), Harry Gregson-Williams (Armageddon, Shrek)…

Pt: this is because the hollywood studio didn’t really trust them, right? they wanted someone to hold their hand?

Jb: Disney wanted an insurance policy. They wanted someone who banged out scores all the time, who had the experience and could make them feel sure that Daft

Pt: the times I’ve seen them in Paris they were always so knowledgeable and kind of train-spottery about vintage keyboards and stuff. I assume they have brought that same aesthetic to doing a score?

Jb: Their studio is wild. There are crazy-looking instruments that look like some kind of sixties controller boards. They shipped in these [vintage] Oberheim synths… and Thomas popped open the AC housing to pull the plug out and a box of condoms from the eighties fell out! A vintage box of condoms! It was hilarious. And they have this huge modular synthesiser… you’re going to hear a lot of those distinctive analogue synth arpeggiations, and one of the important things was to find an organic hybrid of orchestral and electronic.

Pt: have they [Daft Punk] called you into the studio sometimes just to ask, “what do you think of this?”

Jb: We’ve done lots of review sessions, all kinds of feedback and long intellectual conversations about ideas…

Pt: Did you stand up to them?

Jb: They guys definitely respect me and that’s great, there’s a lot of mutual respect… So I feel that. But I really respect the amount of thought and the amount of time they put into the process, and I think one of the keys for them is that they are just such huge fans of popular culture. When you see Thomas and Guy-Manuel, they love all the great cinema, films like Back To The Future – things that have been great popular culture – they love that. That’s their standard and they would never deliver anything less than that – no matter how long it takes. I noticed in all those meetings with all those composers that they were totally taking everything in, you know? They were absorbing every bit of knowledge they could about the process. I would introduce them to picture editors or music editors or score mixers and they would really respectfully take in everything they could. I wouldn’t be surprised that, after this project is over, they become film makers…

Jason Bentley, Music Supervisor onTron: Legacy, was the man who selected

Daft Punk to score the film. Pete Tong interviewed him at this year’s

International Music Summit in Ibiza

Punk could deliver. But at the end of many meetings and funny situations (like driving around Burbank, looking in my rear-view mirror to make sure they were still following in their mustard-coloured convertible Peugeot) I said, “Well all right guys, who do you like? Who do you really want to work with?” And in a very drawn out, slow response, they said “We want to do it ourselves…” So I said, “Er, give me a minute... Hello, Disney? Guess what?’” It was certainly a leap of faith, but I’ve got to hand it to the studio, I think they understood from a very early stage that Daft Punk are game-changers.

Pt: so what did they have to do to convince Disney or to get Disney’s trust before they could be let loose?

Jb: Well it came also from the director, a brilliant Music Executive at Disney called Mitchell Leib, and a lot of believers. Of course there was a short leash at first, but also Daft Punk did their homework. They had a lot of ideas and demos before the film had even been shot. The good thing for the studio heads was that they caught wind very early on that having Daft Punk on board would bring a lot of credibility to this project.

Pt: Did they put Daft Punk [the live act] on hold?

Jb: They were willing to completely commit themselves to the process for two years. Thomas had a house in LA, but we set them up with a studio to stage the project, to present things, and an amazing place that became their studio away from home.

Pt: the process of making this film was like a musical, because the music came first, right?

Jb: Typically on a film the composer will come in on the final six to eight weeks of the picture – completely post-production. But in this case the composers were on board and were writing – music was being played on set that they had written – so it was very much a part of the whole process. It’s not necessarily the Daft Punk you know – there are parts that are full-on Daft Punk, others that sound more like timeless John Williams score themes. I mean they nailed it. They really nailed it.

how DafT Punk meT Disney

Jasonbentley

Gallic answer to Cliff Richards, Johnny Hallyday. When Daft Punk emerged from this wilderness of credibility in 1996 they ran as far as possible from their French roots by signing their debut to Scotland’s Soma Records. “That’s why they didn’t sign to Laurent Garnier’s F Comms,” says Soma’s Dave Clarke. “They didn’t want to be seen as just another French techno act.” At the same time, they paved the way for the huge international success enjoyed by Cassius and Justice, and even Phoenix and Bob Sinclar. And just to finish the job, they almost did the unthinkable by making the Eurovision Song Contest credible. Guy-Manuel produced Sebastien Tellier’s 2008 entry ‘Divine’, a match made in trendy French pop heaven. Sadly it scored only 47 points.

alive anD kickinghow a pyramid scheme made live dance music the most exciting thing in the worldIn 1997 Daft Punk’s live show was considered one of the most exciting in dance music. That was all possible thanks to a rudimentary assortment of basic production kit. Ten years later, just when the duo were being written off as has-beens, they re-emerged as the most incredible live act in dance music history, debuting their 40-foot tall LED Pyramid to a Coachella crowd that could not believe its eyes. When the Pyramid reached the UK later in the summer, Mixmag reported seeing hardened ravers at Global Gathering and Wireless festivals literally moved to tears by the spectacle. Over the past few years, while sales have plummeted everywhere else in the music business, live performance has flourished. While Madonna and Prince lead the way in demonstrating how gigs were the only way of making music industry loot, Daft Punk showed that faceless house and techno had a place on the world’s biggest stages. Now, rumours are surfacing that they are to start touring again in 2011. There are probably only two people in the world that can top Daft Punk’s pyramid show, and they are Thomas Bangalter and Guy de Homen Christo. Expect to be blown away once again.

sTraighT To viDeoFrom spike Jonze to manga, Daft Punk’s videos set the standard for dance musicAt first, Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director Michel Gondry wasn’t sure about working with Daft Punk. He went to see them at a gig in London, but wasn’t inspired by their music. “The only thing they said was ‘We like to see people dancing’,” Gondry told Radio 1. When the iconic dancing skeletons of his finished video hit MTV, it became an instant classic, taking dance music videos to another level.

The rest of the album’s videos feature other big-name directors. Spike Jonze turned ‘Da Funk’ into a short film about a lonely dog wandering the streets (which the video for Roger Sanchez’ ‘Another Chance’ borrowed heavily from in 2001). Francis Ford Coppola’s son Roman Coppola directed ‘Revolution 909’, Janet Jackson director Seb Janiak made ‘Burnin’ and Daft Punk themselves directed ‘Fresh’. The videos were later released as a DVD collection (DAFT: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes). As pop culture nerds, few stars have got closer than Daft Punk to bringing their childhood dreams alive, drafting in their long-time hero and cult Japanese anime legend Leiji Matsumoto to advise on the sci-fi feature Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A musical Battle Of The Planets-influenced galactic odyssey, it lent context to the dancefloor pop of their best-loved album, ‘Discovery’. A later film project, the art-house live action feature Electroma sparked walkouts at the Cannes Film Festival thanks to an interminable ‘hiking robots’ scene (and a soundtrack that didn’t feature any new DP music) – only to later become a cult stoner-cinema success.

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Five years is a long time in dance music. What have Daft Punk done in that time? they’ve made a film, Electroma, reinvented the live/electronic ‘concert’ with their sensory-smashing 2007 world tour, and given Kanye West even more reason to be big- headed with their collaboration on his Us number one, ‘stronger’.

What they’ve not been doing is making another boundary-pushing electronic album. to be clear: their soundtrack to Tron: Legacy is exactly that: 22 tracks of theme and incidental music that (we imagine) is layered through the long-awaited film sequel. It was made with the help of a symphony orchestra of 100 musicians, gathered in a London recording studio. strings, brass, woodwind and big, booming drums are the dominant textures in appropriately titled

instrumental pieces (not songs) ‘overture’, ‘adagio For’ and ‘Nocturne’.

only occasionally – and briefly – do the Daft Punk of ‘Da Funk’ legend surface. ‘end of Line’ suggests a slowed-down version of that original soma classic. ‘Derezzed’ has a fizzy disco buzz. best of all is ‘the Game has Changed’, full of drama, accelerating synths and strings and that old Daft Punk crescendoing dynamism.

there are brief flashes of the robo-brilliance we’ve been craving for the last five years, and they’re thrilling and tantalising. but mostly this soundtrack does what its makers – by which we mean the studio behind Tron, Disney, as well as the ever-mysterious Frenchmen – doubtless intended it to do: serve the film, accentuate the narrative and plot, and provide the colour, texture and atmosphere in the spectral digital netherworld in which the film is set.

In that regard, it’s a job beautifully done. tRoN: Legacy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) composed by Daft Punk is released on December 6 on Walt Disney Records

The Tron: Legacy soundtrack is Daft Punk’sfirst new music in five years, but what’s it reallylike? Well, don’t expect ‘Discovery Part II’...

now for some real user Power

mission imPossibleFrance owes Daft Punk a debt for making French music coolCan’t think of any other French pop stars? There’s a reason for that. With the exception of a few artists such as Vanessa Paradis, Serge Gainsbourg and Jean Michel Jarre, France’s biggest contribution to pop music was the

It’s Daft Punk’s world. We just live in it