Daft Punky Trash

Headline act of the "Pulsa Groove Party" organized last night at the "Zénith" as part of the Nancy Jazz Pulsations, Daft Punk gets a world-wide success. Interview.

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Interview by Alain DUSART and Benoît GAUDIBERT

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-What’s the difference between the studio and the live performance?

- We’re truly playing live, in front of the people, to suit to their reactions. There’s nothing pre-recorded. Sometimes one reproaches electronic music with being too static. Even rock bands, on stage, often gets close to their discs. With us, every evening is different because the interaction with the audience is new.

-Behind your machines, how do you feel that you have a good rapport with the audience?

- When people are jumping and screaming. We’re sometime surprised by the people of the first rows. They’re the only ones who are not dancing. Curious or skeptical, they come and check. We can see them think. It’s mostly the case in France. We’ve learnt to look at the back of the room.

"Stay normal"

-Daft Punk, a French band?

- Yes and no. Our music has nothing that is specifically French. On the other hand, we live here. And the foreign audience, the music they’re listening to, it’s ours.

- You have become celebrities. How do you handle it?

- We are not celebrities. The fact of staying in the background, not being filmed or having our picture taken, is a way to stay normal. We don’t want to be circus freaks. You know, we’ve known each other since we’re 11, 12 years old. As soon as we saw that we were dragged into larger distribution, we’ve made the decision to stop. When we were teenagers, we wanted to make music, we had our idols, our icons. We realized that when we met them, we were disappointed. All of this is illusion and we don’t want to give illusions. And we’re happy that a lot of people understand our approach.

"No focus on us"

- A star without a face, it’s intriguing

- Music is the star. We really don’t want any focus on us. The music industry, consumer society, these are matters of looks, of image. We don’t want any of this. And we’ve managed to change the rules.

- No pictures, no interviews… Has Virgin accepted this?

-Presented with the fait accompli, Virgin was likely to agree. This year we’ve given 350 interviews to the press. For six months it’s the only thing we’ve done, in all countries, eight hours a day. Always repeating the same thing over and over, it drove us crazy.

"We have control over everything"

- One million copies sold, does it change your way of working?

- Musically speaking, it develops by itself. Financially speaking, we’re the ones who are in charge of the tour. We’re losing money. There are 15 persons following us, 3 trucks. This tour is a way of making progress in terms of the image system (the same one used by Jean-Michel Jarre) and sound. Money is used to recreate things. This is entirely disinterested, like patronage is. A vast majority of criticism against electronic music, is the kind of amateur way it is being made. Since we’ve got the financial means to do so, we would like to bring up a different way of working. What is enjoyable is being able to do whatever we want to. We have control over everything, the copyright of all the music, of all the videos. We’ve got given good advice, especially legal ones.

Bowie and Lang as fans…

- Do you wish to work with artists? Bowie, for example…

- We’ve had requests but not from Bowie as it has been written. He just liked our music. However Thomas is going to produce the first album of a young friend from Toulouse, Alan Braxe, from the Chicago house, one of the best stuff we’ve heard of this genre.

- You’ve opened a breach in music for house music, and now for techno music. This musical education has found a political representative with Jack Lang, new techno music ambassador. [He was the former minister of culture and the former minister of education in France in the 90s ; he promoted music that was different from mainstream music]

- If he’s sincere it’s okay. The big problems with the [rave] parties ban had started again after the 1995 elections [The government and the police tried to stop people from going to rave parties because they thought that rave parties = drugs]. Whether we like it or not, the current government that came after the dissolution was supposed to be less conservative than the previous one. And in the end, it’s not! The mentalities need to be changed. The more [house] music will work, the more pressure there will be so that people can listen to it.

Self-portrait –

Black buzz-cut, nice face, diamond on his ear, big silver ring (his grandfather’s), black Nike tracksuit, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 23 years old, is the reserved kind. Calm and rational-looking, a tad tense. His middle school mate, Thomas Bangalter, 22 years old, blond bleached hair, grey sweatshirt, laid back, is definitely wordier. Daft Punk (nickname given by an English magazine at their debut), are two friends rather rational. They sold more than 900.000 albums across the world, got chosen as “best techno music album of 1997” in England and are nominated for the Grammy Awards in the US. Daft Punk avoid journalists, and the photographers and cameras in particular. But with a lot of enjoyment, they accepted to have a camera from L’Est Républicain around their neck. In order to make a self-portrait or a off-the-wall picture. With complete freedom, one of the main values they cherish.