JOE’s Music Makers: Daft Punk

JOE continues our look at some of the biggest names in music and this week it's everyone's favourite high-flying helmeted heroes, Daft Punk...

Best buds and party-beat partners Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter are the French friends who make up the brilliant Daft Punk. We’re pretty sure Thomas is the one on the right...

The excellent electronic music duo met in 1987 while the two were in secondary school and went on to set up the three-piece band Darlin’ along with a third friend, Laurent Brancowitz.

The band didn’t last for long, however, and their music wasn’t well-received. One review, by Dave Jennings for Music Maker, described the music of Darlin’ as “a daft punky thrash.” And so, a short time later, Brancowitz went his his own way while de Homem-Christo and Bangalter went theirs and the devastatingly brilliant Daft Punk was born. Take that Dave Jennings of Music Maker! Ahead of the release of their first single ‘The New Wave’ in 1994, the pair had met a potential record label owner at a rave in... wait for it... EuroDisney. It wasn’t meant to be unfortunately, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that JOE has just found out that you can go to raves in EuroDisney. Mind. Blown.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature about the band, apart from their brilliant bop-tastic beats of course, is the fact that they don particularly ornate helmets and gloves, thereby adopting robot personas and hiding their identity from the prying public. Luckily for you though JOE reader, we’ve got an exclusive reveal-all interview with the men behind the helmets for your enjoyme... oh no. Wait a second. We don’t, sorry. They’re still wearing their helmets.

See? Sorry about that. The band’s debut album, Homework, was released in 1997 and was a hit with critics and fans alike, and showed off French house music in all of its glory, as the album’s infectious dance tracks became dance-floor fillers all around the world. Speaking of around the world, here’s one of the album’s most famous singles, although we can’t for the life of us remember what it’s called... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9MszVE7aR4 2002 saw the release of the absolutely awesome album, Discovery, packed to the brim with cracking catchy synthpop songs that superbly sampled brilliant tunes from the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, here’s an excellent comparative video that shows just how, ahem, different, the Daft Punk songs are from the samples that they used. That's right, we said "different"... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpZRNq33Obk It’s incredibly hard to pick a favourite funky track from the deadly disco-themed Discovery but, if we were pushed for an answer (like you’re pushing us right now), we’d have to go for 'Digital Love'. No! We mean 'Aerodynamic!' No, wait! 'One More Time', it’s definitely 'One More Time'... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJ95GrrajY And Daft Punk’s own song, 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger', was in turn sampled by none other than Mr Kim Kardashian and non-lover of fishsticks himself, Kanye West, for his 2007 song 'Stronger'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsO6ZnUZI0g The more minimalist Human After All, the band’s third studio album, was released in 2005 but, due to its quick recording period of six weeks, it was not as well-received as the band’s previous records. For JOE though, we’ll always have a soft spot for the album’s opening track of the same name, ‘Human After All.’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOCc0tfoqA The science-fiction film Tron: Legacy was released in 2010 and, while the film itself wasn’t highly-regarded, the original soundtrack by the perfectly-apt and futuristic Daft Punk was loved by film and music fans alike. Mainly because it was feckin’ fantastic. Here’s one of the most well-known tracks from the soundtrack, 'Derezzed'... “Electrify the boys and girls if you’d be so kind...” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRsSNFfgBPM Most recently, the deadly duo released the excellent Random Access Memories (2013), different in its recording style to the pair’s previous three albums as this latest collection of songs used live session instrumentalists and musicians such as Giorgio Moroder, Pharrell Williams and Nile Rogers, the latter two collaborating on the little-known track that nobody in the world heard. Ever. Nobody. It’s called ‘Get Lucky.’ We think... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoB9OiTJw40 Although it’s hard to beat this shredded version of the track. A work of pure genius and we’re sure that the Daft Punk lads would love it too... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlM5CDSoi8 Live music fan? Why not enter our competition to win tickets to the upcoming eurosaverLIVE event featuring Gavin James and O.R.B. at Monroe’s in Galway on May 16. The event follows the huge success of the inaugural eurosaverLIVE event featuring Tinchy Strider at The Grand Social in Dublin last year and promises to be a cracking night. For more details on how to enter, click here.