If you were Daft Punk and could do any campaign you want, why not blow the doors off?” As Naomi Williams, who worked as the band’s online PR at the time, puts it: “It seemed like they wanted to approach it not as an album campaign but as a blockbuster movie. Returning to Coachella, where they triumphed with the industry-altering Alive tour in 2006, proved the clapperboard formally calling for action. The trailer, which was first shown 10 years ago this week (April 14), followed a run of teasers during ad breaks of Saturday Night Live weeks earlier. But such was the desire and ambition of the French duo on their first studio album in over eight years. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because, well, it was. The clip is rated E for ‘Everybody Required On The Dancefloor’. The clip, showcasing a snippet of the feverishly hyped ‘Get Lucky’ and its cast list including Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers and more, beams out on the site on the stage’s big screens. Rumours are flying around that Daft Punk are due on stage any moment for a secret set, but instead they and their entourage have travelled to Palm Springs, California to formally unveil ‘Random Access Memories’, the band’s upcoming fourth – and final – studio album. Out step Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, helmetless, into the VIP section of the Coachella festival site. It remains the last time humans have been on the moon.A row of black SUVs roll through the desert dust: The Robots are on the move. But there's somethin’ out there.” This was the Apollo 17 mission, December 1972. “As we look back at the Earth, it’s, uh, up at about 11 o’clock, about, uh, well, maybe 10 or 12 diameters,” the sampled voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan says on “Contact.” “I don't know whether that does you any good. There was joy in it, but there was melancholy, too: Here was a world seen through the rearview, beautiful in part because you couldn’t quite go back to it. “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”-spotlights both for Pharrell and the pioneering work of Chic’s Nile Rodgers-recaptured the innocence of early disco and invited their audience to do the same. “Touch” was “All You Need Is Love” for the alienation of a post- Space Odyssey universe “Give Life Back to Music” wasn’t just there to set the scene, it was a command-just think of all the joy music has brought you.
The concept, as much as the album had one, was to suggest that as great as our frictionless digital world may be, there was a sense of adventurousness and connection to the spirit of the ’70s that, if not lost, had at least been subdued. The theatricality that had always been part of their stage show and presentation found its musical outlet (“Giorgio by Moroder,” the Paul Williams feature “Touch”), and the soft-rock panache they started playing with on 2001’s Discovery got a fuller, more earnest treatment (“Within,” the Julian Casablancas feature “Instant Crush,” the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-The-Doobie-Brothers moves of “Fragments of Time”). So while the live-band-driven sound of 2013’s Random Access Memories was a curveball, it was also a logical next step.
But it also marked Daft Punk as a group with a strong, dynamic relationship to the past whose music served an almost dialogic function: They weren’t just expressing themselves, they were talking to their inspirations-a conversation that spanned countries, decades, styles and technological revolutions.
Within the context of 1997’s Homework, “Teachers” presented the group as bright kids ready to absorb the lessons of those who came before them. There is an early Daft Punk track named “Teachers” that, effectively, served as a roll call for the French duo’s influences: Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, DJ Sneak.
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