Two years after the French funkmeisters unplugged, the electro legend is releasing his first new material – a ballet score. He explains why working with ‘real live humans’ was scary
On 1 January 2000, childhood friends Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo decided to become robots. For the release of their second album, Discovery, the Daft Punk duo enlisted Hollywood effects designer Tony Gardner to fit them with helmets and robo-gloves, which they would then unveil in a photoshoot for the Face magazine and wear in public unfailingly until their split in 2021.
Like Discovery – a gilded, chart-bound spaceship built from shreds of 80s pop, funk and metal – the robots offered us a very retro vision of the future. Bangalter, taller, in the silver helmet, was convinced that the human-machine interface had gone haywire. “The difference between reality and fiction is gone,” he told NME in 2001. “You’ve got Photoshop, deformed images, a speech of the president of America that says things he’s never said, animatronics, androids. You can’t believe what you see on television any more.”
