One of my biggest regrets when I was 17 was hearing that Daft Punk was playing at the Brisbane Riverstage. It was an 18+ only event but me being the legal boy I am decided against using all my savings from working at Woolies. The following Monday, a friend of mine — via Myspace — spoke of this otherworldly, intense experience they had after jumping the fence to get into Daft Punk’s show.
I believed it when it was posted, but I don’t know that I do now. Needless to say, I was gutted. Having had the French robots on repeat for years it would have been a dream to see them live. It’s a sentiment shared by a few people, I imagine. The Alive Tour is a legendary one that featured a pyramid awash with LEDs and honeycomb lights flanking its left and right. Atop that pyramid were some of the most iconic dance music titans of the early to late 90s: Daft Punk. The show that followed for months on end is one that’s still discussed and listened to today. That’s the Alive Tour. Take a look on Youtube. Promise it’s worth your time.
It’s why a lot of people consider Alive 2007 one of the best live albums to have ever been released. It’s hard to say (and I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard much else in the live album format) if there’s another live electronic music show as good as Alive 2007; an album that crushed the likes of Kylie, Cyndi Lauper, Moby and Robyn in the dance category at the Grammys in 2008. Yet, there has to be a reason why it took the dance music world by storm 13 years ago.
What makes Alive so special is that it captures the band in a live contex , but what it also does is it allowed Daft Punk to course correct a few tracks and reconstruct then into stadium-sized monsters. Take (a deep breath while you read this title) Prime Time of Your Life/Brainwasher/Rollin’ & Scratchin’/Alive; a 10 minute marathon mix of the thundering drums of Alive, the looped vocals of Prime Time and Brainwasher, the screeching tires of Rollin’ & Scratchin’s lead. A mash-up of the band’s oldest album, Homework, and their latest, Human After All. A track full of unabashed energy just like the rest of the album.
If you asked me if I liked any of Human After All before listening to this track, I’d have said “Hell no” but having it recontextualised live has me constantly reconsidering my judgment of their third album.
What Daft Punk did so well was find new life in old classics and also have the album mixed in such a way (my incredibly basic research tells me this is a straight up rip from a desk recording from a show in Paris in mid ‘07) that the crowd still plays a really important part in allowing us playing at home to experience those spine-tingling moments.
Moments like when the band drops Romanthony’s (may he rest in peace) iconic vocals to One More Time so the audience can sing it loud; or when they start a trackset with Burnin’, the laser cut house gem screeching for two minutes before sliding in the filtered bass and filtered house brilliance of Too Long. It’s a masterclass in keeping the crowd guessing. And it’s not just that; the band also added their own effects and cuts to each track to aid a build or to keep us tense.
A track like Da Funk/Daftendirekt contains chest-thumping drums and it’s famous 303 line, much like the original, but there’s a bigger sense of the track itself in this setting. Have a listen to the original compared to the Alive tour version and you could argue that hearing Da Funk in a “live” context is MUCH more satisfying than the original (while the original is still a total classic.)
Even in all of that disco distortion, they managed to find some time for everyone to take a breath. Face to Face/Short Circuit allows all of us to be drenched in the synths of Short Circuit’s wonky, distorted end while complemented by Romanthony’s whipped butter smooth vocals from Face to Face buried under some heavy EQing.
However, there’s one track that closes it all out (on the special edition, originally, but now available on all releases) and it’s the masterwork that is the band’s mashup of French Touch classics. Human After All/Together/One More Time/Music Sounds Better With You provides the perfect, perfect close (you can tell how much I fucking love this song.) Human After All provides the build with a slow building beat over the stretched out vocals of the original track, which leads into the vocals for Together…
… and it builds and builds until it unleashes that Together lead. The energy that that track delivers keeps us focused only for a moment… we have no idea where it’s going to go until the band drops the One More Time hook to rapturous cheers and THEN the Chaka Khan hook from the Stardust CLASSIC Music Sounds Better With You which they THEN mix into the song itself. Who the fuck thinks of this? I can barely plan my day let alone a 10 minute heater that closes a show that people called “the pyramid of god”.
We may never see Daft Punk return for a tour after this but having this archive of the band’s classics reaches heights that I honestly don’t think they can attain again. That might be the reason they’ve not come back for a tour. Maybe this was their swansong as a live performance band? They know they peaked here so it’s better to pack it up and head back to the mothership.
Random Access Memories came out 7 years ago (can you believe it?) and the robots have had a few stints producing tracks over the last few years but nothing else has really come to light. Constant rumours were swirling online about their return for the 10th anniversary of the tour in 2017 and then other bits and pieces surfacing online providing nothing but false hope over the last few years. However, Daft Punk operates on their own time and if that’s how they want to play this game in order to bring us new music or live shows like Alive 2007 then those goddamn robots can take as long as they please.
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