13. Daft PunkDiscovery
I don’t know which Daft Punk record to get stuck on. Homework is so great, but Discovery, that’s the one. That’s incredible. Again, it was the late 90s, ’99 being in New York, and that whole new soundtrack to my new life. That was a great record, ‘Face To Face’ especially – you know digging in and then understanding Todd Edwards and the history of garage and how that affected house and French house especially, that whole slivering of sound, and having him sing on it. And the mystery of the masks, the whole thing.
I was a big fan of that movie Phantom Of The Paradise from 1974, do you know that? Nobody knows it. It’s directed by Brian De Palma and stars Paul Williams as Swan, the evil record producer who owns Death Records, whose logo was an upside down dead white bird. He has this empire and he’s getting ready to open this new rock theatre and is looking for the next thing to make this the biggest thing ever, he’s auditioning female singers and arrives on this one woman who’s going to be his muse. He also steals the music of this composer Winslow Leach, he steals this cantata. So the whole thing’s like the Faustian pact – sign this and I’ll make you – meets Phantom Of The Opera. There’s this part where Winslow, the tortured songwriter tries to steal his music back and gets his face stuck in a pressing plant and gets deformed, and Swan says, I can bring your music to a lot of people – I have found the person who can sing it, her name is Phoenix. And he locks him in this recording studio and he has the Daft Punk mask on which he’s hooked up with a vocoder, because he’s lost his voice in this accident, and he’s like try again and he’s manipulating it: "Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix!" So now we fast forward to Random Access Memories and they bring Paul Williams back. You’ve gotta see this thing. It’s just this amazing kitschy, crazy rock opera right in that land-before-punk-rock era, really this big queens kind of thing. It’s really great, it’s so cheesy.
I was at Coachella in 2006 when Daft Punk did the pyramid, which has made that stage at Coachella the biggest thing now. I think those guys are great, their knowledge of music history is pretty deep, Daft Punk. Random Access Memories and that whole three-month set up, all the layers that they showed people, it was just such an old school campaign, such a masterful way to get people engaged.
