Daft Punk at Élysée Montmartre, November 1999 (or how the key to Discovery lay in Europe)
On November 19, 1999, Daft Punk played a DJ gig to a small, largely indifferent audience in Paris that, had we been paying more attention, would have given us vital clues as to the ground-breaking direction in which they were set to head off. It was also, by most possible criteria, one of the strangest DJ gigs the duo would ever play.
For a start, they weren’t even headlining. This was Daft Punk, not quite the legends of electronic music they would later become but still one of the biggest house acts around, playing a support gig to Basement Jaxx, who were touring their debut album Remedy. The venue was unusual too: rather than the sweaty clubs the duo frequented for their typical DJ sets, this took place at the Élysée Montmartre, a former ballroom in Northern Paris with much of the attendant glamour, including wooden dance floor and ornate steel beams.
Daft Punk weren’t even announced as playing the gig. I had been living in Paris since September 1999 — my second spell in the city — and bought a ticket to see Basement Jaxx, whose debut album had lit up my final year at university. When I did so, I saw that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were listed, rather casually, as the support act. In the social media era, I would have told everyone. In 1999, I mentioned it to my friend Andy, who was going to the Basement Jaxx gig with me, and we got pretty excited.
This in itself would be interesting but not really crucial. Daft Punk played a number of DJ gigs in 1999, from Brixton to Tokyo, and Thomas Bangalter also had a number of solo gigs, before ear problems sabotaged his DJ career. (Guy-Man also played a couple of DJ gigs with Le Knight Club in 1999.) But what was crucial was the music that Daft Punk played at the Élysée Montmartre gig: a selection of disco-leaning and very colourful pop songs, including the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive, Hotel California, Giorgio Moroder’s (Theme From) Midnight Express and Europe’s The Final Countdown, which ended the night.
(A small disclaimer here: I was at the gig. But my memories of it are hazy and I am indebted to a piece in Technikart magazine from March 2001 for filling out the details and for @Daft_Wub and @HousePuft for bringing them to my attention.)
It was a musical selection that did not exactly bring the house down. Technikart claims that Bangalter played before Basement Jaxx. My memory is of him (and perhaps Guy-Man) playing for an hour afterwards, upon which most of the 1k-strong crowd abandoned the venue, leaving roughly 20 people, including me and Andy, going mad on the dance floor. I seem to remember Bangalter playing a dancehall bootleg of Music Sounds Better With You, which I have never been able to confirm the existence of, and I definitely remember the iconic, memory-blitzing keyboard riff of The Final Countdown blazing out of the speakers, somehow the most ridiculous but most appropriate thing I had ever heard.
You can understand why the Basement Jaxx audience were so confused. In November 1999, Daft Punk had only released one album, Homework, which kept itself largely true to the group’s Chicago / Detroit / New York house, techno and disco influences. Consider the group’s 1999 Essential Mix for Radio One: it’s brilliant but — Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely Aside — it doesn’t really push many boundaries in the house music world. I talk about this in my book on Daft Punk’s Discovery (available from all good book shops etc and so on): when Discovery was released in March 2001 a lot of people were expecting another house / techno album and were unhappy with the giddy pop fusion they encountered.
This is why the Élysée Montmartre gig was so important. Daft Punk were, at the time, hard at work on Discovery, which was recorded between 1998 and 2000. They were utterly immersed in Discovery, an album that would later be hailed as one of the most important albums of the 2000s and one of the most influential electronic music albums full stop. (Not to mention my favourite Daft Punk album.) And this Élysée Montmartre gig, away from the demands of club music and the typical DJ circuit, was their way of showing us what they were up to, an immersive dive into the world of Discover some 16 months before it was released.
Technikart makes this point very well: Discovery was an album of childhood, of Bangalter and de Homem-Christo looking back on their own years of musical discovery (hence the name). And this was precisely what we saw at the Élysée Montmartre gig: a duo returning to the sheer joy of the music of their childhood, from the Bee Gees to Europe, and sharing it with a select audience. I’m only a couple of years younger than Daft Punk, so their musical childhood was similar to mine: I loved the Bee Gees — who didn’t love the Bee Gees — and The Final Countdown was the first record I bought. So their trip back to their musical childhood was very similar to mine.
And that, perhaps, is one of the reasons why I love Discovery. When the album was released, in March 2001, after a few moments of acclimatisation, I devoured the record: 20 years one from that I ended up writing a book about it. And two years on from that the discovery of the date of the Élysée Montmartre gig has sent me spiralling back into a happy world of disco nostalgia, Proust’s madeleine replaced by Europe’s dual synthesiser assault on The Final Countdown and the emptying dance floor of one of Paris’s most iconic music venues.
