The inthemix exclusive on new Daft Punk album: "It’s gonna be proper and real"
Wed 8th Feb, 2012Overnight, the interwebs went into overdrive about a tantalising comment from funk/disco legend Nile Rodgers to the Houston Culture Map about elusive robots Daft Punk: “Those guys are great. They’re coming to my apartment on Monday and we’re going to talk about making a new record together.”
This morning we were able to go straight to the source ahead of the Chic Australian tour and press Nile Rodgers about the Daft Punk comment. The rub? They’re definitely making a record together and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter had just left his place…
“We were just jamming at my house, but it’s gonna be proper and real,” Rodgers told us down the line. “They came over to my today around breakfast time and it’s now evening I basically had to almost kick them out. We were having so much fun just in an informal setting that we decided to make it formal. And it’s very formal. It’s gonna be amazing.”
Naturally, we asked the man to go deeper. “It’s funny I’ve known Daft Punk for some time now but we were never really close – we never got a chance to hang out with each other, we would just meet in passing,” he happily continued. “So today was the first chance we had to spend hours and hours together and it was just so awesome. Every track they played I just ran across the room and got my guitar and started playing and we were all dancing around my dining room having the time of our lives. It was something that was meant to be. It was interesting how Thomas said to me: ‘It’s funny Nile, it’s like we’ve completed the circle’. We’ve always just met, just had a moment to talk and then finally today we just said, this is something that has to happen.
“The best projects I’ve ever been involved in have always been like that: we vibe on an artistic level first – same thing happened with me and Bowie. Like Bowie, they can speak in abstract terms and I know exactly what they’re talking about. So it was funny, at one point I said, ‘You’ve been talking for two hours and you haven’t actually said exactly what you’re talking about, but I know what you mean.’ It’s all the nuances of music and who a person is as an artist, concepts, where that concept is now in the arch of life – all of that type of stuff, which is what I really understand.”
As hard as we pushed, getting Rodgers to talk in absolutes was no easy sell – but surely this is enough to make Daft Punk fanatics sing hallelujahs.
