Exclusive: Live Album To Chronicle Daft Punk Tour

Daft Punk will in late November release a live album chronicling the June 14 Paris stop on its first tour in a decade, Billboard.com can reveal. The as-yet-untitled Capitol set will be available in a single CD edition plus a two-disc set which features the show's encore. As of now, no live DVD companion is in the works, according to the group.

"We're from Paris and we hadn't played there for 10 years," Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter told Billboard last Friday, the afternoon following the tour closer in Brooklyn, N.Y. "It must have been a special night for the audience, as well as for us."

The tour version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" will be issued as a single from the live set, and a video, directed by Oliver Gondry, will feature footage shot by fans at the Brooklyn show. "It is a montage of people shooting the song in the audience with 250 cameras," Bangalter says. "We were inspired by the Beastie Boys' 'Awesome, I F***in' Shot That!' and tried to do that in a four-minute video."

Daft Punk will return to the U.S. in late October for a performance at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, and is weighing offers for more shows next year. After such a long layoff from live performance, the group admits it was blown away by the response to the recent North American shows, which included a co-headlining performance at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

"We pretty much felt it everywhere, which was fascinating," Bangalter says. "It was a big deal each time. It's a big deal for us each time, too, which is what keeps it fresh."


With a stroke of good timing, Daft Punk is also in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to the "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" sample Kanye West utilizes on his new hit, "Stronger."

The two acts did not collaborate in the studio, and the actors who portray the Daft Punk robots in the film "Electroma" took Bangalter and partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's place in the "Stronger" video. But the pair say they are thrilled with how West's track turned out, having heard first heard it on Los Angeles station Power 106 while waiting for a recent flight to San Francisco.

"The DJ had made an edit of our song at the beginning and then it turned into his song," de Homem-Christo says. "Our song had a good sound, but when he put Kanye's record on, the sound was really fat. It sounds really big. It's not a collaboration in the studio, but the vibe of the music we do separately connected in what he did with the song."

[via billboard.com]

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