The hype for Daft Punk’s latest album Random Access Memories seems to refuse to settle since the record leaked last week before turning up as a stream on iTunes, before 4,000 revellers descended on the rural town of Wee Waa for the album’s ‘global’ launch. Now, following on from leaking ‘One More Time’ in the form of the Japanese exclusive bonus track turning up online, the esteemed Wall Street Journal are getting in on the action, with a report that some of the Parisian pair’s more excessive fans are going a little Daft themselves.
What for? Expensive replications of Thomas Bangalter’s and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s robotic visages of course.
The French duo have been rocking their robotic helmets since the lead-up to their 2001 sophomore album Discovery, and they’ve remained an integral part of the group’s visual appeal ever since. Something they played upon in their experimental art-house feature Electroma, right up to an amalgamation of the robots appearing as the front cover of Random Access Memories.
Even the denizens of Wee Waa saw the significance of the silver and gold robotic heads, with many of the rural town’s 2,000-strong population donning paper Daft Punk masks in a video campaign leading up the Random Access Memories launch.
But the Wall Street Journal reports that demand has soared for recreations of the iconic headgear since Random Access Memories was released as the whole world seems to go gaga for Daft Punk.
London fan site Daft Club has seen a 365% jump in the number of members in a special discussion forum designed for buyers and sellers of helmet recreations, started by the site’s founder Kevin Sanders, with members exchanging recreations that cost from $200 to the several thousand dollars. “demand has soared for recreations of the iconic headgear since Random Access Memories was released as the whole world seems to go gaga for Daft Punk.”
“People are so desperate for these things that they are willing to wear everyday household buckets,” says Mr. Sanders, adding that official Daft Punk merchandise is hard to find in general.
27-year-old Boston fan Trevor Bates is a regular on the popular Daft Punk fan site who is willing to part with up to $2,000 for his own helmet, saying “price is not an object,” while a stagehand called Mr. Bates noted that it was fortunate that Random Access Memories‘ release coincided with his “finally having a job” in order to purchase a facsimile of the robot heads.
The fascination with the Daft Punk helmets first emerged when the duo hit up a Californian based special-effects company to create their iconic headgear with programmable LED displays to promote Discovery. Kevin Furry of LED Effects Inc, who helped installed the electronics, said it was inundated with requests for duplicates and facsimiles once word got out where the silver and gold headgear came from.
At the request of the Frenchmen however, Furry’s company refused to acquiesce to request, even posting a notice warning fans they wouldn’t make replicas without Daft Punk’s permission. So instead, a market has emerged of fans going DIY, enlisting craftsmen to construct their own.
30-year-old props maker Harrison Krix is one such enterprising fan, he tried his hand at creating a fully-functioning LED helmet under commission from a Californian buyer in 2009. He documented the 749-step process in a time-lapse YouTube video called ‘How To Make A Daft Punk Helmet In 17 Months” (which currently sits at over 3 million views); namely taking hours and hours of mould-making, sculpting, sanding, and fine-tuning.
“I was just kind of winging it,” says Krix, who received so many offers for making more Daft Punks helmets that he quit his ad agency and moved into business, Volpin Props, full time. He now offers do it yourself kits to fans to make their own. “To the naked eye, it looks like Daft Punk helmets haven’t changed in recent years… but they are actually very different.”
23-year-old graphic designer Hayes Johnson is another Daft Punk artisan, fashioning a pair of helmets that scored up to $1,000 on eBay, a far cry from his “really primitive” high school attempts using a baseball helmet, soft drink cans, and Christmas lights. He also published a visual document of the process in 2010 called ‘A Visual History of Daft Punk Helmets,” which catalogues the subtle changes the band’s iconic headgear has undergone over the years.
“To the naked eye, it looks like Daft Punk helmets haven’t changed in recent years,” he says. “I feel really dorky when I talk about this stuff, but they are actually very different.”
Easily the year’s (if not the decade’s) most hyped release, Daft Punk teased the release of Random Access Memories through a devilishly plotted marketing campaign involving a slow drip-feed of information, including the online making-of series ‘The Collaborators’, featuring interviews with the record’s list of A-grade musicians, including Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, Todd Edwards, Pharrell Williams, Panda Bear from Animal Collective, Chilly Gonzales,DJ Falcon, and Paul Williams.
Now that Random Access Memories has embedded itself in the ears of music lovers, the reactions have been varied. While some outlets have noted it fails to live up to the hype, our own Tone Deaf reviewer applauded Daft Punk’s shift in direction and the album’s “utterly human feeling,” awarding an 8.5 score.
While Tone Deaf writer Al Newstead plumbed the depths of Random Access Memories and emerged with an opinion piece covering computer analogies, conspiracy theories, and talk of ‘prog-disco’ and Steely Dan,
