No rules: how Daft Punk's 'Homework' changed dance music forever

Two decades ago, there were no robots.

The artwork for Daft Punk’s first album, ‘Homework’, released exactly 20 years ago, featured no gleaming android figures; those would come later. Instead there was an embroidered logo on satin, a black-and-white photo of two callow youths performing in a nightclub and cutesy snapshots of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo as toddlers.

But the stylistic obsessions that have remained with them to this day were all discernible back then: vamped-up house and techno grooves, tweaked disco basslines, twinkles of melody and their soon-to-be-trademark flair for an irresistible hook. Tracks like ‘Da Funk’ and ‘Around the World’ were credible enough to bang the party at some of the dankest of basement dives but populist enough to become chart hits.

When ‘Homework’ was released in January 1997, they were both just 22 years old, but it was already clear that among the cluster of French house producers gaining renown at the time, Daft Punk were going to be the big deal. At that point, however, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were still steeped in the DIY culture of the rave era. The album was recorded at their home studio - hence its title - and sounds almost subversively spiky compared to the sumptuously-upholstered arrangements of 2013’s ‘Random Access Memories’, especially the flaring noise of militant stompers like Rollin’ & Scratchin’ and ‘Rock’n Roll’.

They had already started playing games with their public image, wearing a variety of gaudy masks to conceal their faces onstage and in photo shoots. When I interviewed them for Mixmag before a festival show in 1997, they explained that they were trying to create a visual language for dance music that would leave the clichés of the past behind.

“We don’t want all the rock’n’roll poses and attitudes - they are completely stupid and ridiculous today,” Bangalter told me. He went on to explain: “This is new music, so it’s a new way of doing things. There is nothing to follow. There are no rules anymore.”

On stage later that day, they just wore the masks with their everyday clothes - Bangalter in a brown vintage leather jacket and ‘Back To The Future’ T-shirt and de Homem Christo in a casual turquoise top and denims, although these rudimentary outfits would evolve over the years into high-tech helmets fitted with LEDs and ventilators, sleekly complemented by stage costumes designed by French fashion star Hedi Slimane.

What was evident back then was their enthusiasm about the possibilities that were opening up in front of them. They had learned from the early house and techno producers who set up their own labels that it was possible to retain creative control over your musical output; they were also realising that they could apply the same philosophy to their image-making. Employing directorial talents like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry to make promo videos for tracks from ‘Homework’ prefigured their subsequent engagement with cinema, which culminated in the feature-length films ‘Interstella 5555’ (which they wrote and produced) and ‘Daft Punk’s Electroma’ (which they directed).

Rolling Stone magazine once ranked ‘Homework’ at the top of its list of the ‘greatest EDM albums of all time’, arguing that their sound had “transformed r'n'b and pop music”. But their stage show would prove equally influential in the US. Combined with the robot outfits, the dazzling pyramid installation created for their breakthrough US performance at the Coachella festival in 2006 solved the vexatious conundrum of how to transform ordinary-looking chaps into techno superheroes.

Crucially, younger producers like Skrillex and Deadmau5 were taking notice, and the Daft Punk stage set-up became the source material for the bombastic EDM extravaganzas of today - although the French duo have said that they would have preferred it if their adventurous intentions had been emulated, not their show itself.

For all their ostentatiously ‘futuristic’ gestures, Daft Punk were always obsessed with the past, and have been offering up reverential eulogies to the golden eras of house and disco since they began. On ‘Homework’, the tribute track ‘Teachers’ namechecked a list of originators like DJ Pierre, Lil Louis and Jeff Mills - an attempt to settle a debt of honour to predecessors who remained underground: “The least you can do is pay respect to those who are not known and who have influenced people,” Bangalter explained at the time. Now of course they can pay respect and satisfy their nostalgic urges by putting disco heroes like Nile Rogers and Giorgio Moroder on their records.

‘Homework’ contains many of the vital essences of the styles that Daft Punk have gone on to develop since then; it’s a glittering synthesis of dancefloor fantasies, sometimes euphoric, sometimes kitsch or cartoonish in a Japanese anime kind of way, but never venturing far into darkness. Indeed, the sunny quote from the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson that they printed on the album sleeve could still serve as their motto: “I wanted to make joyful music that made other people feel good.”

Matthew Collin is the author of ‘Altered State’ and ‘Pop Grenade’. He wrote Daft Punk's Mixmag cover feature in 1997