The whole thing was an audacious experiment that came across as an aural love letter to the sheer joy of creating sound. They even arranged for synth king Giorgio Moroder to muck in with a spoken word autobiography so the album could pay homage to his mighty influence. Other collaborations featured Animal Collective's Panda Bear, The Strokes' Julian Casablancas and old-school songwriter Paul Williams Jr. Much of the material was performed by carefully recruited session musicians, chief among them Chic's groovemaster guitarist Nile Rodgers, whose signature sound led to RAM being widely described as a throwback disco LP. It was planned and honed over four years of recording, re-recording and re-re-recording at Henson, Conway and Capitol Studios in California, Electric Lady Studios in New York City, and Gang Recording Studio in Paris. RAM wasn't one of those records that appears by fortuitous happenstance. LCD Soundsystem wrote a song about them ('Daft Punk Is Playing At My House') and pretty much everyone else just genuflected in awe of their genius. By the time they came to bringing RAM to fruition, they were the world's most famous practitioners of electronic dance and always appeared dressed as robots. Their chosen name, Daft Punk, was a joke but their music was anything but. You know the details but, to recap briefly, Random Access Memories was the fourth studio album released by the French electronic duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. And, amazingly, not even as good as the other Pharrell Williams track on the album, 'Lose Yourself To Dance'. Lead single 'Get Lucky' was not just the Song Of The Summer, but A Song For All Summers. The problem for them – and the absolute opposite of a problem for us – was that RAM re-energised the past, established the present and prescribed the future so completely that there was literally nowhere else to go. This was an album so brilliant and which proved so popular that, after giving it some thought, its creators, Daft Punk, decided neither they – nor anybody else for that matter – could ever better it. They included Yeezus, Modern Vampires Of The City, Reflektor, Wakin' On A Pretty Daze, MBV, Old, The Next Day and – staring down at all of them imperiously from the top of the heap – Random Access Memories. This was the year that, when we weren't really looking, a slew of landmark albums arrived. And this was in 2013, to be precise.ĭaft Punk at the premiere of Tron: Legacy in Hollywood in 2010 Such times when the stars align come along very rarely, but it did happen again relatively recently. This was my golden era when a raft of incredible, mind-blowing, pioneering music was released that no one could ever remotely have envisaged. This was the year soundtracked by Sgt Pepper, Surrealistic Pillow, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Safe As Milk, Soul Finger and Time Has Come. I might even have hopped a short haul or thumbed a ride to Monterey where the Pop Festival was, as they say, happening. That way I'd have been hanging around the Sunset Strip in 1967 where, at the Whisky A Go Go alone, I'd have seen Love, The Doors, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Spirit, Janis Joplin, and Them with Van Morrison. What if you could reinvent your life and have another go at it, starting somewhere, somewhen else? Me, I'd opt to have been born a decade earlier and I'd have moved to Los Angeles in 1965, aged 17. ![]() Steve Sutherland celebrates its brilliance Four years in the making, this swansong album from the electronic music pioneers swapped samples for session musicians.
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