How Daft Punk Met: The Paris School Story

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo met in 1987 as students at Lycee Carnot in Paris, introduced by a mutual friend and fellow future musician, Laurent Brancowitz, who would later join Phoenix. They were teenagers with a shared interest in music and, fairly quickly, a shared project.

Their first band was called Darlin', formed with Brancowitz in the early 1990s. Darlin' released one single - a cover of The Beach Boys' "Darlin'" - on the Duophonic label, received a dismissive review in Melody Maker that described their music as "daft punky thrash," and broke up when Brancowitz left to join what would become Phoenix.

Bangalter and Guy-Manuel took the insult from the review and turned it into a name. They kept working. The French house scene was beginning to take shape around them in Paris in the early 1990s, centred on clubs, labels like Roulé and Crydamoure (which Bangalter and Guy-Manuel would later found themselves), and a small network of producers who were building something new out of American house, Chicago acid, and filtered disco.

By 1993, Daft Punk existed as a recording project. Their first releases came out on Bangalter's Roulé label. "Da Funk" followed in 1995. Homework arrived in 1997 and changed everything.

What made the partnership work over nearly three decades was never fully explained by either member, and deliberately so. They gave very few interviews, almost never discussed their personal relationship or working process in public, and maintained a careful mystique that the robot personas only deepened. The friendship that started at a Paris school in 1987 remained, in the end, as private as everything else about them.

Explore the music that partnership produced: a full discography retrospective.