Remembering The Time Daft Punk’s Starship Descended On Wee Waa

— This morning, Daft Punk announced their breakup after 28 years at the forefront of dance music. This article, originally published in 2013, is one of our favourites about the duo — a recount of their extraordinary album launch in Wee Waa, New South Wales. Enjoy. —

It makes sense, if you think about it. When creatures from outer space come to visit, they don’t touch down in the middle of Manhattan (unless they’re trying to destroy it). They find an isolated spot, away from major highways and city centres; they want fields, sky, space. Maybe some livestock to experiment on. They turn up in places where the sight of something new and alien elicits curiosity and excitement, not shrugs and scoffs; not for them the commotion and cynicism of cities that have seen it all.

When it was first announced, there was disbelief. “Of everywhere in the world, why rural New South Wales?” And then there was sneering. “Why would you drive for seven hours to the middle of nowhere to hear someone press play?” The thousands who clamoured for tickets to the 79^th Annual Wee Waa Agricultural Show were gullible, idiots, rubes. “They’re not even going to be there!”

In their exclusive interview with the French duo, Fairfax noted condescendingly that “a few thousand hipsters” who’d never even heard of Wee Waa before (all the real music fans had already been through their NSW geography phase way back in high school?) were traveling all the way out to this dot on the map to hear a CD you could buy in stores that morning, and even stream legally three days before.

That news in particular was received with glee by the cynics. What was even the point now? It wasn’t going to be exclusive, or special, or new. Daft Punk had definitively ruled out an appearance of any kind (except by hologram, a rumour swiftly quashed by Sony), and you could hear the album beginning to end from anywhere you fancied. Last Monday, the Imperial Hotel in Wee Waa had all thirteen of its rooms booked out; on Tuesday, after the stream went online overnight, proprietor Luke Noble had ten of those bookings cancelled. (They were eventually filled on Friday.) According to the hype, 4000 tickets were sold — but the non-local turnout on the night itself was estimated at between 1500 and 2500, including VIPs and media. Some disappointed fans had clearly joined the side of the cynics: why make the trip?

Around sunset on the Friday night, a colleague from FasterLouder and I were sitting in the stands watching the dog jump and interviewing a warm, friendly man named John Sample, who’d flown in from Houston to come to the Wee Waa Show. It was his first time in Australia.

“It’s a lot like West Texas,” he told us, indicating the beaten-down grass, fences and expanse of sky with something like affection. He’d never heard of Wee Waa, but as a former aspiring physicist he was familiar with the nearby telescope array at Narrabri, and was tickled enough by the whole concept that he flew out for four days. It wasn’t just that he was a fan who wanted to be at the launch. If it had been held in, say, London, he’d never have bothered; it would be just another party. “It’d be every Londoner, every Parisian is gonna show up: it’d be a mob scene.”

“So this is like a self-selecting thing?” I ventured. “Only the people who care enough will come?”

“Exactly. That’s exactly why I came here,” he replied, nodding emphatically. “THAT is why I came here.”

The Road Trip

The drive from Brisbane to Wee Waa takes around six and a half hours; from Sydney, it’s seven or eight with breaks. The road from the latter city takes you on a little tour through Australian primary industry, from the open-cut mines of Singleton to sorghum in Breeza, before arriving in Wee Waa, a town with cotton on the brain. It’s easy to tell when you hit cotton country – most of the picking happens in April, but by mid-May the roadsides are still littered with small, fluffy scraps of white that escaped from the balers.

We left Sydney around eight on Thursday night, five of us piled into a battered white sedan. The idea was that we would get in late, collapse into bed, and wake up in Wee Waa reborn as locals; Junkee’s own Wee Waa correspondent, Alex Sol Watts, had commandeered some of his family’s Show tickets, plus beds and local knowledge. Once we were clear of Maitland and onto National Highway 15, he began pointing out notable landmarks visible from the highway. At Singleton, the mines were invisible, but the huge white and orange floodlights that lit them all night long glowed, uneasy and unearthly, in the distance; skeletal steel structures spiked into the black sky.

The car being full of music writers and one musician, we passed, and noted with glee, signs for Gun Club Road and Doughboy Hollow. At Murrundi, north of Scone, we tumbled out to stretch our legs and smoke and pee by the side of the road, and spent a while appreciating the thick dusting of stars you can never see in the city. When we moved on, it was into silver clouds of dense fog, then spectral sheets of mist that hovered above the road and skimmed over the car like manta rays.

As it grew later, we began driving past huge trucks and road trains slumped silently on the side of the highway – many companies don’t allow their drivers to stay on the road past certain times, and so truckies will simply pull over wherever they are at cutoff time, and nod off in the cab. The sleekest, chromiest models looked like sleeping robots.

It was past three in the morning when we finally rolled into Wee Waa, and we drove around town to see what we could see. Every shop, from the indigenous community centre to the bottle-o, had the already-iconic robo-Janus poster in the window; some had special displays. A mannequin in the window of Robbie’s Country Clothing sported the cardboard helmets that had been passed out to locals. There were sleek banners on the lampposts. A lone man at the ATM in a white Tyvek coverall looked at us like we were the suspicious ones.

We drove into the Showgrounds to look for clues as to what we could expect the next night, and snapped pictures of the mysterious lighting rig. As we looked in vain for a spot where a pyramid could appear or a hologram could be projected, we could hear a rooster doing its thing, somewhere off in the dark.

The Party

It didn’t matter how many times the duo or Sony insisted there would be no surprise appearance, neither in flesh nor light form – people still expected something.

Various rumours flew around town all day: that Sony had assured the Wee Waa Show Society (allegedly furious at being gazumped) that the iTunes stream was only a teaser, and that the full album would be revealed at the Show after all; that a private plane had touched down at Wee Waa airstrip carrying Guy-Man and Thomas, who would be wandering the showgrounds in their civvies like they did for the teaser premiere at Coachella.

More than anything, right up until someone pressed play, there was a feeling that the enormous LED dancefloor, the mirrorball the size of a SmartCar and the dozen or so floodlights visible from the next town over just wasn’t enough. There had to be something else!

As it turns out, there wasn’t — unless you count the slightly rough Daft Punk megamix set by OneLove’s Ryan Wilson, that played after the album finished. It was a poor substitute for the flawless mash-up sets of Daft Punk live, but also felt like a consolation prize, or a tacit admission that the album itself wasn’t exactly a party starter at times. The set drew heavily on Homework – an album just as odd and meta and nostalgic as Random Access Memories – as well as the poppier moments of Discovery.

The crowd, still dazed and wild from the grinding euphoria of the album’s final track ‘Contact’, recognised the wry pulse of ‘Da Funk’ (a track recorded nearly twenty years ago) and let out a collective squeal of glee — and the party was resumed. During a pulsing mix of the buoyant central motif of ‘Digital Love’, a determined man in a tweed jacket, who’d spent the main set inside a helmet, was lifted high enough to touch the disco ball. We were still all facing inward towards the ball like a totem as we had all night, and, seeing his palm make contact, roared in approval.

The Album

Electronic music, especially party anthems of the kind Daft Punk do so well, can feel somewhat detached at times; it’s easy to forget that it was made by humans, rather than being delivered fully-formed. The helmets don’t do much to mitigate that effect, and the pair are famously aloof and averse to public attention. (They’ve made absolutely no comment whatsoever on how they feel the Wee Waa event went off, in fact.) But on record, Daft Punk’s favourite emotion is a blind euphoria, anticipation, pure (digital) love for music and dancing and good times — and never has this been more explicit than on Random Access Memories.

The CD booklet features diagrams of the robot helmets, with labels pointing to CPUs, optical sensors, “biomechanical transition” and other cyborg-y sounding things. Inside one helmet, a maze of circuits; inside the other, the crinkled hemispheres of a human brain. Since before “robot / human”, the duo have been exploring the place where man and machine meet – a fundamental concern for those who make art using technology. It’s no accident that this album features the most human vocals of any of their albums, and the most live playing by far, and thus fewer intermediaries between themselves and the music we hear.

With RAM, Daft Punk have added “history / future” to their collection of binaries. The tremulous sentimentality of ‘Touch’, based around the wistful, unadorned vocals of a man who co-wrote ‘Rainbow Connection’, is spliced into burbling digital treatments of the line “I remember touch” – like an AI musing on happier times – and lustrous disco orchestration. ‘Giorgio By Moroder’ builds a Tron pulse around the electro pioneer’s adorably accented reminisces, braiding in a cheesy lounge groove, cinematic strings, arena guitars and flawless drum solos before fading back to just the iconic click. Is it a good song? Lord only knows. It’s an essay, a tour, a daydream. On the glowing disc in the middle of the paddock, people listened to Moroder speak patiently, but grinned with relief when the beat dropped and went back to dancing. “I’M FREEING MY MIND, GIORGIO!” bellowed someone nearby.

The last and best track, ‘Contact’, which will surely have whole movements built around it in their live shows from now on, is the one that samples The Sherbs — meaning yes, Our Daryl Braithwaite appears in Daft Punk’s liner notes. But it also begins with a recording of the Apollo 17 communications, where Capt. Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon, describes a mysterious flashing object to mission control. The crew were heading back from the moon when it was recorded; if our only natural satellite was on the Australian side of the world at the time, that very recording would have been relayed to Houston via the Dish at Parkes.

I caved and listened to the stream last week, so I’m not sure how it all sounded to those who’d saved themselves for Wee Waa. In the end I’m not sure it mattered at all. ‘Get Lucky’ was a sure highlight; the simple track about partying and togetherness felt extra special to those of us who’d driven all night (or day) for good fun. Even the excruciatingly dull ‘Give Life Back To Music’ benefited hugely from being the first track, as people relaxed, luxuriated in the groove, beamed like children at the sunset-coloured lights shifting beneath their feet.

My friend Anne had brought along a brooch from the ‘70s – a small circuit board studded with LEDs in various colours, powered by a few watch batteries. When the pin was fastened the circuit was completed, and the lights would pulse in response to bass noise. It’s not the subtlest analogy, but that’s how it seemed in the middle there: we were components in the circuit, waiting for the beat to come and light us up. Before the album started, before the fireworks, caged by pirouetting floodlights, I felt we were like those alien-friendly folk on top of the building in Independence Day – gazing upwards, waiting for a visitation.

On Saturday, we went back into town. We visited the Show again, where the crowd was much more full of kids in RM Williams than VIPs in fur gilets and metallic platform brogues (though several of the invaders had returned for fudge and showbags). The mannequin in Robbie’s Country Clothing was now wearing a white Akubra.

We had another night, so Alex took us on a little tour of the area. We gazed at Yarrie Lake, created when a meteor hit the earth and skipped across the landscape like a stone. We drove out to the Narrabri array, watched the huge white dishes shift imperceptibly to hear the stars better, read battered information signs about how our universe was expanding every day. We visited a cotton farm and got tipsy in a shed, sitting around a rusted orchard heater burning sump oil, as the sun sank towards the flat horizon. We oohed and aahed over the shifting pinks and corals, and our new farmer friend said with a wry grin, “Ah, sunsets out here are a dime a dozen.”

The Aftermath

There was a lot of talk about how good this event would be for Wee Waa. A lot of that talk carried with it a certain patronising element – isn’t this nice for them? Nice to have something decent out there for once? It’d put the town on the map. But the locals embraced it wholeheartedly, with the helmets and the posters and the puns, and welcomed the visitors with a genuine friendliness and openness.

Roxanne Whitton at the newsagency spent Friday handing out posters to new arrivals, chatting to all. “I enjoyed having everyone around – they were all so friendly,” she told me on Monday. “There was a real nice, happy buzz all around Wee Waa. … They were just here to party, they weren’t shopping and things like that, but they had to eat, and it was great, the bakery stayed open all night. People just sat around, sat in there all night.”

Small town councils and agricultural show societies probably aren’t equipped to deal with some of the politics of a major label release cycle, and it was clear some residents felt that the town had been exploited somewhat by Sony’s marketing juggernaut, even as they agreed that it was an overall positive. The hype over the supposed 4000 tickets sold led to some overcatering, with the Pony Club — who catered the VIP bar — stuck with food for an extra hundred people, and the Imperial having to receive dozens of cases of beer back into stock from the event bar (perhaps because of overpricing by the organisers; people don’t drive out to the country to pay $9 for a can of Extra Dry). But the ease with which the town cleared up and went back to normal on Saturday showed how unfazed they were by the whole affair.

“I don’t think the rewards back to the community will be quite as much as everybody was hoping,” mused Alex’s dad Kerry, as we prepared to drive home on Sunday. “We got some rain on Monday, Tuesday last week. We needed that rain desperately, but if we’d gotten three inches of rain, which is what we would have really liked to have had, that would have made more money for the town of Wee Waa than any Daft Punk album launch ever would.”

It did put the town on the map, certainly. We can at least hope that a few of the people who descended on Wee Waa last weekend drove away again feeling less like this dot on the map was on some other planet. There may not have been holograms or pyramids, but those who made the trip got something more out of this album than a soundtrack to dancing in your bedroom. The lights blink off and the humans stumble home, dazzled.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.