Daft Punk’s Ecstasy Revelation
EDM pioneer Thomas Bangalter chatted to Rolling Stone about dabbling with MDMA during Daft Punk’s first incarnation as uber-credible tech-house auteurs and revealed that he quit on the day Kurt Cobain died.
“I did Ecstasy for one year, from early 1993 to early 1994,” the French pop star confessed, “The problem was that I was liking any music I’d hear, any crap – I had no critical judgment.” (Rolling Stone: http://rol.st/14MR9Tk )
His recollections differed markedly with the views of 80s electronic pioneer Dave Ball who chatting to Skrufff in 2007 about the genesis of Soft Cell’s ground-breaking (and still brilliant sounding) electronic dance music album ‘Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing’ recalled being inspired after taking ecstasy in New York in 1982 (when MDMA was still legal).
“At the time we were minor celebrities because we’d had a hit record with Tainted Love and I think it was (manager) Stevo who first mentioned ecstasy to us. He came in one morning saying ‘I had this amazing drug last night’. We weren’t really into drugs at that point, we didn’t know much about them beyond a bit of speed,” Dave recalled.
“There was this girl from Brooklyn who was selling them for $6 a hit, per capsule and we did it. We were going to places like Danceteria and Paradise Garage, hearing all this great dance music and E-ing off our tits. So we thought ‘wouldn’t it be a great idea to make a full on club version of the first album.”
“But you can’t actually make records when you’re on drugs. You can get inspired by drugs. Pink Floyd said that. They were known as an acid band but they never took it when they were playing it, they just knew what worked for people on acid,” he added.
“And it wasn’t actually mastered under the influence of ecstasy and that’s the fallacy,” he also stressed, “you can get your inspiration from drugs and try and replicate that feeling but that’s all- trying to make records on drugs is a really bad move,” he advised.
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
