30 Days of Music: 19 A Song From Your Favourite Album

Daft Punk – Television Rules The Nation / Crescendolls (Youtube, audio only)

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and make what be a pretty bold statement: Alive 2007 is the greatest live album of all time. Yes, I said it. Better than Live at Leeds by The Who. Better than Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison. Better even than Nirvana Unplugged. It’s just that damn good.

After listening to Human After All, you might think Daft Punk had gone downhill. The album had some great moments, bogged down by repetition. The thrilling Robot Rock for one got a lot less thrilling after the fourth minute or so, and tracks like Steam Machine never seemed to go anywhere but seemed to take their damn time doing it. It wasn’t another Discovery, shall we say.

By the time the band started their 2007 tour Alive, exactly ten years after the original Alive tour in 1997, they’d taken their weekest album and transformed it into their strongest. By mixing up their older tracks with their new ones, they created something stronger than both. Worth more than the sum of the parts, these tracks delivered in a live setting in a way no other band has ever really matched. If you were cynical, you might think that a New Coke ploy had been played – the Human After All tracks work so well mixed in with their older hits that you could almost say they’d planned it all along.

The show that makes this album was recorded in Paris wih a crowd totally in rapture, and this track Television Rules The Nation / Crescendolls really epitomises that. You’ve got the massive build up, the crowd singing “ooh, ooh ooh ooh” along with the synth parts, aspects of Around The World dropped in to set the crowd up, and a massive, massive song.

I had the pleasure of seeing Daft Punk on the London leg of their tour, with my musical and apparently hetero life partner Matt. He’s written about this concert for his blog as well, adding to the list of musical connections we’re re-affirming. He says these connections are “like kissing, or something”. He is right. I wish he wasn’t.

Regardless, it was the best gig I have ever been to. So many people there for the same reason, to dance and sing and enjoy themselves. It was life-affirming. When the beat drops in this song, I just about lost my mind, and it just gets bigger and bigger from there. On top of that, you’ve got the titular crescendo that knocks the song up and sends the crowd wild – people were losing shoes. It was spectacular.

It is amazing. It is music that makes you feel, music that makes you want to dance, music that touches you inside. On top of being the greatest live album ever, it is among the greatest albums ever recorded, and I say that with no level of hyperbole.

Amazing.