So you’re one of the most celebrated dance music acts in the world and you have a new album coming out. The entire world is on tenterhooks waiting to hear it. The hype machine is reaching apoplexy. Where do you have your launch party? London? Paris? Tokyo? If you are robotic beatmongers Daft Punk, the answer is none of the above.
Displaying the iconoclasm that has characterised their entire career, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have decided to go for something a little bit more alternative. They’re throwing one of the biggest parties of the year in an Australian backwater named, oh yes, Wee Waa.
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Wee Waa is a small town in New South Wales, about 355 miles northwest of Sydney. Less than 2,000 people live there. In a few weeks time, this humble Antipodean outpost will be the centre of the entire universe, for it is there that Daft Punk will conduct the global launch for their hugely-anticipated fourth studio album, the eight-years-in-the-making Random Access Memories.
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Perhaps fearing that an album launch by itself may not attract enough attention, the ‘Punk have opted to combine their little shindig with Wee Waa’s yearly agricultural festival, The Annual Wee Waa Show, which sounds like some sort of obscure comedy thing that you’d find on YouTube.
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One of the highlights of the Wee Waa calendar, this farm-tastic event celebrates all that is great about rural life, and soon, all that is great about grown men in robot costumes playing repetitive beats. We’d love to have been there when the organising committee got the phone-call, just so we could see their reaction.
But it gets better. Apparently every member of the Wee Waa Show (we’ll never get tired of saying that) is guaranteed tickets to the 4000-capacity launch event on May 17, which by itself is already the sort of bash that people would sell their entirely family to attend.
This means that a bunch of amiable sheep-dipping Aussies have automatically been given a leg-up over hordes of self-important media parasites, all of whom are now crying into their craft beer as they realise they have significantly less chance of getting off their tits at what will be one of the watershed cultural highlights of 2013. How will they be able to pretend they’re mates with Thomas Bangalter now? IT’S NOT FAIR!!! They’re probably posting sadfaces on their Tumblr even as we speak.
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We’re not entirely sure why Wee Waa got the gig (something to do with telescopes and community spirit, apparently) perhaps its status as the Cotton Capital of Australia sealed the deal. Either way we applaud Daft Punk for choosing such a wilfully awkward option. Hopefully their next album will be launched at a dried walrus meat sale on an Alaskan tundra.
