Earlier this summer prior to my exams I wanted to write a piece of music coming from different corners of the globe. Unfortunately the world cup was on and the only thing that I could do was watch it and then bitch about to my friends in America. I even wrote an email to them whilst they where in the plane flying to Germany. Since the World Cup in Africa is going to be the first one ever that I don’t have to study I think I might be able to do more than just waste my time watching men kick a ball. Anyway I regret not writing the piece since the autumn has been an invasion of a good few bands that I like. The Australians represented with Presets and Wolfmother and the Americans came through last week with The Gossip which hurt me because I desperately wanted to see them but I guess exams are more important. Today whilst pottering through my Itunes List I ended up listening to an album that I for the longest time despised. Not that it is bad but I think that it is the worst album that the group ever made. Manu, disagreed with me even to the point where I began to question his sanity. However I need to apologise to him, the album is quite excellent, that album is Homework by Daft Punk. It was released ten years ago and let me set the mood about my life at the time. I was in France making the transition from befuddled English kid in a bi-lingual school to a befuddled English kid in a bi-lingual boarding school. Music began to be my only way on learning the language which didn’t include mass swearing. I saw La Haine for the first time and just gawked at the film for about 3 hours straight. I marvelled at how the older kids would be effortlessly cool, smoking and riding their mopeds. The stories of the guys going clubbing and meeting undeniably hot girls ringed in my ears for days. Basically these where my formative years, I lashed out a bit and did stupid shit and even learnt how to play tennis. At this time I relied heavily on the library for new music, france has its radio stations and they never really appealed for me, I was still riding on the gild of Britpop. Oasis and Blur where my staples back then. Then I discovered Nirvana, the live album Muddy Banks of Whiskah. From the opening cords of school I was hooked, so much so that I don’t think that I ever stopped listening to that cd straight for about 5 months. Other bands came and passed but it was mainly Nirvana, Green Day and I Am (French rap group). Those bands accompanied me everyday as I took a metro and then a tram to school. My batteries ran out all the time but I would then steal the schools. Around this time Girl Power took over, but in a way that I didn’t realise. I didn’t see the spice girls until I got back to England a year later. Instead France became hooked to this one song with a repetitive loop and simple phrase Around The World. The video, directed by Michel Grondy, was a visual masterpiece that had us all trying to do the dance. Those 4 minutes meant that everything stopped and you just head nodded your way through the track. I used to wait on the countdown to see when it would come on. Then came the second single burnin’ which you had to be extremely patient to get going in fact most of the time you would lose interest. I forgot about them for a while. Then came the album discovery, I was in America at the time and I was surprised to hear this disco house song playing on the radio and at parties I would go to. Then my friend Lucas passed the album onto me, the name of the album describes the sound and the feel of it perfectly. Discovery – Very Disco and that’s in a good sense. It is one of my top five albums of all time and whether it be the minister’s stomp of Too Long or the sombre Digital Love I love it. The anime that it is based on the album isn’t that bad either. Then came Human after all, y brother played me a couple of tracks, in fact he played one track so many fucking times that I cant stop laughing when I hear it. Emotion, repeated again and again, emo for the dance people. This latest album isn’t the best but its damn good still. I always placed Discovery at the top and then left the other two to duke it out but to be honest I always preferred Human after all. Then I realised that Homework has to be viewed as the first of its genre, without his album we wouldn’t have had the spate of house songs that we have today. Tom Novy, Pete Heller, Spiller, Moloko and Mylo all owe parts of their success to the groundwork of the album Homework. The bass line in the song Da Funk is possibly the best I have ever heard for a dance track. Now if they only remixed a DFA 1979 song I would be stoked.