In early 2006, Daft Punk announced a number of shows. On 29 April, they performed at the
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, their first US performance since 1997.
Thomas Bangalter initially suggested there would be a DVD release of the show, but later said he felt amateur footage shared online was more compelling. Daft Punk later announced shows at
Bercy, Paris,
Wireless Festival and
RockNess in June 2007, the
Oxegen festival in July and
Lollapalooza in August. Daft Punk played at the
RockNess Festival by the banks of
Loch Ness, Scotland, on 10 June 2007 as the headline act in the 10,000-capacity Clash tent. Part of the tent was removed to allow thousands of people outside to see the show. On 16 June, Daft Punk headlined the third day of the
O2 Wireless Festival. Daft Punk headlined Stage 2/NME Stage at the Oxegen music festival on 8 July 2007. Their live set was preceded by a showing of the trailer for the film ''
Daft Punk's Electroma''. Four days later, the duo played at Traffic Torino Free Festival in Parco della Pellerina in
Turin, Italy. Daft Punk headlined the
AT&T stage on 3 August 2007, the first night of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago. Their show there was praised by
Pitchfork, which wrote that it "was a much-needed reminder of the still-potent power of communicative pop." On 5 August, Daft Punk performed at the
International Centre in Toronto followed by a 9 August performance at
KeySpan Park in
Brooklyn, New York. They headlined the
Vegoose festival in
Las Vegas on 27 October, along with
Rage Against the Machine,
Muse and
Queens of the Stone Age. They also performed on Friday 2 November 2007 at the Arena Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico and Guadalajara.
Modular Records announced that Daft Punk would appear in Australia for an event in December 2007 called Never Ever Land. Daft Punk were supported by their regular acts
SebastiAn and
Kavinsky at the appearances, which had been announced as an extension to the
Alive 2007 tour. A
Triple J interview with Pedro Winter (Busy P) revealed that Daft Punk's Sydney appearance on 22 December would be their final show for 2007 and the last to feature the pyramid light scheme. Tickets for the Australian tour sold more quickly than for any Daft Punk-related event in their history. For the 2007 shows, Daft Punk added the tracks "
Burnin'" and "Phoenix" and an encore. The introduction for the live show featured the five-note sequence used in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Technical elements For the performances, Daft Punk used
Ableton Live software on "custom-made supercomputers" The company provided eight-core
Mac Pro units running Catalyst v4 and
Final Cut Pro. Daft Punk approached the company with their visual concept for the shows. "They came to us with a pretty fixed idea of what they wanted", said head of XL Video, Richard Burford. "They wanted to mix live video with effects. Using the eight-core Mac Pros, we were able to take in eight digital sources and treat them as video streams. Then they could use Catalyst to coordinate the video with lighting effects and add their own effects in on the fly. The final digital video streams ran to
LED screens."
The Times described the set as a "memorable sensory spectacle, both dazzling and deafening" and
ThisisLondon declared it "an almost faultless set of relentless electro euphoria".
NME wrote that the performance was "a robotic spectacular", while Shoutmouth described the set as "typically triumphant". The
Guardian journalist Gabriel Szatan likened it to the
Beatles' 1964 performance on
The Ed Sullivan Show, which brought
British rock and roll to the American mainstream.
Dates == Critical reception ==