If you’re a fan of Daft Punk, you probably know that they haven’t toured since 2007 when they capped off their Alive tour in Australia, and haven’t done a live performance since 2010 when they made a guest appearance with Phoenix at Madison Square Garden in New York. Thomas Bangaltar and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have laid out their reasons for not touring in past interviews, claiming basically that they want to keep their creative focus on making captivating records. In an interview with Rolling Stone they said:

We want to focus everything on the act and excitement of listening to the album. We don’t see a tour as an accessory to an album.

To later elaborate on this, they are quoted as telling the Daily Telegraph the following:

We don’t want to tour this record right away because it seems the magic of music today and the life of music today is on stage. We put all our focus on the idea of trying to put a lot of life on a record, the same life you would have in a live performance and we don’t want to simultaneously do something that would remove the focus from this thing we spent so much time doing.

If you see words like “right away” and “simultaneously” as strategically placed qualifying words, you’re probably correct in assuming that a Daft Punk tour will happen sometime in the future. Unfortunately the real Daft Punk has not yet announced this speculated tour, but something almost as good is stepping up the fulfill the demand. Meet Daft As Punk, “the world’s first Daft Punk tribute band.”

The story of Daft As Punk goes like this: Two blokes named Eugene and James from Ireland walk into a local pub in Dublin and start putting down Guinness as if they were two blokes at a pub in Dublin with really good Guinness. After about 8 pints of the stuff, they have “a brainwave” that is so infectious to their imagination that they actually remember it the next day. Fast forward a bit and the two aforementioned blokes have acquired a set of excellent looking Daft Punk replica helmets from here in the states, put their money into some equipment, and take a chance booking themselves at a club in Dublin called The Pod. To their surprise, the show ends up being a hit and now they’re touring around the UK.

They admit it themselves that they started this endeavor as kind of a joke. People didn’t take it seriously at first either, and they say that everyone wrote them off as chancers (an Irish slang term that generally means a con man). One of them says in their video interview with Ministry of Sound:

I am a chancer, but I am a Daft Punk fan. I love going to see Daft Punk, and they don’t fucking play anymore, it’s so annoying. They just make appearances; they just walk on stage and walk off. Fuck that.

A rather ineloquent beginning to an idea that already has some air under its wings. Check out the video interview embedded below to hear the story of when they played a corporate Christmas party for a really posh advertising agency. Apparently the organizer of the event might have told everyone that they were the real deal and as a result, they had people coming up to them speaking French and treating them like royalty all night long.

What do you think? Is a Daft Punk tribute band brilliant or blasphemy? If you have seen the real robots before, would you go see Eugene and James to relive the experience? If you missed the Alive tour, would this be enough to satisfy your insatiable craving to see the robots live?

Go like them on Facebook here, and you can even book them for your own corporate soirée here.