By George Pickthorn
‘Epilogue’ is the name of the video that Daft Punk released on February 22nd to mark their disbandment. The video uses footage from their film
Electroma accompanied by ‘Touch’
, a track from their final album: Random Access Memories. There is no fanfare or grand farewell, only a wistful sunset as the robots conclude their work and part from each other.
It makes sense that Daft Punk would communicate their disbandment with a video. The band always used unusual and memorable visuals to elevate their music. Even in 1997 when the young Thomas Bangalter and Gay-Manuel de Homem-Christo released their first album
Eddie Johns, whose 1979 track More Spell On You was sampled by Daft Punk for their hit single One More Time , has never received royalties from the French duo s track.
Johns story has been uncovered in a new profile by the Los Angeles Times, who tracked him down in LA, where he s been living in a supportive housing facility after struggling with homelessness for over a decade. Johns suffered a stroke ten years ago, which left him unable to work. I help Eddie use the computer sometimes, and he showed me some of his music, Johns case manager Alyssa Cash told the Los Angeles Times. He showed me his album cover, and when I found this video talking about how it was sampled by Daft Punk, it was like a lightbulb went off. That s Eddie, this is his song.
Thomas Bangalter and
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, was released in 2000.
The song garnered numerous accolades including being ranked #5 on Pitchfork’s top 500 songs of the 2000s and peaking at number one on the French singles charts.
Music group Daft Punk performs onstage during The 59th GRAMMY Awards at STAPLES Center on February 12, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for NARAS)
In February, following their retirement announcement,
However, 70-year-old Johns, who wrote the 1978 single
“More Spell On You”
which provides the horn sections for Daft Punk’s “One More Time” said he hadn’t earned anything from the song, per an interview with th
7 May 2021
Eddie Johns, 70, who has struggled with homelessness for a decade, was a 1970s disco star who recorded the horn section that is sampled on Daft Punk’s classic dance hit “One More Time” but he reportedly has never been paid his royalties.
The original song is “More Spell on You,” the title track of an album Johns released in Europe at the time:
Over the years, Daft Punk fans have explained how Johns’s sound was sampled and edited to form the basis for “One More Time”:
The
Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that Daft Punk has paid royalties to a French music company, GM Musipro, which owns the rights to Johns’s song, but that the music company had not been able to locate him. It promised to settle accounts.
Friday, May 7. I’m Shelby Grad.
It’s been a surreal week on the recall campaign trail. A week where the biggest star was a bear from Alaska, along with the term “pretty boy” and tales of woe from private jet hangars.
She and her campaign staff are struggling to move beyond the OMG phase of her candidacy OMG, another celebrity politician! OMG, a transgender woman running for office! They want to talk policy, hash out the big problems facing this big state and tell voters how the candidate would work to solve them.
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In the 2003 recall, with 135 gubernatorial hopefuls of varying fame, only Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to hitch celebrity to substance with any success. And that’s because the former Mr. Universe/Conan/Terminator had spent the previous year campaigning statewide for Proposition 49, a measure to increase funding for before- and after-school programs. It was his first political success.