Okay, admittedly: Cher was first. At least, it was her monster hit ‘Believe’ that introduced the general public to autotune in 1998: the notorious sound effect that corrects and adjusts the pitch of a voice or an instrument. But it was Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ that gave the metallic robot effect a touch of credibility in 2000. Striking, because around that time Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the producers behind the Daft Punk alias, started to deck themselves out in flashy robot helmets. The gentlemen decorated the full-bodied house groove with clipped samples of the horn section from the disco song ‘More Spell on You’ by one Eddie Johns.
The duo asked Romanthony, an American gospel house legend who was highly regarded in the dance world, for the singing part. “He is a teacher for us,” Guy-Manuel once told the magazine Jockey Slut. “He has proven that you can perfectly combine minimalism with soul and emotion, as well as with love and depth.” Romanthony’s crooning certainly sounds passionate. “One more time, we’re gonna celebrate”, he shouts like a frenzied preacher, bandaged in autotune, “Oh yeah, alright, don’t stop the dancing”. He wonderfully captures the dizzying euphoria you feel when in a packed, steamy club the beats and the crowd merge and catapult you through the night as if in a whirlpool.
“The success of the song changed my life,” Romanthony told the magazine about ‘One More Time’ Slices. “It gave me a chance to sit back and admire the machine that sold that song to the masses. There was an incredible amount of marketing and promotion involved and I was not used to that. It’s a completely different business than selling your records out of the trunk of your car.”
Romanthony, who had never encountered superstardom before, was afraid of what big money would do to him. “He said, if you pay me that much money you’ll send me to my death,” says Kevin McKay, the boss of Romanthony’s record label Glasgow Underground, in the book Daft Punk: We Were The Robots. “Not because he was going to commit suicide, but because he was afraid of going down in true rock star fashion. So he asked me to send him a small amount every month, about ten thousand dollars. Enough to keep making music and throwing parties.”
‘One More Time’ exploded from the start and spawned the accompanying second Daft Punk album Discovery a boost. Even though not everyone was keen on the pop content and the fiddling with autotune, much to the annoyance of the Parisian duo. In the magazine DJ Times Bangalter compared the criticism of autotune and vocoders to the conservative resistance of folk purists to the electric guitar: “In the 1960s, rock musicians were sometimes asked why on earth they played the electric guitar. But it is simply a tool! No big deal. Well, creation is interaction. You either love it or hate it. As long as people are not neutral about our music, I can live with it.”
