Fred Again B2B Thomas Bangalter isn’t Alive 2026… but it’s close enough for now

AKA an emergency Substack

Rosalía x Lisa x Alexandra Sans Massó

Ever since Daft Punk floated off to the great digital cloud in the sky, fans have been wondering what on earth a final Daft Punk tour would have sounded like - an Alive 2017 (or Alive 2027 for the eternal optimists).

Some fans have speculated about a possible Random Access Memories-style tour, where Daft Punk bring the highly-trained studio musicians they worked with on their fourth album out for a spin of the world’s arenas. (There was, I believe, talk of this in the 2010s but it proved too financially and logistically challenging to pull off.)

Most fans, though, like to think about an Alive 2006/7-style tour, where Daft Punk, once again, mash and mix up their hits - including all the music from RAM and the Tron Soundtrack - into mind-bending new combinations.

All the signs suggest that we’re never going to hear this. But Thomas Bangalter’s recent return to DJing with Fred Again - first at Paris’ Pompidou Centre in October 2025 and again at London’s Alexandra Palace this weekend - gets us about as close as we’re going to get. For me, the Alexandra Palace gig is the most interesting, given that Bangalter and Fred Again spent the whole week preparing for it, and that is what I am writing about here.

There are, of course, some serious caveats about comparing the Ally Pally gig to what Daft Punk might have done. Most notably, this wasn’t Daft Punk and it was a DJ set rather than a live gig, which means that there was a lot of other people’s music in there, including (naturally) Fred Again’s.

(And, for my part, I wasn’t at the gig and have only listened to a recording of it, which isn’t perfect, although the atmosphere sounds electric.)

But given the preparation that went into the two-hour back-to-back set in London, it was clearly far from an off-the-cuff performance. And the heavy presence of Daft Punk cuts, in admirably mixed-up forms, means that in theory it sails closely to what a modern Daft Punk performance could be, an Alive 2026 crossed with the duo’s classic Essential Selection.

Naturally, there are moments in the set - the jungle cuts and Youngstar’s Pulse X - that feel a lot more like the work of Fred Again than Thomas Bangalter. Daft Punk have never talked much about jungle / drum & bass and it really wasn’t popular in Paris in the 90s; the duo’s views on iconic grime instrumentals, too, go un-recorded.

On the other hand, there are moments in the set that sound pure Thomas Bangalter. About an hour in someone - and I would bet it was Thomas - drops Prince’s Raspberry Beret, which is something Daft Punk themselves used to do on the Daftendirekt DJ tour, mixing it into Digital Love in a moment of pure joy.

Going further back, the set starts with George Frideric Handel’s Sarabande, mixed into Peter Fonda’s famed monologue from The Wild Angels, which then gives way to the “Jack has a groove sample” - pure Bangalter again - and, in one of my favourite moments of the whole two hours, someone mixes Bangalter’s Mythologies v. Les Amazones (from his 2023 ballet debut, no less) into Stardust’s Music Sound’s Better To You, which is, in turn, is mixed into Armand van Helden’s remix of Da Funk, a stunning 10 minutes of music. The Signatune / Around The World mix, which turns up around the end, is brilliantly Bangalter, too.

Many of my favourite moments from the London set involve Daft Punk’s own music, which Bangalter and Fred seems to have re-moulded in their own image during the week’s prep. Towards the start of the set, the duo offer up a mix of One More Time with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Aint No Mountain High Enough, which I could listen to for hours.

The blend of Daft Punk’s Nightvision and Animal Collective’s My Girls, which eventually drifts into Panda Bear’s vocal from Doin’ It Right, is exemplary too, the kind of inspired combination that could have turned up on an Alive 2017; and the various manipulations of Touch, whose naked piano line turns up all over the set’s mid section, including being interrupted by some fearsome jungle beats, are inspired.

I’m not as keen on the various Daft Punk / Fred Again combinations, including Loving Arms / Digital Love (which they also played at the Pompidou), Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger / Turn On The Lights again and Delilah / Around the World, largely because I’m not a big Fred Again fan. But they make perfect sense in the context.

In any case, you have to give kudos to Fred Again for tempting Bangalter back into the world of dance music. I have enjoyed Thomas’ ballet, art installation, sound track work and more. And he has earned every right to do whatever he wants for the rest of his creative life.

But in both Daft Punk and his early solo work, Thomas Bangalter was incredibly skilled at making people dance, his music tapping into the barbarian part of the brain that just needs to move and wilfully manipulating the impulse. Think Spinal Scratch (which Thomas played in London), Burnin’, Ventura, Outrun and more.

I feared this part of Bangalter’s life was lost forever. Maybe it will never come by again. But whatever happens from now on in, with his shows at Alexandra Palace and the Pompidou Bangalter has shown he can still ignite a dance floor in 2026, with invention, verve and power.