It appears that elusive French electronic duo Daft Punk have plans to tour in 2014, with the American National Park Service revealing that they rejected a proposal from the pair to stage a gig at America’s first national monument, the Devils Tower in Wyoming.
The Rapid City Journal reports that the Get Lucky hitmakers reportedly proposed a 50,000 capacity show on private land just under a kilometre away from the site, with plans to use equipment like lasers at the base of the 400-metre rock tower.
But The National Park Service have given the proposal the old no-can-do, after consulting with six Native American tribes, with superintendent Reed Robinson saying lighting up the sacred Native American site would be disrespectful:
“This being a night skies park and a natural park and a sacred site to 24 different tribes, that would be considered sacrilegious and gets into that ‘inappropriate use’. And that meant maybe we would have to close portions of the main trail to facilitate this kind of stuff.”
Devil’s Towers was declared America’s first national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906, with the site famously featuring in the 1977 Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Robinson said the “highly unusual” request came from ICM Partners, an agency representing the group, and that they seemed to be looking for locations for a series of shows around the world to take place mid-year, which sounds like good news for punters hoping to see the electronic pioneers in the flesh this year.
It’s not the first time Daft Punk have sought out an unlikely location for an event, with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo staging their global Random Access Memories launch party in Wee Waa in rural New South Wales last year.
