|
Pedro Winter is the visionary Parisian at the helm of the good
ship Daft Punk. Meet the man behind Headbangers, Cassius and an
inspirational business outlook based on skate philosophy
Whatever the ‘French Touch’ happens to be, Daft Punk’s
28-year-old Parisian manager Pedro Winter has it in spades. An
ex-skate kid, itinerant law student, self-confessed ‘freaky
turntablist’, and bourgeois gentilhomme of the international
creative economy, Pedro’s savoir faire has in the
past eight years helped transform Daft Punk from two posh kids
with a sampler and a bunch of ideas into a global entertainment
brand capable of rolling out pan-European Number One records, astonishing
video work and manga fantasias on DVD while appearing in Gap adverts
with no shame. For an outfit who never really needed a manager – Thomas
Bangalter’s father Daniel Vangarde, who wrote Ottowan’s ‘D.I.S.C.O’,
is the duo’s paternal overseer – Pedro Winter has been
the best manager they could ever have hoped for. A fixer, imagineer,
dealmaker, enabler and connector who counts Sophia Coppola, Spike
Jonze, Michel Gondry, Air, Jazzanova and Kenny Dope as close friends,
he is the silent third member of dance music’s most intriguing
outfit. In 1995 he met Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem
Christo – barely into their twenties – at Ministry
of Sounds, and promptly quit law school to manage them.
At the Cannes film Festival back in May, Pedro appeared in a razor-sharp
Christian Dior suit by Hedi Slimane to present Daft Punk’s
new DVD, ‘Interstella – The 5tory of the 5ecret 5star
5ystem’, a $2million+ collab with with Japanese Manga veteran
Leiji Mastumoto. But it’s a safe bet you’ll spot the ‘entertainment’ moguls
of the future not by the cut of their suits but the vintage of
their heavy metal T-shirts.
In the Paris offices of Pedro’s Headbangers’s management
company he’s slouched in a pair of Dockers with a chain on
his waist and a Metallica tee on his back. Vertiginously tall,
strikingly blond and expansive to the point of hysteria, he looks
like a catwalk model but burbles evangelically as a teenager who’s
just discovered music. The subject might be records, skating, fashion,
movies, business or whatever else is firing his imagination. Pedro
currently manages Daft Punk, house outfit Cassius and Parisian
producer DJ Mehdi alongside his own burgeoning career behind on
the decks. Next, he’s signing music to his new Hedbangers
label, whose ‘open-mind’ remit reflects the spectrum
of his tastes - he’s a diehard metal fan who DJs house, hip
hop and R&B. Meanwhile, he consults for the French music business
and is setting up a ready-to-wear range, Headbangirls.
In short, Pedro Winter has made a career and a packet out of structuring
the freerange creativity of Young Paris into a lucrative economy
where the currency is ideas and the transactional basis is trust. ‘Trust
is the secret,’ he glints. ‘When I’m touched
by something, when I hear some music, or see some inages, it makes
me feel something and I should go with it. I’m entering 2004
with my head full of projects’.
With no formal training, Pedro puts his success in business down
to - off all things – a childhood spend rigorously pulling
ollies and carving up the boulevards on a skateboard. ‘I
did ten years of skateboard, practising five hours every day on
the same trick, keep doing and keep doing it,’ he says. ‘That
gave me my business skills. With people like Mark Gonzalez, Mike
Templeton, Spike Jonze, something was around us at this time, the
influence of all those people.’ It’s as much a dedication
to the serious work of having fun as it is the friendships forged
in the Eighties and Nineties that have positioned Pedro and Daft
Punk at the centre of collaborative, entrepreneurial nexus which
continues to produce what he calls ‘entertainment’ – music,
film, web content, clothing, graphics, parties.
Like contemporary figures including James Lavelle, the Beastie
Boys, Spike Jonze, So Solid Crew’s Megaman, Roc-a-Fella’s
Damon Dash, P Diddy and even Jamie Oliver, Pedro is at the vanguard
of emerging culture in which previously disassociated displines
of business and creativity are cosying up, and where old orthodoxies
- such as the idea that all commerce somehow dirties the ‘pure’ artistic
process, or that moneymaking is vulgar – are disintegrating.
What unites all the above is an ability to transmute their own
lifestyles, passions and ideas into business that pay. The lesson
of hip hop and skate culture have been learned by a new generation
of entrepreneurs who correctly predicted that seemingly meaningless
activities – like making up rhymes on street corners, or
trolleying around on a plank with roller-skate wheels – could
be turned into multibilliondollar lifestyle conglomerates.
‘What we are is what we do, and what we make, we make the
best,’ Pedro says. ‘In my office, I have all my record,
all my gold discs and all my skateboards. I have a turntable, loads
of books by Futura 2002 and Mark Gonzales. The chance we have is
that we are living our passion, and my job is my passion.’
It seems implausible that being a businessman has become the newest
aspirational archetype; by the same token no-one ever expected
a pair of Parisian kids wearing robot masks to make a Numbebr One
album, however. In an era when everyone considers themselves creative,
the key skill is to alchemise nebulous ‘creativity’ into
tangible £££s. Feed your mind, make art, have
fun and get paid for it.
‘Everyone says art and business can’t be together,’ Pedro
reasons, But Thomas Bangalter is an example of this, David Bowie
is an example. There are tons of examples. Dr Dre, Eminem, Madonna
who are good at being artists as well as being goood in business.
There is the idea that artists have to be in pain or be crazy to
create some art. It’s a bad habit.’
Daft Punk are the living, breathing, raving example of an art
project that got paid on its own merits, rather than by playing
to the established rules. As careers goes, practically everything
they did has gone against the rule book, yet they remain a huge
money-spinner. Marketing themselves more in the manner of a luxury
product or a pair of limited-edition trainers - managing scarcity,
cultivating credible partnerships, maintinaing quality - than as
a pop act desperate for publicity, as they mature they seem capable
of making a success in whichever medium they choose – music,
video, art, graphics. Much of which has to do with Pedro’s
vision, stewardship and force of personality.
‘We are always thinking of using good style,’ he says. ‘They
did what they had to do with [debut 1995 album] Homework,
in terms of presenting this music and defending the home-studio
way of producing. They had the chance to be able to tell it to
the world. They did it and now they can to go further and make
the stuff they like.’
How do Daft Punk remain so big, yet so credible? By following
the golden rule of cool: doing ‘nothing’. Or at least,
never appearing to try too hard.
‘Crazily, we don’t do anything,’ Pedro explains. ‘At
the beginnning they used to say no to everything. When people asked
me what I did for Daft Punk, I told them I was the King of The
No. We said no so much in the beginning – to Britney Spears,
George Michael, Janet Jackson. Everybody has got this image like,
forget about Daft Punk - we can’t touch them. Untouchable.
By doing nothing, we are doing something.’
Much of this is happening at a moment when the beleaguered music
business, following years of prioritising the business over the
music, discovers a tidal wave of file-sharing, CD burning and bedroom
production decimating its profit margins. These days major label
board meetings begin and end with doomy forceasts. The future belongs
to independent multimedia production and distribution units wary
of the corporate process and fired by belief in creativity for
creativity’s sake, the like of which Daft Punk incarnated
ages ago.
‘Now, everyone can do it,’ says Pedro. ‘Thomas
and Guy-Man said. “Everyone could have done ‘Homework’” -
now you can have Protools in your computer, get some loops from
the net, burn a CD, give it to Gilles Peterson and hear it on the
radio. I’m glad about that. I’m doing it myself! I
have an MPC 2000 in my basement and I’m making tracks and
giving CDs to my friends. It’s wonderful…’
And so is Hedbangers: a record label, a business and a creative
force to be reckoned with. But mainly, a way of life. Like Blackstreet
sang - getting paid is a forte, true playa way, each and every
day.
© Kevin Braddock 2003
|
