An unreleased Daft Punk mix from February 1997 is now streaming for the first time. Leeds DJ Ralph Lawson, the founder of 20/20 Vision, uploaded the hour long recording to SoundCloud on October 29 after rescuing it from a mouldy, ripped cassette that the French duo had sent him as a guest mix for his Kiss FM show, Trans Europe Express, almost 30 years ago.
How the unreleased Daft Punk mix resurfaced
The story started with a storage unit. According to Mixmag, Lawson came across the tape in 2024 while digging through his DAT archive. It was in no state to play. Rather than risk the reel in a deck, he handed it to Adrian Finn at Great Bear Digitising in Bristol, who cleaned off the mould and repaired the tears.
“The tape was broken and it’s taken me all this time to get it sorted out,” Lawson said in an Instagram video he posted on October 21, as quoted by Mixmag. In the same clip he admitted to nerves: his worry was that the cassette would turn out to be a copy of the duo’s BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, which aired in March 1997 and has circulated among fans for decades. When the tape played, it was something else entirely, and he celebrated on camera.
What is on the tape
The recording runs just over 60 minutes and sits on Lawson’s SoundCloud as the first entry in a playlist titled Trans Europe Express: Lost Transmissions. Mixmag describes the sound as Chicago house, scratching and the fizzing groove of the Homework era, which is exactly where Daft Punk were in February 1997. Lawson has not posted an official tracklist alongside the upload, so any track IDs circulating online should be treated as fan work until he confirms them.
The playlist name hints that more archive material could follow, though Lawson has not announced any further uploads.
Why a 1997 Daft Punk DJ set still matters
Timing is everything here. Homework came out on January 20, 1997, so this mix was recorded within weeks of the album that turned two Parisian kids into the faces of French house. DJ sets from that window are rare. The Essential Mix is the famous one; this tape now gives fans a second, cleaner look at how the pair were programming records while “Da Funk” and “Around the World” were taking over clubs.
It also lands at a moment when there is no new Daft Punk coming. The duo split in February 2021, and Bangalter ruled out a reunion in an interview earlier this year. For a fanbase that already treats every scrap of the robots’ history as an event (see our report on the Daft Punk LEGO set), a genuine lost recording is about as big as archive news gets.
Ralph Lawson and the Leeds connection
Lawson is no collector who got lucky. He has been a fixture of the Leeds club scene since the early nineties as a resident at Back to Basics, and his label 20/20 Vision has been releasing house and techno for more than three decades. His Kiss FM show was the kind of specialist slot that invited touring DJs and rising producers to send in mixes, which is how a Daft Punk tape ended up in a Yorkshire archive in the first place. That world of club tapes and pirate era radio is the same culture we revisited in our look back at Love Parade 1998.
How fans reacted
The response was immediate. Lawson’s October 21 teaser passed 4,400 likes and drew hundreds of comments, many of them simply begging him to release the full recording. Once the SoundCloud upload went live, the track logged more than 8,800 plays in its first day. Some listeners went further, asking him to archive a lossless copy so the recording survives beyond streaming platforms.
What happens next
For now, the mix is free to stream on SoundCloud. There is no word of a physical or official release, and no public comment from either member of Daft Punk about the find. If Lawson follows the playlist title and digs out more Trans Europe Express guest mixes, this could be the start of a wider archive project from one of the north of England’s longest running house institutions.
Either way, a tape that sat forgotten for close to three decades has given the Homework era a new chapter, and it is worth an hour of anyone’s time.
FAQ
Where can I listen to the unreleased Daft Punk mix?
It is streaming on Ralph Lawson’s SoundCloud as “daft punk feb 97 dj mix,” the first track in his Trans Europe Express: Lost Transmissions playlist.
When was the mix recorded?
Daft Punk sent the tape to Lawson in February 1997 as a guest mix for his Kiss FM show, a few weeks after Homework was released.
Is this the same as Daft Punk’s 1997 Essential Mix?
No. Lawson checked that specifically. The Essential Mix aired on BBC Radio 1 in March 1997, while this is a separate recording made for Kiss FM.
Who restored the tape?
Adrian Finn of Great Bear Digitising in Bristol removed the mould and repaired the rips so the cassette could be digitised.
Is there an official tracklist?
Not yet. Lawson has not published one with the upload.
