N.E.R.D. leader and Neptunes producer Pharrell Williams has been at the top of the pop game for what feels like forever, peddling irresistibly feel-good party tunes that resonate with a mass audience. (Honestly, can you believe that “Get Lucky,” the Daft Punk global smash featuring Pharrell, came out way back in 2013?)
And Pharrell’s riders do tend to reflect the party lifestyle his music resonates. In 2009, Esquire reported the “Happy” singer requested a mind-boggling amount of backstage liquor, including 20 crates of Grey Goose vodka, 20 of Bacardi rum, 15 magnums of Perrier-Jouêt Belle Epoque champagne, as well as a group of backstage belly dancers and a Rolls-Royce on standby. (Let’s hope the drive comes before he cracks open the Grey Goose.)
But of course, Pharrell isn’t on this list just for his list of luxuries: he’s on it because as Vice reports, one thing he always requests backstage is a framed photo of the astronomer Carl Sagan, whose iconic 1980s space documentary “Cosmos” Pharrell claims to have loved since childhood. “When I look at that picture I realize how lucky we all are,” Pharrell told “Today,” perhaps revealing the real inspiration behind his Daft Punk collaboration.
As The Smoking Gun notes, Williams is so keen that his dressing room be adorned with the image of his great scientific idol that the demand actually appears twice in his rider from 2015, just to be on the safe side.
