“I hope I die before I get old,” Mr Roger Daltrey, now 76 and tying himself in knots over immigration and Brexit, first sang in 1965. Which is a problem when marketing pop stars, given the youth-obsessed nature of popular culture: they all either, sadly, die or get old. But Daft Punk, who announced their split this week, found a way around that.

Messrs Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, better known as Daft Punk, died in 1999. Or so the story goes. “We were doing a track and our sampler crashed and exploded and there were sparks,” Mr Bangalter explained after the event. “We were hurt a little bit, so we had to make a little surgery and then we became robots.”

Like the legend of Mr Robert Johnson rebooted for the 21st century, the duo’s robotic reinvention made for a neat gimmick for press junkets, or a means of avoiding them entirely. But perhaps more than that, it gave the musicians something off limits to bands at the very top tier of the industry: anonymity.

Of course, they knew how to dress – or maybe they were programmed that way. Jumping from space suits to tracksuits to tuxedos, they fell into leather biker jackets around the time of 2005’s Human After All – the versions they wore for their Alive shows in 2006 and 2007, complete with light-up logos, are the stuff SAINT LAURENT collections are made of. And yet it’s hard to take your eyes off the helmets.

That tour, with its 24ft-tall pyramid-shaped rig, played out at 48 dates worldwide, including a headline slot at Coachella, an event said to have kick-started the EDM movement in the US. The subsequent (and, as it turns out, last) album, 2013’s Random Access Memories, sold 3.2 million copies, producing “Get Lucky”, that year’s second-biggest-selling single. However, thanks to the android alter egos, you’d struggle to recognise Messrs Bangalter or de Homem-Christo even if you were stood next to them.

Daft Punk could have lived forever, but chose not to. As a final statement, the band put out an excerpt from their 2006 film Electroma. It features Mr Thomas Bangalter peeling off his leather jacket to reveal a self-destruct mechanism. After his colleague activates it, he stomps into the desert, going out the same way as his human precursor had at the hands of that errand studio equipment. “Like the legend of the Phoenix,” Mr Pharrell Williams sang in “Get Lucky”, “it all ends with beginnings.”

“We don’t want all the rock’n’roll poses and attitudes,” Mr Bangalter said in 1997, setting out their stall from the start. “They are completely stupid and ridiculous today.” But we could still use a pair of stylish cyborgs to show us the way forward.