Fifteen million album sales later, Oxygeneis still enthralling audiences around the world, Jean Michel Jarre tells PETER CRAWLEY.
ON A QUIET afternoon, Jean Michel Jarre stepped briskly around the stage of the National Concert Hall, which, for his two performances in Dublin recently, had been transformed into something that resembled a cross between a laboratory and a museum. Standing in a small, square-shaped space, bordered on every side by an array of analogue synthesisers, the French pioneer of electronic music was king of an electronic music geek's paradise.
"This instrument," says Jarre, pivoting towards a small conspiracy of coloured knobs and pins that resembled nothing more closely than the control panel of the Tardis, "is the first synthesiser I ever used. This is the Putney VCS3 and it's the first European synthesiser. And, you know, I bought that when I was at school. I bought it in 1969 and it's still working every night." He hesitates. "Touching wood."
This little superstition, mercifully, is something the Putney's designers had catered for, having encased their portable assembly of oscillators and modulators into a handsome wooden frame. A nearby theremin, dating from the 1920s, could have been mistaken for a particularly elegant wireless radio, were its antennae not so distinctive. Indeed, with huge Roland System devices standing in the background, holding a morass of patch cables like an early telephone exchange, each of Jarre's instruments seemed both modern and retro: vintage advertisements for a future that never quite arrived.
Surveying the Moogs and Melotrons originally used to record his groundbreaking album Oxygene, in 1976, and recently liberated from careful storage to re-record the album for its 30th anniversary, Jarre explained the idea behind getting these bulky, temperamental wonders back on the road.
"These instruments are part of the mythology of electronic music," effuses Jarre, who turns 60 this year. "They are part of its foundations. They could be compared to the Stradivarius in classical music. Today, whatever the technology we have in 2008, the absolute dream of the violin player is to play on the Stradivarius violin that has been created in the 17th century. It's the same thing with those instruments that were created mainly between the 1920s and the 1970s."
FOR FANS OF electronic music, this is not overstating their importance. Having opened up a new universe of possible sounds, analogue synthesisers were quickly phased out by their pristine digital successors in the 1980s. Most of the early instruments were discontinued, many of their manufacturers went bust and while some have been replicated or copied, Jarre's hoard represents many rare - and hugely expensive - collector's pieces.
Charming as they are, the instruments are also famously dyspeptic, often belching out unwanted tones when their tuning goes awry. A heating system, easily the most modern piece of equipment onstage, has been discreetly tucked in among certain instruments to regulate their temperature, as though to pacify a room of cranky geriatrics.
"It's funny," says Jarre, "because these days we're so afraid of accidents that nobody takes risks any more. At lots of concerts, you have Protools and computers on stage. Lots of concerts are pre-mixed or pre-recorded as we know. Even with big performers. In this case, it's absolutely 100 per cent live with no memory or presets, where all kinds of accidents may happen. But I think it's part of the game, of sharing those potential accidents with the audience."
The imperfection of those analogue instruments, as opposed to the sterile precision of digital, accounts for the unusual warmth of Jarre's music and Oxygene- which, with more than 15 million sales, is one of the most popular albums of electronic music - opened up a schism in the genre, with Jarre's melodicism on one side and the impersonal chilly robotics of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream on the other.
"That was always the big question mark and ambiguity and contradiction with electronic music," agrees Jarre. "Because electronic music always carried an image of being demhumanised and cold. In my opinion, those instruments are exactly the reverse. Because they allow you to have a very tactile and sensual approach to music."
It is not something you associate with the computer age. "Frankly," he says, "to watch a band behind laptops for two hours is not the most exciting thing ever. The success we have had with this tour is the incredible warmth and organic feel that we are able to convey and share with the audience every night."
That night, Jarre and his three fellow musicians manoeuvred between more than 50 synthesisers, beginning with the entrancing drift of a tuning session before coaxing them through a continuous performance of Oxygene, until the last surf-swell oscillations of Jarre's trusted Putney device.
Jarre is famous for the ludicrous scale of his outdoor concerts, among them a laser show over the pyramids of Giza on the eve of the new millennium and a Moscow concert with an attendance of 3.5 million, which earned him his fourth entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Such gargantuan scale performances have bolstered a perception that he has an ego to match, but in conversation he is charm personified, good humoured and self-deprecating.
BY COMPARISON, the venues selected for the ongoing world tour of Oxygeneare astonishingly intimate, conjuring the effect, Jarre explains, "of being in your living room", while a giant tilted mirror above the stage now suggests that the instruments themselves provide all the spectacle necessary.
Certain displays, such as his priapic pose with a portable Moog synthesiser, remind you of the absurd solemnity of the Jarre of old, at which it would require a heart of stone not to laugh. Jarre does have a pleasing understanding of the music's kitschier pleasures though.
"I think, with time, you maybe get a bit of distance about what you do," he says (although he never once removes his sunglasses). "These instruments are really crazy, but they are also innocent. It was a time where people had a poetic vision of the future. 2001 was ahead of us - both the movie and the year - and we had this fantasy about an epic vision of the future, the conquest of space and all those kind of hopes."
Today, he says, that optimistic vision has elapsed, and for all its warm optimism, it is now the album's more disturbing imagery, with the earth peeling away to reveal an arid skull, that has attained a sharper, anxious focus. "We have a much darker and reduced vision of the future now," muses Jarre, whose role as Goodwill Ambassador for Unesco is involved in the availability and purity of water.
"We see the future being really based and focussed on whether we are going to survive," he says. "It was absolutely not the vision we had in the 1960s or the 1970s. Those instruments are full of innocence. The characteristic of Oxygeneis a mixture of innocence and ambition, of trying to do something different in a different way. Early music in all kinds of movements is always a mixture of innocence and ambition."
