152. Jean-Michel Jarré
The O2 Arena
7 October 2016
If you had told me back in the mid-eighties when I had discovered Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygène album, that one day I’d be sat in North Greenwich watching that Frenchman play lasers like they were a Hammond organ, I’d have told you to lay off the mushroom tea.
But here we are. The year is 2016, and Jean-Michel Jarre, the original high priest of synth-pomp, has descended from his LED mountain to deliver unto us a sermon of light, noise and seismic low-end throb. The O2 Arena transformed into a cathedral of circuitry, part electronica church, part warzone for epileptics. And my word, what a spectacle.
Jarre appeared amidst a blitzkrieg of lasers so intense I thought I was being abducted by a very punctual alien invasion. Clad in his trademark black, he looked like a slightly grizzled philosophy professor, flanked by banks of circuitry the size of fridges, summoning our robot overlords.
Then there was the sound itself. It was ludicrous. Not just loud, but existentially loud. Frequencies you didn’t know existed were suddenly humming through your kidneys. This wasn’t music, it was sonic architecture.
The setlist drew heavily from the then-new albums Electronica 1 & 2, which sound like Kraftwerk and Vangelis got stuck in a lift with Moby. But threaded throughout were the classics: "Oxygène", "Équinoxe", "Chronologie", each dropped like sci-fi confetti, triggering waves of nostalgia.
The visuals were like being trapped inside a Commodore 64 that was shorting. Every beat, every squelch of synth, came with a firework, a laser, or a giant exploding polygon. At one point, a huge three-dimensional skull hovered above the crowd, pulsing in time with the beat like a rave-borne harbinger of doom. It was both terrifying and sort of beautiful. It was probably too much. But you don’t come to a Jean-Michel Jarre show for restraint.
The crowd was a delightfully weird mix: techno dads in fleece jackets, trance kids with dilated pupils, and one bloke in a full astronaut suit who may or may not have been part of the production. Everyone, everyone, was locked in the music. And at the centre of it all: Jarre. Cool, enigmatic, a little bit mad. Like the French Brian Eno with better posture and access to a UN weapons-grade lighting budget.
He finished, fittingly, with Oxygène IV, that legendary synth lick that once convinced half of Europe that the future was coming, on a jet-pack. And as the lights faded and the final note hung in the arena like a shimmering satellite, you realised something rare had happened: a 68-year-old Frenchman had just out-partied everyone in the postcode.