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The music of Jean-Michel Jarre has always sounded like it\u2019s from the future. And that\u2019s somewhere the \u201cgodfather\u201d of electronic music, 75, feels extremely comfortable. Despite some incredible achievements under his belt, the classically trained French composer, performer and producer prefers looking forwards, both for himself and for music.<\/p>\n
Since his career began back in the late 1960s, he has sold more than 90 million mainly instrumental records and scooped 40-plus awards, including France\u2019s highest possible accolade, Commander of the Legion of Honour.<\/p>\n
His passion for breaking musical boundaries, both in composition and performance, has earned him three Guinness World Records, including largest ever outdoor audience for his 1997 Moscow concert which drew a staggering 3.5 million spectators. And he\u2019s still making records: his latest, Oxymoreworks, featuring Brian Eno, Armin van Buuren and Depeche Mode\u2019s Martin Gore, is released today.<\/p>\n
And, he tells the Daily Express, he has plans to put on another spectacular live event somewhere in Europe next year.<\/p>\n
Born in Lyon to Jewish French Resistance fighter Francette \u2013 who escaped three Nazi concentration camps \u2013 and film score composer father Maurice Jarre (winner of three Academy Awards for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India), Jarre retains the same optimistic outlook today for what music can bring to the world.<\/p>\n
He also possesses much the same joie de vivre and Gallic good looks as when his first album, Deserted Palace, was released back in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n
Speaking to him at home in his central Paris apartment (whose former owners include Marlene Dietrich and Henri Matisse), I can\u2019t resist telling him his global breakout hit Oxygene, composed and recorded in his kitchen back in 1976, was the first piece of music to affect me emotionally when I heard it, aged six, at the London Planetarium.<\/p>\n
This now legendary record was turned down by countless record companies before finally being accepted by Francis Dreyfus\u2019s Disques Motors label. Dreyfus agreed to press 50,000 copies; it went on to sell 18 million.<\/p>\n
READ MORE: <\/strong> ‘It sounds haunting yet beautiful’: Fans emotional over The Beatles Now and Then<\/strong><\/p>\n When I describe how the album\u2019s hit single, Oxygene (Part IV), was used as an auditory backdrop to the mesmerising show of stars and planets swirling above me almost 50 years ago, Jarre smiles: \u201cMy music has always been linked to space, yes \u2013 but not, for me, to outer space, but to the environment and the space around us.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that is also the reason I decided, long ago, to play at these big outdoor \u00ad venues \u2013 like the pyramids, the Sahara desert, Houston, China and the London Docklands.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1981, Jarre made world history by becoming the first western musician ever to play a concert in communist China.<\/p>\n Seven years later, his Destination Docklands concerts saw him perform hits such as Equinoxe, Revolutions and London Kid, with space-age instruments such as a laser harp, to more than 200,000 people from a barge in the River Thames.<\/p>\n Given the futuristic aspects of his music, I ask him whether space and science fiction have always been of interest to him.<\/p>\n \u201cOh yes! I was very close to sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke. I\u2019d been inspired, like many others, by 2001: A Space Odyssey \u2013 both the movie and the book \u2013 and when the sequel came out, 2010: Odyssey Two, I was in London. I went straight to a bookstore and bought it, and when I read inside I was amazed to see my name acknowledged: he\u2019d written the book while listening to my music. We started a kind of correspondence and became quite close.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had a perfect mind between science and art. You know in Europe especially we have the tendency to separate culture and technology, and sci-fi writers such as Clarke link the two in an artistic way, and that\u2019s been a major source of influence.\u201d<\/p>\n Jarre also formed a friendship with the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, even dedicating an album, Chronologie, to him.<\/p>\n When Hawking was asked by the French musician \u2013 married to Chinese actress Gong Li and previously wed to British screen star Charlotte Rampling \u2013 \u201cwhat is the most mysterious thing in the universe\u201d, the physicist is said to have replied \u201cwomen\u201d.<\/p>\n Yet before all the fame, success and headline-grabbing concerts, what were Jarre\u2019s own first musical memories? \u201cMy mother was friends with another woman from the French Resistance called Madame Ricard who owned the most famous jazz club in Paris,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/35\/590x\/secondary\/5046922.jpg?r=1698997854892\")
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