Gig review: Jean Michel Jarre

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 19:22

JEAN MICHEL JARRE *** CLYDE AUDITORIUM, GLASGOW

MORE than 30 years ago, Jean Michel Jarre was the sound of the future. That's proven the case in many respects, but to see the man himself surrounded by banks of dials and sockets and using three backing musicians is to realise how times have moved on. These days, a teenager can make similar sounds using a slim laptop.

Still, Jarre is big on performance. On white-trainered feet, he skips around the stage with Gallic, Eurovision exuberance, flashing a pearly smile and forcing his fist into the air. Scotland, he says, is a country that "all of France loves". Such cheery hyperbole and his curly, jet-black mane are reminiscent of radio DJs in the Eighties. The music, meanwhile, is dated and spectacular in equal measure, set against a scaled-down version of Jarre's famous light show.

Although the composer's popular legacy has it that he retained all of the prog era's indulgence (and there's some truth in that), it becomes obvious while watching him at work on these now vintage devices that his innovation must have influenced those who followed as much as more credible contemporaries, such as Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream. As he plays segments of his conceptual albums – Oxygene 2 and 4, Equinoxe 7, Third Rendez-Vous – and orchestrates a couple of show-stopping moments with a laser harp, a light-instrument which plays notes as he breaks each beam, the building blocks of electronic music as we know it can be heard. It's not fashionable to say it, but would house music or trip-hop have sounded the same without him?