Jean Michel Jarre

Ditto! A bit wet that night.

 

You must be a couple of years older than me. ( I was 11 mostly in ‘77)
I did have access to loads of Disco and Soul, so my love of (some) Giorgio Moroder electronic sounds via Donna Summer etc.
It was the dancing side of electronic music that had me appealed first. Pop Corn, Magic Fly etc. Couldn’t dance to Jarre, so it didn’t tick all my boxes back then.

 

It had a few choice tidbits, but AFAICT, no 8 or 16 track machine!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/16/jean-michel-jarre-michel-granger-oxygene



[edit]

I never knew he had an EKO ComputeRhythm.

 

He was at the time estranged from his father and living in a small apartment. Having recently split from his first wife and with his then wife to be (Charlotte Rampling) away filming he had 8 weeks over summer with 'nothing to do' and so set about recording Oxygene using analogue monophonic synths he had purchased secondhand with money from his songwriting endeavours and an old 8 track recorder. The whole lot was set up in his kitchen where he worked either alone or with his friend Michel Geiss who had introduced him to synths and how to mend them, improve them etc. The 8 track was then of course mastered and mixed professionally, but the raw recording was done by Jarre at home and one of the reasons the album contains so many background effects is to cover up the tape hiss from the 8 track.

 

My history differs significantly because I didn’t know any older teens, no older males cousins etc. with collections to trawl through.
All the rock/prog you mention were of no interest then, I didn’t know anyone who had that kind of stuff. And you couldn’t dance to it.
Apart from that, like many here, I spent all my paper round money on records as well.
What I didn’t do is trade - I still have most of what I bought from the age of 12 onwards.

 

This talk reminds me that I spent most of my mid teens attempting to convince Jonathan Dove: https://www.jonathandove.com/biography.html that Genesis were master composers.

 

That’s a prototype JMJ song title if ever I heard one.

“Magnetic Fields” is peak Jarre for me, love “The Concerts In China” and “Zoolook”, found “Rendez-Vous” a crushing disappointment. As a pre-tween OMD / Human League / Soft Cell / New Order enthusiast JMJ fitted right in.

 

I have the Concerts in China LP. I bought it after being hugely impressed by the live 1981 RFM/BBC transmission from Shanghai .

Living on a hill on the South Coast I had - and still have - excellent reception of RFM FM transmissions on my QUAD FM4, so was able to switch between that and the BBC transmision, which I seem to remember sounded exactly the same - they probably came from the same feed

Anyhow, I was so impressed by the music I bought the LP, though to this day it remains the only one of his I own - at least I think it is, but just recently I've been coming across stuff I'd forgotten I had.

 

"Arpeggiator" from the China Concert is one of his finest moments, but pretty atypical for him.

 

First came across JMJ when a French exchange student stayed with us in Leicester in the early 80s.

This French lad Renard bought over an LP of "Equinoxe" and I played it on my father's Garrard deck. As a Kraftwerk fan I really liked it.

That evening we bought Renard Fish 'n' Chips from the famous Grimsby Fisheries in Leicester. Renard solemnly watched me construct a chip butty. Renard then proceeded to make his own chip butty (he seemed very puzzled by this English culinary delicacy).

After the food we watched Kenny Everett on TV. Renard dissolved into a fit hysterics watching Kenny's mime artist:-



Some years ago I scored this nifty JMJ box set from a Charity Shop for a bargain price:-



All the albums from Oxygene to Cities In Concert and in nice non-brickwalled early masterings.

The box set was in such beautiful mint condition that I made a rookie error in not checking all the discs.

The protective foam in the fatboy case of Concerts in China had decomposed and eaten through CD2 !!!!

Thankfully the discs are same as the standard issue - so I sourced an identical replacement disc on Discogs. This was well worth doing as the box now goes for around £70 in this condition.

As someone else said Zoolook is a cracking album.

 

Yes have a lot of JMJ, love Oxygene- never knew how it was recorded though!

 

https://aerozonejmj.fr/la-genese-doxygene

Everything you need to know about Oxygène (French).

 

Yes, JMJ always stuck me as the acceptable, overground face of electronic music, whereas Tangerine Dream were the real deal, known only to the hip.

 

Around 1985 I saw TD at Leicester De Montfort Hall...

...at Leicester Goldsmiths record library I was fondling a TD LP - when an Irish girl with the most alluring green eyes said "Do you like Tangerine Dream?"

When I said that I had recently seen them in concert - she was virtually in my bed.

Then she pulled "Unknown Pleasures" out from the "J" section...

... "Do you know what the hell this is?"

Game over - what a great summer!

 

And in more recent times (Oct 2022):