Fancy a Jarre tonight?

No doubt the highlight of your ongoing Saint Patrick's celebrations will be Jean Michel Jarre's show at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on 18 and 19 March.
 

The Frenchman will be performing his classic 'Oxygène' album in its entirety. What's more, he'll be doing so on the same analogue synthesisers (around 50 of them!) he used for the original recording back in 1976.

Listening to 'Oxygène' today, it sounds surprisingly solid and contemporary. True, it lacks the electricity of fellow electronica-pioneers Kraftwerk's best tracks -
but Jarre's masterpiece has none of the swishy panpipe-moods blandness typically associated with his later work. The career of Jarre-lovers Air seems to have followed a similar path; where 'Moon Safari' was fresh and well-written, later albums such as 'Pocket Symphony' are ghastly elevator music.

If you're heading along to see Jarre this week, you're lucky to see him in such an intimate setting. The typical JMJ live show involves hundreds of thousands of punters, one of whom tends to be a Guinness Book Of Records person doing a quick head count.

In 1990, 2.5 million fans watched him perform beside the Grande Arche at La Défense, the business district at the edge of Paris. He topped that with his 1997 Moscow concert, attended by a mindblowing THREE AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE. In other words, the entire population of the Republic of Ireland.

Here's a recently-made video for the most famous track off Jarre's greatest album - the instantly-recognisable 'Oxygène IV':

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