Beeep, beep-beep-beep, beep.

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

16/10/77 : Oxygène - Jean-Michel Jarre

I never liked Jean Michel at the time, but given I now have quite the penchant for electronic/ambient music, I suspect this is going to undergo somewhat of a reappraisal.

"Oxygène (Part IV)" is the one everyone knows but the rest of it is all perfectly acceptable electronic ambient music - you have to be in the mood for it, but if you are then this is as good an example as you're likely to find.  I enjoyed it - I don't really have anything more to say about it.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his tenth week of a twenty week run, with it having peaked at #2 in FIVE separate weeks, kept off the top by Connie Francis and Diana Ross, both of whom are still with us with a combined age of 185 years whereas Jean is a relative spring chicken at the tender age of 75!  The rest of the top five this week were best-ofs from Diana Ross and Slim Whitman, The Stranglers and the Cliff Richard best-of (a new entry) and the next highest new entry was Steve Hillage (#29) who was a name I recognised but knew nothing about - he's had quite an interesting career.

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album (215 milliPeppers - most of it obscure talk about synthesisers) and it tells me this is his third album - it was released in France in December 1976 and distributed worldwide by Polydor in 1977.  It also reminds me that "Oxygène (Part IV)" was inspired by "Popcorn" by Gershon Kingsley, which we've met before here under slightly more bizarre circumstances when Tove Lo decided to mix it with "Crazy Frog".  The album's critical reception was, it's fair to say, mixed at the time ("not really suited to our insular and musically antiintellectual Anglo-Saxon island") but retrospective reviews "regard the album as a major work in the development of electronic music".  Commercially, it did well across Europe (#1 in France, selling over 1.5 million copies) although not so well in the US - but it's still sold over 15 million copies globally.

"Customers also listened to" Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream - yeah, some definite similar motivations there.  I'm pleased I visited this though, because a) it felt like a gap in my musical knowledge and b) I really liked it.

09/10/77 - The King's last album
23/10/77 - No more than fine

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