Woo-woo-woo

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

25/02/79 : Equinoxe - Jean-Michel Jarre

Our third visit with JMJ and he's gone up in my opinion with every visit so far - here's hoping that continues.

Hmmm - no. Except for some bits of "Equinoxe, Pt 4" this was all rather dull - he was relying too much on synthesisers being, as Giorgio Moroder put it "zee sound of zee future". Maybe everyone back in '79 just went "wow man - this is so froody" (that's how they spoke, right?), but today it just sounds a very repetitive load of nothing. And I've absolutely no idea why "Equinoxe, Pt 8" has some oom-pah music in the middle of it. All in all, very disappointing.

We're at #11 in the charts this week on his twelfth week of a 21 week run and this was as high as it got, also in its ninth and tenth weeks. The top five this week were Blondie, Bee Gees, Elvis Costello, a compilation called Action Replay and the Cliff Richard/Shadows live album, with the highest new entry being Stiff Little Fingers (#14). Coming back to the Action Replay compilation, it's a most peculiar collection including The Boomtown Rats, The Three Degrees, Village People, Darts and Devo - quite who was buying that is very unclear.

Wikipedia tells us it's his fourth album and apparently it is supposed to "represent a day in the life of a person, from waking up in the morning to sleeping at night" - somehow I completely missed this. He used sixteen different synthesisers on it - I'd be interested to know how much difference I'd have noticed if he'd just used a couple. As part of the album promotion, he played an open-air concert on the Place de la Concorde, with more than a million people in attendance which was the largest event attendance at the time - either he (Moscow in '97) or Rod Stewart (Copacabana in '94) now hold the record with estimated crowds of over 3.5 million at events at both. Back to the album, critical reception here was very negative at the time, but they quite liked it in the US and retrospective reviews are nicer - commercially, it did well in Europe (as he tended to), getting to #3 in The Netherlands and #5 in France. 

discogs.com tells us that a couple of quid will get you a decent version but if you want the remastered half-speed numbered gatefold version (and who doesn't?) you'll be handing over £275. Which I will not be doing because this was one of the more disappointing albums of the year - which is a shame after he'd almost converted me on our previous visits.

18/02/79 - Some very fine tracks and some not so fine
04/03/79 - Nicely of its time