Prog These are heady times for , even by his own lofty standards. His two albums – and this summer’s , featuring top-notch guests like , , Hans Zimmer, Laurie Anderson, , and many more – were huge hits across Europe, taking him into the UK Top 10 for the first time in 25 years. Their combined success led to an extensive tour of the continent this autumn, packing out arenas from Cardiff to Copenhagen, Brussels to Budapest.
At 68 years of age, and bearing in mind this is a man who’s shifted 80 million albums over his career, Jarre’s commercial and artistic clout is arguably at its peak – or at least on a similar level to 1977, when took him from jobbing composer of library music to full-blown international superstar. Given this evaluative symmetry, it’s entirely fitting that Jarre has now chosen to release a third volume of . Not that he deliberately planned it that way.
“During the project, I did a track that wasn’t sitting at all with the other songs,” he tells . “I kept that idea in the back of my mind. When the record company mentioned that they’d like to do something special for the 40th anniversary of , I thought it might be good to use it as a deadline pretext.
” Nominally, of course, the new album is a sequel to 1997’s , but Jarre was more interested in following the original as a working model. “I did the first album in six weeks with very limited tools,” he explains, “so I thought it would be fun to go back into the studio with the sam.