Jean-Michel Jarre Quotes
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I feel very privileged to have played China, and the pyramids, all these fantastic places, but it created a kind of smoke curtain between the audience and me as a musician.
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The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.
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I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It's undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.
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I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.
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Pursuing music eats into your life to the point where there is no space left for anything else. You are lucky if you find a partner who is able to understand that, but even then, they will only understand it for a while, and then things get - you know, difficult.
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Creative industries are more important than the car industry, luxury jewels, and fashion.
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I wanted to find a bridge between Musique Concrete, electro-acoustic music, and proper rock music.
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My mother, who was in the Resistance in the Second World War, passed away at 96, and it was like she was 60. I almost have to apologise for my genes.
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In my opinion, British women are more romantic than French ones.
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Bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, who I respect, have a very robotic, dehumanised approach. They're almost an apology for machines. It's very German.
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I just had one occasion in my life when suddenly my private life was everywhere, and that was an accident and beyond my control.
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We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.
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My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
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The characteristic of 'Oxygene' is a mixture of innocence and ambition, of trying to do something different in a different way.
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My first break was in my home country with some pop songs that became hits, writing for French singers Christophe & Francoise Hardy, which became hits.
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Peace is neutral, and not very sexy.
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Governments can help support European music by promoting public awareness that when people take music that doesn't belong to them, they undermine the future of those very artists whose work they enjoy.
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When I began making electronic music, the only thing I was thinking about was creating music that I really liked. I didn't think about what effect it would have; I was busy doing it.
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Even if we artists are all very privileged, there's a constant frustration about how to do more or better, and never being satisfied.
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It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.
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I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.
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I consider music like a mirage in the desert. You're obsessed with the ideal piece of music, and the more you think you're getting closer, it's not there.
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I've always been involved in the visual aspect of my work, and moreover, it's very important in days where technology allows us to push the boundaries even more than when I started out.
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All those ethereal string sounds on 'Oxygene IV' come from the VCS3. It was the first European synthesizer, made in England by a guy called Peter Zinoviev. I got one of the first ones.