Jean Michel Jarre interview: 'If your priority in life is happiness, don't be a musician'

As he releases his 15th studio album, the French composer and music producer discusses his four-decade career

Jean Michel Jarre at his recording studio in Bougival (Getty)

Five years ago, Jean Michel Jarre’s mother and father, long divorced, died within a few months of each other, and then came the death of his close friend and publisher. “It was a difficult time for me,” Jarre says. He spent several months contemplating not so much his own mortality as the passing of time, and what that means for someone who had not long before entered his seventh decade.

He needed a distraction, and so the electronic pioneer whose 1976 album Oxygène would go on to influence a generation of musicians, threw himself into his next project with abandon. It was to prove his most ambitious one.

“I wanted to work with people who have been my inspiration,” he says. “You have fantasies about these sorts of people, don’t you? Your heroes. This is why I approached them not through managers or lawyers, but direct, me to them.”

He sent out invitations to Pete Townshend, to Laurie Anderson, Primal Scream, Moby and Peaches. He emailed soundtrack composer John Carpenter, and the classical pianist Lang Lang; French synth duo Air, and British noise bludgeonists Fuck Buttons.

“And they all said yes!” Jarre says, laughing. “I didn’t expect this. So the project became bigger than I expected, and two albums, not one.”

The first fruits of these collaborations, Electronica 1: The Time Machine, came out last year to appreciative reviews; the second, Electronica 2: The Heart Of Noise, is released next month. Like its predecessor, it is wildly eclectic stuff. Pet Shop Boys’ effort, "Brick England", sounds like it could have been lifted from their current album; the gleefully clunky "Circus", with German producer Siriusmo, might well have been the soundtrack to a Janet Street-Porter yoof TV project from 1987; and Julia Holter is so eerily minimalist on "These Creatures" that she is rendered less human, more ghost.

“I was afraid to collaborate with so many at first, you know,” Jarre says, sitting in the bar of a West London hotel where he declines the offer of a drink in favour of fiddling with a toothpick. “I thought it would perhaps be difficult working with people as different as Hans Zimmer, Gary Numan, Massive Attack. But no. Electronic music is all about connections, which is why we didn’t collaborate via email; I travelled to them in every case - to London, New York, Bristol, Berlin, Los Angeles. I was moved that these people opened their doors to me, and were prepared to share their vulnerabilities. It was like being naked with them. And that isn’t always easy, is it?”

He even collaborates with the world’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, on a track called "Exit". This was still a closely guarded secret when we met, under heavy embargo for reasons unclear. “Edward is an absolute hero of our times,” Jarre has since said. The hyperactive techno track is as frantic as a Jason Bourne film, and features Snowden not singing (perhaps mercifully) but rather in spoken word mode, recounting his man-on-the-run narrative.

“I’ve always appreciated electronic music,” Snowden has said of the collaboration.

Jean Michel Jarre was born in Lyon in 1948 and studied classical musical composition before, in his 20s, dabbling in rock music and briefly fronting a proto-punk act called The Dustbins. Never much interested in singing - the only singing he has ever done, he tells me, has been through a vocoder - his main aim in music was to create a link between electronic and pop. “Melody is everything,” he says, “but the avant-garde world never cared for this.”

His early albums of synth noodlings sold scantly, which didn’t bode particularly well for his 1976 effort, Oxygène, the Prozac of all electronic albums, elegiac and melancholic as it was. Oxygène had been turned down by every major record label. “They complained it had no drama, no singer, and that every song was 10 minutes long.” Eventually released by a French independent label, the album would go on to sell 12 million copies and make its author an anomaly in the electronic field: a recognisable superstar. Success, however, proved traumatic.

“Oxygène and [its 1978 successor] Équinoxe changed everything for me, financially, socially. I made a lot of new friends, lost a lot of old ones. It was like vertigo, all very strange. And then, of course, came the concerts.”

Jarre had long been obsessed with the theatricality of opera, and when he came to perform live himself was adamant to do something similarly grandiose. “One man behind a synthesiser for two hours is not the sexiest thing, is it? I was inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick, and I wanted to create, you know, a spectacle.”

His live shows, rarely confined to arenas, were certainly that. He was the first Western pop artist to play in China after the Revolution. When he performed in the recently completed Docklands area of London in 1988, he used more fireworks than the average New Year’s Eve bash sees, and when he played Moscow’s Red Square in 1997, 3.5 million people turned up.

“Oh, the shows just got bigger and bigger,” he sighs ruefully. “It was like making Apocalypse, Now in just one night: exhausting. It took me a long time to realise that less is more.”

When he tours the UK later this year, the venues will be indoor, and manageable. “Which is difficult for me,” he says, “as I am a little claustrophobic.”

Unlike the electronic acts he would go on to inspire, Jean Michel Jarre has always lived a life more in keeping with your traditional rock star. He has been married three times, most famously to the actress Charlotte Rampling (they divorced in 1997). He has three grown-up children - two sons and a daughter, who work as a magician, film director and creative designer respectively - and at 67 years old could pass for someone in his mid-50s. George Clooney would kill to look like him at his age.

Music, he says, has given him a good life, but one not without sacrifice.

“I would say to anyone starting out that if their priority in life is happiness, then don’t be a musician. I am not going to complain because I know I have been very privileged, but music and concerts - they are an addiction, a hard drug. 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.

“From the outside, being an artist seems like a dream life, but there are much darker aspects to it. People who do music do it because it is all they can do.” He sighs again, and for a moment looks utterly bereft. “And that’s me, I suppose. I can do nothing else.”

‘Electronica 2: The Heart Of Noise’ is released on 6 May