Link: Simon Reynolds tracks the history of electronica's Seventies pioneers | OMM | The Observer.
Perhaps inflated by his worldwide success (and marriage to Charlotte Rampling), the hallmark of Jarre's career became a gigantism verging on shlocky overkill. Starting with a 1979 Paris concert that drew one million fans to the Place de la Concorde, he threw a series of increasingly spectacular high-tech extravaganzas. He became the first Western pop musician to perform in the People's Republic of China, played at Nasa's 25th anniversary celebration in Houston, threw a huge 1988 event in London called Destination Docklands, and drew 2.5 million to Paris's La Defense district in 1990. This run of Guinness record-breaking mega-concerts peaked with his performance in front of 3.5 million Russians at Moscow's 850th anniversary celebrations. Jarre also received an honour to make the other spacetronica pioneers green with envy - having an actual heavenly body named after him, the asteroid 4422 Jarre.
Apart from Tangerine Dream, the major figures in the analog synth epic genre were solo artists. Something about the tableau of the solitary composer flanked, on stage or in the studio, by banks of electronic gear seems to go to the core of the genre, conjuring an aura of 'Great Man, Alone' grandiosity....
