Jean-Michel Jarre: Oxygene Live

Tonight's crowd at Birmingham's Symphony Hall might not be of the capacity that Jarre is used to, but it's a packed venue and the atmosphere generated by said audience is what you might call electric, albeit backed up by occasional doses of the fawning adulation that Jarre seems to attract. The age range is surprisingly varied — from teenagers to pensioners — and there's a definite air of geekdom filling the venue, enhanced by the fact that the banks of classic keyboards are free for all to view on stage as the auditorium fills. Indeed, a few people wander to the stage to admire the rig and argue over its contents, no doubt right down to the actual serial numbers of the keyboards on offer. More of this synth spotting later, but suffice it to say that gone are the laser harps, gone are the gimmicks, there are no multi-tracks or computers in sight, and there are a lot of leads and, you get the impression, as many fingers being crossed backstage before the show too

Even before the gig starts you feel that, as well as it all being a more low-key affair, it's going to be far more intimate and consequently more real. As the crowd enters, expectation levels rise and reach a peak when an egg-shaped chair appears. Those 'in the know' realise that Jarre is sitting in it with his back to us (although it's pretty obvious to the rest, it has to be said), but when he spins around you'd think it took everyone by surprise, such are the whoops and cheers.

As we progress through the album, the first thing to hit you is the sound quality. There might be problems with the gear — that's a given — but that's not taken our attention away from the glorious sound that these old beasts can make. The rich analogue fatness is something that perhaps has been missing from our digital worlds, despite what soft synth manufacturers have been telling us. Make no mistake, though, what we are seeing and hearing tonight is the real deal. Can we ever go back to plug-ins?

What is happening on stage is then revealed to an astonishing degree as this worship of analogue synthesis reaches an even greater peak, fittingly during the 'hit' — Oxygene Part IV. A huge mirror lowers above the stage, turns 45 degrees to reveal Jarre and his 'band' from above in all of their 'really playing this and sequencing that' glory. Jarre's three fellow players — Dominique Perrier, Claude Samard and Francis Rimbert — are shown to be wrestling with at least half a dozen synths each, while Jarre himself parades between a square formation of around a dozen at the front. We can see them all play and we really can see it when those keyboards go wrong. And we can also hear the tuning issues, volume issues, and even phono plugs being accidentally disconnected. At one point, a mobile phone interferes with the sound. ("The concert in Birmingham went OK," says Jarre later in his blog, "except that Claude forgot to switch off his cell phone before the concert and we had a lot of interferences." That's told him then.) As each of these mistakes occur, the crowd looks around, smiling, because it really doesn't seem to matter. It surprises me, in fact, that the mistakes aren't applauded, such is the level of love from the crowd — and such is the realism that those mistakes add to the performance.

On we go through Oxygene, and Jarre adeptly orchestrates his moments of glory; at one time mastering the Theremin — a notoriously difficult instrument — another time grappling with a Doepfer ribbon controller, and yet another picking up his Moog Liberation for a spot of strap-on synth action. We work our way through the album, reaching Oxygene VI, and a huge 3D rendition of the album logo (a skull within the planet Earth) appears on screen behind the stage to remind us that the album was one of the first 'environmental' recordings ever made. Despite myself, it's quite a moving moment, especially as VI was always, to my mind, one of the unsung heroes of Oxygene.