The short version
- On the night of 14 July 1979, Jean-Michel Jarre gave a free open-air concert, "Paris Bleu Blanc Rouge", on the Place de la Concorde. It was his first big outdoor show.
- He stood on stage alone, surrounded by synthesizers, with lights, lasers, giant images projected onto the buildings and fireworks. Eurovision carried it across Europe.
- The crowd size depends on who you ask. A reporter that night said 150,000; Jarre and the text of his official site say a million; the audience field on the same site says 1.5 million.
- Jarre said it took him a year to get over the shock. The night set the pattern for the city concerts that followed, in Houston, Moscow and beyond.
On 25 October 1836, in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, a stone column rose slowly off the ground. It was the obelisk that had stood for 3,300 years at the temple of Luxor. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, had offered it to France in 1829, and it reached Paris only in December 1833. A huge crowd came to watch it go up. A hundred and forty-three years later, another crowd filled the same square. This time they came for a sound.
The square
The Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris. The architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid it out, and it was finished by 1772. During the Revolution it was renamed the Place de la Révolution, and on 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was executed there. Marie Antoinette followed on 16 October the same year. In 1795, as a gesture of reconciliation after the turmoil, it was given the name it still has: Concorde, harmony.
So a concert in this square on the night of 14 July, the national holiday that marks the storming of the Bastille, was no small thing. It was called "Paris Bleu Blanc Rouge": blue, white, red, the three colours of the French flag.
That night
Jarre was thirty. Oxygène had gone round the world three years earlier, and Équinoxe had come out a little over seven months before. Electronic music, the doubters said, could not be played live.
The French Wikipedia names the organiser as Jean-Michel Hepp, head of light entertainment at the TV channel TF1. According to Michaelangelo Matos, writing for Red Bull Music Academy on 7 January 2016, the police and city hall let them close off part of the square three days ahead to set up the equipment. There were two rehearsals.
Jarre stood on stage by himself, ringed by synthesizers, some of them supplied by Francis Rimbert, then a demonstrator for Korg and later one of his collaborators. Around the square there were lights and lasers, giant images thrown onto the fronts of the surrounding buildings, and fireworks overhead.
In 1979 there were no big screens behind the stage and no way of syncing lights and projections to the music automatically. MIDI, the standard that lets synthesizers talk to each other, did not exist yet. Jarre triggered sequences by hand and played nearly everything live, giving cues to the lighting crew over a huge headset. That is also why he wore a silver jacket. As Matos reports it, Jarre called it a visual trick, so he could be seen.
The English Wikipedia gives the length as 40 minutes. The set list on Jarre's official site is all Oxygène and Équinoxe, and the last piece is "Oxygène Part IV". Eurovision broadcast it live to television across Europe.
How many came
The numbers are the night's great puzzle. Here they are, source by source.
- 150,000. According to a 2018 piece by France's national audiovisual archive, INA, that is the figure the reporter covering the concert gave that night.
- Nearly a million. The figure in the text of the same INA piece.
- A million. Jarre's own figure. In a 2017 Newsweek interview he said there was not a lot of promotion, but a million people came. The concert page on his official site also says an estimated one million.
- 1.5 million. The number in the audience field on that same official page. One page, two numbers.
There is a Guinness story too. Jarre's official biography and Wikipedia both say this concert was his first entry in the Guinness Book of Records. We could not find the 1979 concert on the Guinness World Records website. The Jarre record we did find there is Moscow, 6 September 1997, counted as 500,000 paying attendees plus an estimated 3 million watching from the surrounding hills. What the printed 1979 book said, nobody can confirm without the book in hand.
The square covers about 7.6 hectares. We found no count of how far the crowd spilled beyond it. One thing is certain: neither the organisers nor Jarre expected anything like it. The French Wikipedia says the turnout was completely unforeseen and astonished the organisers and Jarre himself.
What happened next
Jarre said it took him almost a year to recover from the shock. He told Red Bull Music Academy and Newsweek the same thing. The records reacted at once. Between 14 July and 31 August another 800,000 were sold.
This is where Jarre's road out of the studio and into the city begins. In the Newsweek interview he said that because the concert became an event, he was invited to stage the same kind of show in other countries and regions: China in 1981, Houston, his hometown Lyon for the Pope's visit, Russia, the pyramids of Egypt. On 14 July 1990 he gave another free concert, at La Défense outside Paris. The 1995 Guinness Book put that crowd at 2.5 million. The Houston and Moscow numbers vary from source to source as well. Jarre's city concerts always come with at least two numbers attached.
What survives of the night is a 30-minute videotape, Jarre à la Concorde, and a single of the same name, with the video's version of "Équinoxe Part 7" and a long "Équinoxe Part 8".
How to listen: two tracks that bring the night back
- "Équinoxe Part 7". It was in the set, and it was the A-side of the single that followed. Open a window while it plays. A square has more air than a room.
- "Oxygène Part IV". The last piece of the night, according to the official set list. Turn the lights off, and when it ends, stay where you are for a moment.
The one track to send a friend
Send "Oxygène Part IV". Tell them it runs 4:14, then pass on this: the concert that ended with this piece on 14 July 1979 drew either 150,000 people, as a reporter said that night, or a million, as Jarre says. Nobody was able to count.
The obelisk is still standing. In 1836 people gathered to watch it go up. In 1979 they gathered to hear what was playing in front of it. Both times the stone said nothing.
Where to get it
Everything played that night is on two albums. The editions are covered in the Équinoxe and Oxygène reviews.
