Revolutions: Jarre's 1988, and two nights on a London dock

Two weeks before the show, the fire services pulled the plug. The date was 24 September 1988, one night on a dock in east London, and the reason was safety. The concert went looking for a home: Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, even the Alton Towers theme park. The writer Will Jennings, looking back in 2018, tells how it ended. Jarre flew in himself for an extraordinary council licensing meeting, and the show came back to the docks, pushed back to October.

Where it sits

Where to begin with Jarre is in Jean-Michel Jarre, where to start. This record came a decade after Oxygène and Équinoxe.

It was recorded in 1987 and 1988 at the Croissy studio in Croissy-sur-Seine, west of Paris. Most of it was mixed there too, with a few tracks finished at Studio Guillaume Tell and Studio Davout in Paris. The engineer was Denis Vanzetto. Jarre composed and produced; Dominique Perrier and Michel Geiss are credited on keyboards, "Joe Hammer" on drums and Guy Delacroix on bass. The Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani shot the cover, and the art direction was by Mark Fisher, who also designed the dockside stage that year.

In a 2018 interview with a fan site Jarre said he had fallen for the Roland D-50 at the time. To him it was the anti DX7. The credits have him playing the D-50, the Fairlight, the Synthex, the OSCar and even the Cristal Baschet, an instrument sounded by rubbing glass rods.

The release date depends on whom you ask. MusicBrainz and French Wikipedia say August 1988, English Wikipedia 26 September. It entered the UK album chart at 3 on 8 October, the first night of the concerts, climbed to 2 the following week, and stayed thirteen weeks.

Tracks

Timings are as printed on the 1988 French LP. The UK CD gives the titles in English (Industrial Revolution, The Emigrant) and times "September" at 3:52.

Through the record

• "Révolution Industrielle". A four-part suite that takes up almost all of side one, overture through part three, a little over 16 minutes. Listen for the joins where one part hands over to the next.
• "London Kid". 4 minutes 34 seconds, with the tune carried by Hank Marvin's guitar. Hear how that 1960s Shadows sound sits among the synthesizers.
• "Révolutions". The title track. The original pressing has Kudsi Erguner's ney, a Turkish reed flute, and a recording of a muezzin's call. Check which version you have before you listen.
• "Tokyo Kid". Jun Miyake's trumpet and megaphone come in, human breath riding a machine beat.
• "September". 3 minutes 57 seconds. The sleeve dedicates it to Dulcie September, the South African anti-apartheid activist assassinated in Paris on 29 March 1988. A girls' choir from Mali sings on it. Stay with it to the last voice.

How to listen

• Side one in one go. The four parts of the suite and "London Kid" run as a single stretch.
• A little louder than usual. These pieces were built to be played across a dock.
• If you know Oxygène, play this straight after it and hear where the man from the kitchen had got to twelve years on.

One flute, one lawsuit

The ney on the title track caused trouble. Citing a book by the musicologist Laurent Aubert, English Wikipedia says the track reworked samples of an unpublished piece by the Turkish musician Kudsi Erguner, which Jarre had obtained from the ethnologist Xavier Bellenger. Erguner went to court, the same article says, and won a modest indemnity.

Jarre's side of it is in the 2018 interview. Erguner sued everybody, he said, claiming to be co-composer and wanting royalties, and that made him so angry that he decided every future reissue would carry a different version. He added that he had never felt the original quite worked; it was too much like world music. Later pressings retitle the track "Revolution, Revolutions".

What happened next

The concerts took place on 8 and 9 October at the Royal Victoria Dock. The official site says the stage stood on a 1,000-ton floating barge. Will Jennings writes that it was ten barges lashed together, brought down from the north-east and meant to float from left to right, until the weight of equipment and performers left it stuck fast. Millennium Mills, an old flour mill on the dock, had its facade painted white to take the projections.

The weather was bad. The official site mentions rain and strong winds, the official biography appalling conditions. Hank Marvin came on stage for "London Kid".

The crowd depends on the source. The official concert page says 400,000 tickets sold in a few hours across the two nights; the biography on the same site says 250,000. English Wikipedia says 100,000 a night. Take the smallest figure and it is still 200,000 people on a wet dock over two nights.

The single "Revolutions" reached 52 in Britain that November, and "London Kid" 52 in January 1989. The concert recording came out as Jarre Live in October 1989 and was later reissued as Destination Docklands.

The one track to send a friend

"London Kid". 4 minutes 34 seconds. Tell them this: the guitarist is Hank Marvin of the Shadows, and that October he played it again on a barge on a rain-lashed London dock.

Where to get it

The 1988 French Dreyfus LP (837 421-1) and the British Polydor LP (POLH 45) are the record as it first appeared. If you want the ney on the title track, look for an original pressing; later reissues swap in a different version. Put side one on and turn it up. When the suite ends, the dockside wind is still in the room.

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