The short version
- At 8 pm on Saturday 3 May 1997, Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène tour opened at the Zénith, an indoor arena in Toulon in the south of France.
- The tour promoted Oxygène 7-13, released that February. By the last night, in Orléans on 20 October, it had played 36 concerts in 15 countries to 230,000 people.
- According to Jarre's official website, this was the first time he took an indoor tour around Europe. His big shows until then had been in the open air.
- One open-air night in Moscow that September drew 500,000 paying listeners by Guinness's count, more than twice the total for all 36 indoor shows.
Eight o'clock on Saturday 3 May 1997, in Toulon, the port city on France's Mediterranean coast. In an indoor arena called the Zénith, Jean-Michel Jarre played the first night of a new tour. It started here, not in Paris, and it would end five and a half months later in Orléans.
Where this stage stood
The reason for the tour was a record. In February 1997 Dreyfus released Oxygène 7-13, which is exactly what the title says: the sequel to Oxygène from 1976. According to English Wikipedia, Jarre used the same synthesizers as twenty years earlier and dedicated the album to his old teacher Pierre Schaeffer, who had died two years before. Michel Granger painted the cover, as he had in 1976.
Explaining the record to the Daily Telegraph, Jarre talked about painters. Give a painter four tubes of colour and he paints. Sit him in front of a computer with two million colours and by the time he has looked through them all he has forgotten the first one. So he went back to old machines he could work with his hands.
From the square to the arena
Jarre's official website calls this his second major tour. The first was Europe in Concert in 1993. This time the concerts were indoors, and the site notes that the only indoor concerts he had given before were on his short run of shows in China in 1981.
Set the numbers side by side and you see what that meant. The 36 concerts drew 230,000 people in all, roughly 6,400 a night. On 6 September, in a gap in the tour, came the open-air show in Moscow. Guinness World Records puts that night at 500,000 paying listeners, with about 3 million more watching from around the site. The paying crowd for that one night alone was more than twice the whole tour's.
Four musicians shared the stage with him: Laurent Faucheux, Dominique Mahut, Christoph Papendieck and Dominique Perrier.
What the tour played
The official site and the fan site Jarre UK give the same list of pieces, and Jarre UK adds that the selection varied from concert to concert. The list opens with "Oxygène 7" and closes with "Oxygène 13", the first and last tracks of the new album. In between come parts 2, 4, 5 and 6 of the 1976 record. The official site points out that "Oxygène 2" and "Oxygène 6" had not been played live for a long time. Two records made twenty years apart took turns within one evening.
There was a new instrument on stage too: the theremin, the electronic instrument Leon Theremin built in Russia in 1917. According to the official site, this tour was where Jarre first brought it on stage, and it has been a regular part of his concerts ever since.
What exactly he played that night in Toulon, in what order, and how the audience took it: on that, we have found no record. What we know is the date, the time, the place, and that the tour began there.
The road after the first night
Hungarian Wikipedia's list of Jarre concerts sets out the tour date by date. Four days after Toulon, on 7 May, it was in Copenhagen. Then came Stockholm, Oslo and Gothenburg before the tour headed down into Germany: the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin on 14 May, the Olympiahalle in Munich on the 23rd, and on 8 and 9 June, Wembley Arena in London. The summer leg ended in Milan in late June. After Moscow on 6 September the tour came back to France in October and played the Zénith in Paris on the 16th. Paris was neither the start nor the finish. The start was Toulon, and the finish was Orléans.
How to listen
Put on "Oxygène 7", the first track on Oxygène 7-13. It runs 11:41, and the tour's list of pieces opens with it too. Follow it with "Oxygène 2" from the 1976 Oxygène. Twenty years apart, played back to back, you can hear the same machines breathing. If Jarre is new to you, start with our Jarre guide.
The last piece, "Oxygène 13", runs 4:27. The evening that began in Toulon was played 36 times, and the last time was at the Zénith in Orléans on 20 October.
Where to get it
Oxygène 7-13 first came out on Dreyfus in France in 1997. In 2016 it was reissued as Oxygène 2 in Oxygène Trilogy, which gathers all three Oxygène albums.