ALBUM (1995)

Hong Kong Jean-Michel Jarre (Dreyfus)

Live albums, often hurriedly thrown together to cash in on successful tours or limit the losses of unsuccessful ones, are not the best representation of an artist's work.

Due to problems with recording live shows, the albums often suffer from bad production and dropped sound, and usually have to be touched up in the studio (or extensively touched up, in the case of Kiss' Kiss Alive, which featured hardly any live music at all).

Jean-Michel Jarre's Hong Kong live double-disc collection went one better by featuring hardly any songs played at the gig. It also fell foul of that perennial problem in Hong Kong: a clueless government.

Before U2 built a city building-sized structure to house lights and effects for their 360 tour, the French synth maestro was using real buildings as stages and backdrops for his concerts, beaming video images on to the sides of skyscrapers and harnessing the acoustics of urban canyons to project his futuristic musical pieces.

Through gigs in cities such as London, Lyon and Houston, the extroverted Jarre became renowned for staging gargantuan city-centre concerts that attracted, in the case of Paris, more than a million people.

The Hong Kong performance, played at the end of a massive European tour, was to be similarly grand: staged at the opening of the newly renovated Hong Kong Stadium in March 1994, it also marked Jarre's return to the East after he became one of the first Western performers invited to play in China 13 years earlier. During the gig, Jarre debuted new song Digi Sequencer, featured tracks from the recently released Chronologie album peppered with a few old favourites from his Oxygene and Equinoxe hits, and included, for local colour, songs he'd recorded for and after the China gigs, including Souvenir of China, and an extended version of Fishing Junks at Sunset.