Back To The Future
Once the darling of 70s electronic music, Jean Michel Jarre, 62, is now an elder statesman of the first synthesizer generation. He has just embarked on his first world tour of arenas (local promoters please take note), having previously concentrated on mounting huge, one-off, spectaculars in large open spaces in cities around the world. In this latest tour, perhaps influenced by his live revisiting of the ‘Oxygene’ album in 2008, he has also forsaken digital technology in favour of using original analogue instruments.
“There is such warmth, such depth, that we have lost somehow,” he told journalists before the start of the British leg of his tour. “These Moog and Prophet keyboards are quite special in the history of music. They disappeared at the beginning of the 80s when the Japanese created the DX7 and also with the explosion of the development of computers. These instruments didn’t even have the chance to become adults and occupy the future.
“So I want to be in a total live situation, with no computers on stage, exposing myself to accidents because these instruments were not necessarily made for performance. The challenge is that every concert should be different, something special.”
“For me, electronic music is like cooking: it’s a sensual organic activity where you can mix ingredients. It is the reason I still have this intact thrill, it’s almost sexual somehow, not cold at all. With the computer screen, you have a kind of abstract interface between your idea and the audio result. With analogue instruments, you have the direct interactivity between the sound and your hands. I think the future of music will involve cross pollination between analogue and digital.”
He went on to describe how, when he was one of the artists introducing electronic music to the pop and rock world, the world had a naïve but exciting idea of the future, an idea that, in the actual future (now) has been reduced to ways of selecting garbage and how to survive global warming. “Suddenly, we are putting ourselves as the next dinosaurs. It’s rather dark; we have narrowed our dreams. It is time to restore our visions,” he explained.
Own A Piece Of John Lennon
“You get the biggest prize when you die, a really big one for dying in public,” John Lennon said in one of his final interviews, in 1980. “I don’t appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious, or dead James Dean. What do they teach you? Nothing. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? It’s garbage, you know. I’ll take the living and the healthy.”
Lennon would have turned 70 last Saturday, and today sees the release of remastered versions of all his solo albums. They are the latest offerings from a posthumous, multi-million-dollar Lennon industry, which join a long list of recent nods to his legendary status such as a TV commercial for a Citroën, a Mont Blanc fountain pen retailing at $27,000, a limited edition Gibson Imagine guitar ($11,000), alongside the usual array of Lennon-branded mugs, clothing, books, calendars, prints and even an ‘Imagine’ brand of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
And that’s just the official merchandise. Last month, the toilet from Lennon’s home in England was auctioned for £9,500. The last album he ever autographed, for his assassin Mark Chapman, went for $525,000 in 2003. In 2009, his bloodstained clothes and glasses were part of an exhibition in New York.
Debut Single For Cruz
The new and quite exciting five-piece Maltese combo Cruz, notable as the opening act at this summer’s Winter Moods concert, have released their debut song titled ‘Red Tape’, which is getting considerable airplay on music stations 897 Bay and XFM.
Cruz are made up of P.G. Mollicone (a former member of the now defunct Hidden Sun) on drums, his brother J.P. Mollicone on synthesizer, Rob Gatt on guitar, Chris Xuereb on bass and vocalist and lyric writer Marilyn Mifsud.
The frontwoman has had some moments in the spotlight before, first as a member of the short-lived all-girl pop band Vieve, then as a soloist, having released a well-received single called ‘Where my Head’s Been’ in 2009. Both that tune and ‘Red Tape’, written with her new band mates, seem to deal with the frustrations of petty misunderstandings within relationships, a favourite area of exploration of teen to twenty-something musical females everywhere.
Having read her monthly contribution to a local Sunday magazine, I suspect that ‘Red Tape’ was also partly inspired by the trials and tribulations she witnesses in her day ‘job’ as a law student. Lawyers hang over our society with a foreboding omnipresence, and having someone straddling both worlds that merges the law world’s rich vocabulary and metaphorical concepts with the science of relationships on our music scene makes Cruz an interesting band to listen out for.
What gives the song another edge over recent releases is the electronic treatment added to the basic pop-rock riffs as well as Marilyn’s edgier, harsher vocal delivery to what listeners have been used to from her so far – perhaps she is opening herself up more to the influences of quirky North American artists Pink and Gwen Stefani, whom she has gone on record saying she admires.