I love Chronologie, it’s my favourite Jarre album, not necessarily for the music but for the concept, the link with Swatch (a brand I was already a fan of), the amazing live shows across Europe and the time it arrived in my life. Although the music is also brilliant.
I first got into JMJ in 1988 with Revolutions, and the media hype surrounding the Destination Docklands London concert. I was 13 years old at the time, and a friend played me the title track off his cassette through my Sony Walkman headphones, and I was blown away. The concert was on the news every night, with the “will it happen, won’t it happen” storyline. I didn’t attend the show but watched it on TV later that year, sort of impressed but not quite sure what I’d seen. And then I sort of drifted away from JMJ and was into all sorts of pop and rock.
Then Cousteau came out and I sort of got interested again, and then …. Paris La Défense was shown on UK TV a few weeks after the event, on a late night screening. My dad set the VHS to record it – he didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, he just did, and he wasn’t interested, was this fate? – and when I watched a few days later there was no going back. I’ve been a full on JMJ fan ever since.
Anyway, the reason for this back story is that it’s now the end of 1990 and I’m 16 years old and I’ve bought the WHOLE back catalogue on cassette – from Oxygene to Cousteau – and I play them all day, every day nonstop thru my headphones and I’m waiting, waiting and waiting for new music and then in the COTM fanzine there is rumour of a new album and it’s “best of” and Images is released in 1991 and it has a few new tracks and some reworked stuff but it’s not new, so the wait continues.
I’m waiting for what I can consider “my album” and by now it’s 1992 and JMJ appears on a UK TV chat show and says that he’s preparing a series of concerts across Europe in 1993 and then I’m really excited about the idea of new music and new performances. Here's the clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGBkFUFiR6E
And now it’s May 1993 and I am in the middle of my A-Level studies in the UK, the final set of high school exams before leaving home and going to university, and on Monday 24th May I queue up outside the record shop in Preston, Lancashire and I am the first person in, and I buy the first copy (on cassette, obviously) and it’s still such a vivid memory. But I decide to only listen to Part 4 (the cassette single) and I save the full album until my last exam is over in June, and when I finally play it, I still recall being wowed by the long transitions between Part 1 and Part 2, and that Part 6 is incredible, and that Part 8 makes me laugh. It’s a delight from start to finish.
And in my opinion, Chrono Part 4 is his best “4” – better than the Rendezvous, Equinoxe and Oxygene versions that share the same number.
Later that year, I see him live for the first time on the Manchester date of his triumphant Europe in Concert tour. And a few weeks after that, I leave home for university, and I have not returned. A new life.
Waiting for Cousteau and La Défense began for me a three year wait for new music. Chronologie is all about time, and it was released at a time in my life when things were ending, and new things were starting. A really intense and decisive few months in an important year for me.
Fast forward (the cassette) to 2006 and it is Saturday 1st April I am getting married to Charlotte. We are in a church in Preston, Lancashire, just a few streets away from the record shop where I bought Chronologie 13 years’ earlier and at the end of the ceremony, as we walk down the aisle together, surrounded by all our friends and family, the church organ rings out the opening section of Part 8 and it sounds amazing, before the organist moves into a clever segue into “Finale” from Organ Symphony No 1, by Louis Vierne (I think) and Vierne was the organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, offering another neat JMJ link for years to come.
Anyway, that’s Chronologie. It’s a timeless, wonderful album that means a great deal to me ❤
