Jarre in Royal Albert Hall

The trip to London was great. Me and my wife had a great time. Off course for me the Jarre concert was the highlight of the trip. Directly after we arrived in the hotel we looked where the Royal Albert Hall was exactly. I turned out that we could walk it easily from our hotel. We decided to go there in the morning to make sure we wouldn't walk wrong. And that was a good decision afterwards, because that is exactly what we did. After we found it we went back to the hotel and took a little nap. We left early to go back again and ate at a nice Indian restaurant that we found on the way back.

Entering the hall is a very special moment. The ambiance there is really great. You can just feel the greatness that has happened there in the past. The hall was completely sold out we heard, but lots of people were late. So the concert started a little later than planned. Jean-Michel Jarre did a nice introduction before the concert and told that he was there not so long ago with Arthur C. Clarke who recently died. He said he would think about that during the concert. A scary moment was when during this presentation a iron chain fell down from the ceiling of the hall. Luckily it didn't hit Jean-Michel Jarre nor the equipment on stage. And what a nice stuff there was standing on that podium. Lots of vintage synthesizers :)

We had very nice seats as you can see from the picture on the left we were pretty close. Row 15 right in front of the podium. Great for a good stereo image :) You can also see some of the nice synthesizers that were on the podium like: Arp 2600, MemoryMoog, EMS Synthi, Jupiter 8, Moog Modular, Theremin, Eminent 310, Moog Liberation etc etc. Before they start the concert they even need to tune them last minute. Actually that tuning session sounded quite nice :) It is really a playing museum on stage.

The concert itself was great. However different from the other Jarre concerts I have seen. They were more about the show with lots of light, video and lasers etc. this concert was definitely focussed on the music itself. I really loved it and it was really live. Jarre made some mistakes on the solo's, but I don't mind. It was really cool to experience the greatness of the Oxygene album live. Something really cool was a big mirror array above the podium. You could look on top of the stage this way. Great idea.

After the concert we waited for a while in the hall in the hope that Jean-Michel Jarre would do an autograph session, but it looked after a while that this wasn't going to happen. So we went out to the stage door. There a pile of fans was waiting Jean-Michel Jarre up. A bit scary. We didn't want to stand between that and watched from a distance. I brought my CD with me because I really wanted to give it to him, because Jean-Michel Jarre is the reason I started making music. He is my big inspiration. Suddenly my wife recognized the assistant of Francis Rimbert coming out of the stage door. We met her (and Francis) at E-live in Eindhoven last year. We talked a while to her and she promised to get my CD to Jean-Michel Jarre. So he should have it now :) Now lets hope he will listen to it some day. If he ever does then it would be great to get some feedback from him. I can only hope for that. I gave Francis Rimbert a copy at E-live. I heard that he didn't have time to listen to it yet, but still has it. But they did look at my website already :) I was very happy to hear that. Well if something ever comes from this you will hear for sure.

All in all a great experience I wouldn't wanted have missed for anything. The rest of the trip was also very nice. We (me and my wife) had nice dinners, went to The Museum of Natural History, The Science Museum, Madame Tussuads, The London Aquarium and we saw a nice movie (10.000 BC).