Here is a beautiful interview, which I translated and placed on
http://www.jarreforum.com/showthread.php?t=1357 (there are other translations there as well):
Long (35 minutes) interview to Jarre, in Portuguese news radio TSF. Listen
here. Broadcast on 14-Jan-2008, interviewer: Carlos Vaz Marques. Slight problem: answers are partially overdubbed in Portuguese.
What's your concept of success?
I think success is an accident. The trap for an artist is to consider that success is always due to him. It's not permanent though. You alternate between success and failure.
You were hesitant between becoming a painter or a musician. What made you choose music?
It was because I joined Pierre Schaeffer's group. We owe him everyhing: sequencers, loops, delays, inversions, everything that we hear today in music. I went for music because the work with frequences and sound textures is exactly the same as non-figurative (abstract) painting. It's playing with colours, sound colours, to create sound landscapes just like creating landscapes in a canvas.
Are the light spectacles you put on the result of your trying to combine music and painting?
Absolutely right.
But what's the actual relationship between music and painting?
There's a great similitude between abstract painting, which was the one I was most interested in, and electronic music. They can both be compared to cooking. We can mix ingredients, sauces, flavours, just like we mix colours, textures, like Pollock or Hartung did and influenced me, just like we mix sounds, colours, textures, depths. It's exactly the same thing.
Did music come to you first or was the electronics that pushed you towards music?
Technology has always defined the style. The invention of the brush led to painting, the piano led to the preludes, the electric guitar led to rock'n roll, the 3-minute single led to quick songs. When I was a child, I saw my grandfather invent incredible things - he made the first mixing console in France - called TBase, the first portable turntable, and a coffee grinder that made an unbearable noise. I was already attracted to sound - I played the oboe, and my father was a great film music composer. I was 5 when my parents divorced - I have few memories of his influence.
So you lived since very young surrounded by technological innovation.
Yes, and I was very happy about it. I'm not a technician, but that world aroused my curiosity.
Are you still up-to-date with today's innovations?
Yes, I'm amazed with Apple's iPhone. I'm interested in technological innovations both personally and as an artist.
You feel the need to own the latest gadget?
No, I'm not interested in acquiring the latest instruments, but to know them. The artist is made to "pirate" things, in the good sense of the word. He pirates technology, provokes accidents, makes space for creativity.
Do you keep the same attitude towards new instruments?
That question is very easy and very hard to answer. There are two very distinct categories of instruments: analog, which are at the foundation of electronic music, which I use with the utmost joy as they are sensual, organic.
Sensual?
For many reasons. The hands touch them, caress them. We tune them until we get what we want. Then, the sound is very warm, round, so it isn't aggressive on the ear. In a computer there isn't this sensual aspect, it's much more intelectual, you make calculations, move the mouse, give instructions, it's not the same.
So computers did not bring you joy?
I think there was a dark period in the 80s when the digital was notoriously worse than the music. It was a very sad phase, where instruments were not at the same level. Digital led to the split of music into segments. It took 20 years to start finding again the lost warmth.
Are you still an enemy of the CD?
Of the CDs produced then, yes. I think the CD is responsible for the crisis of the record and of the music. The music industry wanted to sell CDs like yoghurts. That's why I composed 'Musique pour Supermarchés', published in one copy to protest against this state of affairs. Music is vibration, you have to feel it. With analog, it was simple: you recorded in a magnetic device and vibration was continuous; then a needle in a record reproduced the continuous vibration. It was a physical process and those vibrations went directly from my musical gesture to your ear. Digital split this in segments: vibration was segmented - it arrives to your ear in fragments and the sense of continuity in vibration is lost. So what you get is an emotion cut in slices.
But can't you hear the same thing?
Of course you hear the same thing, at the hearing level. But at the emotional level it's not the same thing. So that changed everything and changed the relationship between society and music. It got worse with MP3 and now with music in cell phones with minuscule speakers. But the digital also progressed. With HD, we get a sound as good as analog sound, if not better. That's what I did on DVD with Oxygene. I think the medium should be reevaluated.
What challenges are still facing you?
Do you realize what question you've made? You ask an artist "you have already been so successful, what can you still do?" Now, you don't make music to be successful. We are not bankers, that's the main problem - mixing music and creation with the financial result. Of course we work to get a salary, though music is now perceived to be free, as free as the air we breathe. It's a scandal. There were things that resulted well and guaranteed my material comfort but that does not block my desire to compose.
What do you still desire?
An artist has something to say and spends his life saying the same thing. Look at the works of the Beatles, Kubrick, Fellini, Garcia Marquez, Coppola - they always say the same thing but in a different way. It's the media that in each record asks "what is there new?" and the poor artist has to answer "well, it's totally different from the earlier works". Is 'Yesterday' so different from 'Strawberry Fields'? No, it's the Beatles. Their sound is unmistakable and that's why, 20 years later, one can say they always composed the same song. In my case, I'd like to one day listen to something of mine and say "here is something that corresponds from A to Z to what I intended to say". But I'm not there yet.
'Oxygene' was not a predictable success...
It was turned down by every publisher, except a small one that took it. I've never told this, but it was my wife, Charlotte Rampling, we had just met, she was filming in Ireland, and I showed up with the recording of Oxygene. She listened to it at night and was fulminated. She said "look, this is so special that it will either be a total failure or a global success". I explain the success in that there was electronic music in Germany - there were Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, but it was totally different music, they had a robotic, dehumanized, cold approach to music. They led people to think that electronic music was cold, robot music. Oxygene was the opposite, impressionist, melodic, with no repetition of sounds, with all sequences played by hand. It was human, analog music, not machine music.
Was there a community of electronic music in the 70s?
No, the word 'community' appears with the Internet. There was no community back then. And electronic musicians were not like their rock counterparts, they worked in their small instrument labs.
Did you know the members from Krafterk?
I knew, but we didn't live in the same country, we traveled less, we didn't really have contact. After we became successful, we came across each other several times but before that each one was in their corner, totally underground.
Your obsession was to build a bridge between Pop and Classical music. Did you do it?
With Oxygene and Equinoxe, yes.
Do you read Sci-fi?
I used to read more, until 2001. Now less. My reference work is "2001". Nothing compares to it.
Your music is considered futurist. Do you like it?
That's true, and even though I read sci-fi, I never considered my music as connected to sci-fi. My music is not connected to the stratosphere, but to the biosphere. Oxygen is not in the stratosphere.
But why that association?
For a very simple reason, because I used electronic instruments. It had a futurist aspect, a "Star Wars" side.
"Star Wars" used orchestral music...
That is very interesting. I would have liked to compose music for this genre of film but nobody has done it. There was Ridley Scott, who did Blade Runner with Vangelis, but that's the sole example. I think directors suspected the synth was used to fake orchestral sounds, so it was better to use real orchestras. It was the idea that the synth and electronic music are uncapable of conveying feelings. It's incredible.
Is there still a concert that you would like to perform, that would be a challenge?
You need to understand, because you media think that I attack concerts like someone climbs the Everest, that most of my concerts were by demand, not because I wanted to perform them, like a capricious child - "now I want to play at the Pyramids..."
That pic needs to be enlarged. 
Good to see JMJ getting some kind of press coverage over in Portugal. 
eg pears):
to hear that he likes those albums more than Oxygene. 
