Jean-Michel Jarre – Destination Docklands: The London Concert / Disques Dreyfus Audio CD 1996 / FDM 36149-2

UPC 3460503614925

Jean-Michel André Jarre (French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl ɑ̃dʁe ʒaʁ]; born 24 August 1948) is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.

Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and grandparents and trained on the piano. From an early age, he was introduced to a variety of art forms, including street performers, jazz musicians and the artist Pierre Soulages. But his musical style was perhaps most heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, a pioneer of musique concrète at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

His first mainstream success was the 1976 album Oxygène. Recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, the album sold an estimated 12 million copies. Oxygène was followed in 1978 by Équinoxe, and in 1979, Jarre performed to a record-breaking audience of more than a million people at the Place de la Concorde, a record he has since broken three times. More albums were to follow, but his 1979 concert served as a blueprint for his future performances around the world. Several of his albums have been released to coincide with large-scale outdoor events.

As of 2004, Jarre had sold an estimated 80 million albums. He was the first Western musician officially invited to perform in the People's Republic of China and holds the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event for his Moscow concert on 6 September 1997, which was attended by 3.5 million people.

Destination Docklands was an event consisting of two concerts by musician Jean-Michel Jarre on the Royal Victoria Docks, Docklands, London on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9 October 1988, to coincide with the release of Jarre's new album Revolutions. The concerts were attended by 100,000 people on each night.

Accompanied by fireworks and a light show, the concert also featured The Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin who joined Jarre on the tracks "London Kid" and "Fourth Rendez-Vous". The show was intended to show a history of the area, with tracks dedicated to the industrial revolution, swinging sixties (with Hank Marvin), and future regeneration of the area. The concert's scale was larger than any seen in the UK before or since, and used vast numbers of fireworks, World War II searchlights, and used entire buildings as giant projection screens throughout the show. The majority of the audience watched from disused land on what is now the site of the ExCeL Exhibition Centre.