JM Jarre: Equinox - ELO: A New World Record

I started the new year with some rediscovered vinyl, from the old days. That means the late 1970s when as a teenager I started to spend some of my pocket money on LPs.

Jean-Michel Jarre's Equinox has always been one of my favourites. It's probably the best he has ever done. It's a beautifully sequenced suite of very atmospheric tracks. The LP still sounds great. Soon after, however, I grew disenchanted with Jarre. His China concerts were a rehash of the Equinox/Oxygène/Chants Magnétiques stuff and his later work - Zoolook (1984), En attendant Cousteau (1990), etc - struck me as significantly less inspired. In the 1990s I lost track altogether. Also I never took to his penchant for Babylonian laser-and-fireworks shows which he unleashed all over the globe. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that JM Jarre has made his mark and his wikipedia lemma makes for fascinating reading.

The Electic Light Orchestra's A New World Record dates from 1976 and has seen years of heavy rotation. I believe I also had the double album Out of the Blue, but that has disappeared from my collection. It's been 30 years at least since I have last heard the stuff. I still know many of the lyrics by heart. I think most of the songs have aged gracefully. And certainly, this kind of symphonic rock was instrumental in nudging me gently towards the real thing which I discovered just a few years later. Sadly, this LP has been dreadfully recorded: an overproduced, 'radio-friendly', muffled sound with clipped dynamics.