We’ve come to believe that - unlike the greedy, grasping, bottom-line-obsessed present day - the 1970s represented a golden age in the music industry, when record companies would nurture and invest in talent with nary a thought for commercial returns. This may not be entirely true. If it were true, it would follow that when Jean Michel Jarre started taking his Oxygène album round the record companies looking for a deal back in 1976, he would have met an enthusiastic response, along the lines of: “Okay, it’s a bit different, but you’re obviously a talented lad, so we’ll take a chance on you and, if it doesn’t sell, so be it.” This is not what happened.

“It was refused by many, many record companies,” Jarre recalls, with the wry amusement that 15m subsequent sales of the album affords him. He reels off the litany of excuses he was given for this rejection: “ ‘There are no singers, no songs, the tracks are all too long, they’re all called the same thing.’ “Even my mother asked me, ‘Why do you have to name it after a gas?’ ” Oxygène was finally released in France in 1976, and in the UK a year later, establishing itself as a landmark album and making Jarre an international star.

Three decades on, he is revisiting his early masterpiece. He first returned to it in 1997, creating a sequel, Oxygène 7-13. This time, he has chosen to recreate the original work in a new studio recording and a live performance, packaged as a CD/DVD set, Oxygène: New Master Recording (available now), as well as taking it out on the road. For a man whose extraordinary outdoor concerts regularly turn up in Guinness World Records - his most recent entry, his fourth, is for the 3.5m who attended a Moscow concert - he is playing Oxygène in some relatively intimate environments, including the Albert Hall.

“Actually, I originally made it on an old eight-track tape recorder in the kitchen of my apartment,” Jarre explains. “I always said to myself that, one day, I should do the piece again on a more professional setup.” He decided that, while he would take advantage of technological progress in recording equipment, as far as the instruments were concerned, he wanted to remain faithful to the early analogue synthesizers on which he had performed the original.

“When I got them out of storage and played them again, I realised something that even I had forgotten - that these analogue instruments are unique,” Jarre says. “Choosing to use these old synths instead of their modern equivalents is not a retro thing, it is not nostalgia, it is because technological progress has almost nothing to do with the quality of the instrument.

A violinist playing today would rather play a Stradivarius than any other instrument - a violin made 400 years ago. Many guitarists would say that the best electric guitars ever made were Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters from the 1950s or early 1960s. It is the same with these analogue synths.”

Although Jarre has played tracks from Oxygène in concert over the years, he has never played the entire piece. The decision to do so now, and to use the original instruments, created obvious problems. Unlike modern digital synths, the instruments Jarre is taking on tour have no memories and no preset sounds. You have to create each sound as you go along, tweaking knobs and plugging in patch cords. There is every chance the sound that comes out won’t be quite the sound you planned.

“They are totally irrational, unreasonable machines to work with. But this is the source of the inspiration,” Jarre says. “You could say I was taking the risk of all those accidents, but they are also sometimes the special moments. I did a few concerts in a nice theatre in Paris last year. One night, I had one Moog synthesizer that went quite berserk, but because the audience reacted to it - and because they realised then it was really live – it was fun. It creates something quite human, in an age when everything is so neat and clean.”

This is one of the contradictions at the heart of Jarre’s music. It is very human. Back in the 1970s, at a time when other synth pioneers, such as Kraftwerk, were exploring the cold, robotic side of electronic music, Jarre was demonstrating the exact opposite: that these newfangled electronic instruments could produce stunningly sensual, organic music. While the electronic music of Kraftwerk and their disciples used the sounds of synths to conjure up a vision of a bleak, alienated world, the fact that such (then) state-of-the-art instruments could create such warm, comforting sounds as Jarre conjured out of them seemed to suggest another, more hopeful future.

A further contradiction, however, lies between the warmth of the music and the stark imagery of the album’s cover: planet earth falling apart to reveal a skull. Early environ-mental concerns inspired the music, and that cover seemed a shocking image at the time. “Back then, our vision of the future was perhaps quite innocent and naive,” Jarre says. “We had an epic vision. “Now our view of the future is very different, more sombre, narrower.” And that skull peeking out from a rotting earth looks strangely prescient.

The Oxygène tour starts tonight at the Royal Concert Hall, in Glasgow, takes in Jarre’s first-ever Irish dates at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and runs until March 30, when he plays the Albert Hall, SW7

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