Jean-Michel Jarre Trivia
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50 free Jean-Michel Jarre trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Jean-Michel Jarre trivia quiz covers the French electronic pioneer from his Lyon childhood and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète to Versailles in 2023. It goes through the albums — Oxygène and its skull-in-the-Earth cover, Équinoxe, Les Chants Magnétiques and the Fairlight, the one-copy Music for Supermarkets, Zoolook's sampled voices, Chronologie, Aero and the Electronica collaborations — and the gear, from his first EMS VCS 3 to the laser harp. Then it takes in the giant concerts that made him famous: the Place de la Concorde in 1979, the five shows in China, Houston and the Challenger tragedy, Destination Docklands on barges, La Défense, Moscow's 3.5 million and the pyramids at Giza, plus the family stories, the Oscar-winning father and the actress wives. About a third of the questions are easy for any fan; the rest are for people who own the Concerts in China on vinyl. Our synth-pop and electronic music pages carry on from here. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on Jarre and his albums and the interviews they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which French city was Jean-Michel Jarre born?
Lyon
Lyon. His grandfather there, an oboist and engineer, gave him his first tape recorder, which the teenage Jarre used to twist the sound of his guitar in rock bands.
Q 02Jarre's father, Maurice, was a film composer who won three Oscars for scores to films by which director?
David Lean
David Lean. All three Oscars came for Lean epics, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India, yet Jean-Michel barely knew his father, who left for America when he was five.
Q 03Jarre's mother, Francette Pejot, had done what during the Second World War?
Served in the Resistance and survived a camp
Served in the Resistance and survived a camp: she was deported to Ravensbrück in 1944. Her son later owned a glass bust of Beethoven that Hitler had commissioned and the Resistance seized.
Q 04Which science-fiction author became Jarre's friend and worked with him on a millennium concert in Okinawa?
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke. Jarre says the friendship began when he found his own name in the acknowledgements of Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, a novel written to the sound of his albums.
Q 05Which French abstract painter did Jarre name as an inspiration for both his music and his stage visuals?
Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages. Jarre sold his own paintings as a young man, and he lists Soulages beside Jackson Pollock among the abstract painters who shaped how his music and his shows look.
Q 06What was Jarre's first synthesiser, installed in a makeshift studio in his kitchen?
An EMS VCS 3
An EMS VCS 3. Jarre said it looked like a telephone exchange, yet its swooshing effects went on to fill Oxygène, the album that made his name.
Q 07Which princess sat through wind and rain at Jarre's 1988 Destination Docklands concert in London?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana. By Jarre's account she had promised to come to his next British show, so a box had to be built for her on the derelict waterfront, where she was soaked along with the crowd.
Q 08What does the cover of Jarre's album Oxygène show inside a peeling planet Earth?
A human skull
A human skull. Michel Granger painted it for a series on the damage being done to the planet; Jarre spotted the watercolour, already titled Oxygène, in a Paris gallery and bought it.
Q 09Before Oxygène made him famous, Jarre released a cover of which synthesiser hit under a pseudonym?
Popcorn
Popcorn. Jarre's 1972 version went out under the names Pop Corn Orchestra and Jammie Jefferson; four years later his own tune, Oxygène (Part IV), became his signature hit.
Q 10Which album did Jarre release in 1978 as the follow-up to Oxygène?
Équinoxe
Équinoxe. The next summer he took it to a free Bastille Day show in Paris that he had thought of as an underground project, and about a million people turned up.
Q 11Jarre's record-setting free show on Bastille Day 1979 was staged at which Paris landmark?
The Concorde
The Concorde. About a million people filled the square and the Champs-Élysées beyond, a crowd that entered the Guinness Book of Records; Jarre said it took him a year to get over it.
Q 12In 1981 Jarre gave five concerts in which Communist country, then barely open to Western music?
China
China. State radio had just started playing his albums, some of the first Western music heard there in decades, and officials cut the power to a district of Beijing so the first show could run.
Q 13Why did about half the crowd leave Jarre's first 1981 tour date early?
The city's buses stopped running at ten
Q 21Jarre's 1988 concert Destination Docklands was staged at which east London site?
The Royal Victoria Dock
Newham council dithered until the month of the show; the stage floated on four barges and Hank Marvin guested in awful weather.
Q 22Which guitarist joined Jarre as a guest at his 1988 Destination Docklands concerts?
Hank Marvin
Hank Marvin. The Shadows guitarist played 'London Kid' in the part of the show given over to the Swinging Sixties, one chapter in Jarre's history of the area told in music and light.
Q 23Which famous undersea explorer did Jarre honour in the title of his 1990 album?
Jacques Cousteau
The city's buses stopped running at ten, so leaving early was routine. That first house was mostly soldiers and officials, so Jarre's team handed out tickets in the street for the later shows.
Q 14Which signature Jarre instrument gave its name to a track on his 1982 live double album?
The laser harp
The laser harp. Jarre plays it by blocking upward beams of light with his hands, and it has featured in almost every concert he has given since those 1981 shows.
Q 15Which new digital sampling instrument did Jarre pioneer on 1981's Les Chants Magnétiques?
The Fairlight CMI
The Fairlight CMI. It could turn any recorded noise into notes on a keyboard, which Jarre tied straight back to his student training in tape music; Peter Gabriel was a fellow early owner.
Q 16What did Jarre do with the master tapes of his 1983 album Musique pour Supermarché?
Had them destroyed
Had them destroyed. A single copy of the LP was pressed and auctioned in Paris; Jarre then let Radio Luxembourg air it once and urged listeners to tape it, saying 'Piratez-moi!'
Q 17Jarre's 1984 album Zoolook was built around what kind of sampled material?
Human voices in many languages
Human voices in many languages. Jarre collected speech and song in about 25 tongues and cut the fragments into rhythms and melodies, with Laurie Anderson among the guest voices.
Q 18Jarre's 1986 Houston concert marked Texas's 150th anniversary and the 25th anniversary of what?
NASA's Johnson Space Center
NASA's Johnson Space Center. Jarre turned downtown Houston's skyscrapers into giant projection screens, and well over a million people filled the parks and blocked the freeways to watch.
Q 19Which Challenger astronaut was to have played saxophone on 'Rendez-Vous VI' from orbit?
Ronald McNair
Ronald McNair. From pre-launch quarantine he took Jarre's rehearsal calls on a corridor payphone at two o'clock sharp; after the disaster the track became 'Ron's Piece', played in Houston by his friend Kirk Whalum.
Q 20Jarre's October 1986 concert in France was staged to mark a visit by which world figure?
Pope John Paul II
Pope John Paul II. Jarre's home city asked him to play for the papal visit, and he met the Pope just before going on stage: 'it's like the temperature was getting higher', he recalled.
Jacques Cousteau. The album is called Waiting for Cousteau, and its long ambient title piece later turned up on the soundtrack of the explorer's own documentary about the island of Palawan.
Q 24Jarre's 1990 Bastille Day concert broke his own crowd record in which district of Paris?
La Défense
La Défense. Guinness logged about 2.5 million people stretching back towards the Arc de Triomphe, while Trinidadian designer Peter Minshall's giant puppets paraded to a live steel band.
Q 25Jarre's 1997 Russian concert, reputedly attended by about 3.5 million, marked what anniversary?
Moscow's 850th birthday
Moscow's 850th birthday. The city invited him to play at the State University, and cosmonauts aboard the Mir space station joined the show by live video link.
Q 26Where did Jarre stage The Twelve Dreams of the Sun on New Year's Eve 1999?
The Egyptian desert near Giza
The Egyptian desert near Giza. Built on ancient myths of the sun's journey, the show threw giant laser images onto the pyramids, and it went ahead only after a court threw out a last-minute challenge to its cost.
Q 27Which actress was Jarre's second wife, whom he met at a dinner party in Saint-Tropez in 1976?
Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling. Both were married to other people when a friend sat them at the same table; they wed in 1978, and Jarre has called their bond the one thing in his life he is proud of.
Q 28Which watch brand backed Europe in Concert, Jarre's first tour, in 1993?
Swatch
Swatch. Jarre had already played a show for the company, and he says its boss talked him into designing its first musical alarm watch, built from only two notes.
Q 29Which Danish act joined Jarre on stage at his 2002 concert on a wind farm near Aalborg?
Safri Duo
Safri Duo. The percussion pair played a show meant to celebrate wind power; instead 22 mm of rain turned the site into a swamp, and some fans needed six hours to get away.
Q 30Which whistleblower's voice appears on 'Exit', a track on Jarre's 2016 album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise?
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden. Jarre asked the Guardian's music desk how to reach him, talked with him for 90 minutes over Skype, then flew out to Russia to film him for the live show.