The year was 1998, and I was settling into hectic flat share life after a stint in the halls of residence at Glasgow University. January can be cold, dark and miserable in the city, but the ray of dappled light that was French electronic duo Air’s laid-back-to-the-point-of-sunbathing debut album, Moon Safari, arrived to dispel the gloom. A huge hit in the UK – as it was in Australia – its blissed-out mellifluence was a salve for soggy souls that felt like a spring breeze wafting cigarette smoke and perfume along Paris’ Rive Gauche.
That imagined olfactory hit became the real deal under the stars on a temperate Melbourne summer’s eve at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl almost 26 years later. Versailles-born buddies Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin performed the seminal record in its entirety as part of ALWAYS LIVE festival, though it was heady notes of grass that flared my nostrils, both that crushed underfoot on the sloping amphitheatre and smoked by those around me swaying to the band’s Korg and vocoder-amplified, shimmering sounds.
The peculiar ticks of an album-driven gig throw out the rule book. Mega-hit first single, ‘Sexy Boy’, arrived second, after a gloriously woo-woo distorted wall of sound version of opening track ‘La Femme d’Argent’, rather than being held back for an encore. Arguably their biggest hit, it’s always been a stylistic outlier, with a much dirtier, dancier baseline. But the combination of chilled opener segueing into pheromone-interloper worked as well here as it does on the album.
When third single ‘All I Need’’s aching dream arrived, the boys deployed vocoder magic via their own vocals in place of US singer-songwriter Beth Hirsch’s guest role on the album. This opening salvo of three fabulous tracks also formed the tricolour of the French flag via the vast three-walled screen wrapping round the stage, projecting trippy star-heavy visuals in white plus a very David Lynchian red and blue.
These incredible visuals carried Godin and Dunckel’s dreamy lyrics into the night sky and beyond, evoking everything from the planetary majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the swirling spirals of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the inescapable burning sun of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The latter felt especially apt given that the enormous success of Moon Safari brought them to his famous filmmaking daughter Sofia’s door, scoring the soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides.
That film’s classic track, ‘Highschool Lover’, popped up in the first of two bonus encores, but not before the band sailed through Moon Safari’s other seminal track, ‘Kelly Watch the Stars’, via a reverent church organ-like intro, before crashing into a crunchier rendition bumped up by guest Louis Delorme, who bounded effortlessly between the old school drums and their electronic equivalents from moment to moment.
‘Talisman’ received a bass-guitar-heavy boost, and there was a fairground whirl on ‘Remember”s James Bond-like theme that spun it into a hallucinogenic reverie, attracting one of the biggest blasts of applause of the evening from a crowd who often appeared rapt on the giant screens flanking the Bowl’s canopy. The tap-tap-tap percussion of ‘You Make it Easy’ swung with fireworks erupting on the video screens, ‘Ce Matin‐là’s synths as rich and creamy in timbre as ever. By the time ‘New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal) and Le voyage de Pénélope’ sailed into the final shores of the album, the crowd were aching for more.
Read: Book review: The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy
And they got plenty of it, including ‘Alone in Kyoto’, used in Sofia Coppola’s drifting souls-led movie Lost in Translation, and a stormy-visuals backed rendition of ravishing ‘Run’, both drawn from Air’s third record, Talkie Walkie. Second album 10 000 Hz Legend threw up heroes like the drum ‘n’ bass driven ‘Don’t Be Light’ before it was left to the frogs’ chorus-like heartbeat pulse of ‘Electronic Performers’ to shimmy us fulfilled into a night considerably warmer than the first time I heard Moon Safari. It’s never felt more gloriously alive.
Air performed Moon Safari at the Sidney Myer Musical Bowl for one night only on 4 December as part of the ALWAYS LIVE Festival, which runs until 8 December 2024.
Images: Australian Musician and Jason Rosewarne @jrosewarne_photography.
