I WENT to a rave last week. The music was supplied by a slightly mad French pensioner. Welcome to 40 years of Jean-Michel Jarre.

If you were vaguely interested in avant-garde/ambient music, and had an ear for the relatively new-fangled synthesiser sound, you’ll have been impressed by JMJ’s Oxygene album, boldly announcing the Frenchman’s arrival into the big time, late in 1976.

Spooky skull-in-a-peeling-planet-earth cover and all, this gently pulsing masterpiece set him off on a career involving numerous awards, spectacular and record-breakingly vast outdoor concerts in unusual places and more than 20 albums.

The most recent of these, Electronica 1 & 2, saw him collaborate with an impressive who’s-who of current and veteran musicians, and his first visit to the Top 10 album chart in a quarter of a century.

He’s not exactly been growing old gracefully, either. Some of these recent tracks are firmly in the techno/dance/rave category, with relentless beats and decidedly up-tempo pace.

I headed up to Glasgow last week to catch him on tour. To set the scene on what was to come, the support act was a DJ/producer, who delivered a 30-minute set of trippy, pulsing, house-y music that baffled the people in the row behind me. I can confirm this by the fact that they spent the entirety shouting at each other about how it wasn’t music, but just some guy with a Macbook.

I didn’t hear them once Jarre started. Considering he’s no poulet de printemps, the sound coming from the array of speakers was decidedly modern, and his bank of synths was accompanied by two other musicians playing percussion, additional keyboards, vocoders and some other stuff I’d probably need an electronics degree to describe.

Amazing curtains of LED lights could one second be a screen displaying dazzling computer-generated graphics and images when on, or see-through when off. They also moved around, parted and came together in front of, and behind, the musicians.

It wouldn’t be a Jarre show without lasers, and they painted a stunning picture through the dry-ice-cloud filled SECC. There was even his signature laser harp, where breaking a beam creates a note.

A heavy (in all senses of the word) number, with video on the LED curtain of Edward Snowdon, put the frighteners on the crowd with its dark message about privacy in the modern era, while the beats attempted to crush your skull.

The audience loved it all too – I saw the sort of waved-hand gestures I associate with rave culture and they were of a wide range of ages, showing just how well Jarre has continually kept in touch with, and influenced, other artists.

He even played a track from the forthcoming Oxygene 3 album, which will be released 40 years to the day the original came out.

Pumping your fist in the air in a crowded room with lasers flashing above your head. Not bad for a 68-year-old. Him, not me. I’m too old for that sort of thing.