e were promised jetpacks. Instead, gen X had neoliberalism, the new world order and pre-millennium tension. To soothe it, we got Air’s debut Moon Safari, the 1998 space-age bachelor pad album that offered a nostalgic passport back to a future that never materialised in quite the way we expected. Immediately, Air were everywhere – not in our faces, but part of our very atmosphere: in shopping malls, on soundtracks, in every cafe and lounge.
Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Inevitably, Moon Safari dwarfed everything the duo has produced since, and Air haven’t made an album since 2012’s brief sojourn Le voyage dans la lune , the title of which suggested they knew they would never escape the shadow of their debut. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, they’ve leaned, playing the album in its entirety and in order, plus an extra set’s worth of songs from their half-dozen albums.This weekend, as part of Vivid, it was Sydney’s turn.
It was all over too quickly: the last note of Le Voyage de Pénélope disappeared like a ship over the horizon, and most of the Opera House was on its feet. It was a fine spectacle, too: the three musicians dressed in dazzling white, backed by a light show as elegantly designed and in sync with the music’s themes as the original album cover.The second set that followed was a metaphor for the rest of Air’s career: perfectly fine, and just a little redundant.
For their encore, Air gave us Electronic Performers, from their album 10 000 Hz Legend: “Riding on magnetic waves / We search new programs for your pleasure.” But Godin and Dunckel are not convincing robots, like Kraftwerk. If they were, they might have kept on making variations of Moon Safari for ever. Had they done so, the otherworldly charm of the original wouldn’t have maintained its strange fascination.