In a small room in the London office of his record label, Jean-Michel Jarre is explaining the exhausting-sounding business of making his new album, which he describes as “a four-year-long initiation journey”. Electronica 1: The Time Machine took so long not only because he insisted on having a different high-profile collaborator for each track, but also because he insisted on meeting each of them in person, rather than swapping sound files over the internet. As it turned out, so many people wanted to work with him that even a 70-minute long, 16-track album couldn’t accommodate them all; a second volume is due next spring.

Critics have always been a bit sniffy about Jarre, ever since he rocked up with his synthesisers and his multi-part instrumental albums at the height of punk. But anyone who doubts his influence over latterday electronic music should have a look at Electronica 1’s tracklisting, which features a startling supporting cast: Dutch EDM maven Armin Van Buuren alongside Pete Townshend and film-maker and soundtrack composer John Carpenter, Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang next to Fuck Buttons, Boys Noize, Air and M83. “All these people have in common two different things,” he says. “One, they have an organic approach to sound. Also, they’re all geeks.”

You could say Electronica 1 is the latest grand gesture in a career packed with grand gestures. Jarre was the first western artist to play live in China, an ostentatious early adopter of cutting-edge technology – his 1981 album Magnetic Fields was the first to use the Fairlight CMI sampler that came to define the sound of pop in the subsequent decade – and the author of Music for Supermarkets, a 1983 album of which only one copy was pressed and sold at auction, apparently as a protest against the music industry “wanting to sell music like toothpaste and yoghurt, not a work of art”.

Jarre lights up the pyramids of Giza in Cairo to usher in the new millenium on 1 January 2000. Photograph: Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images

And then there were the huge, spectacular live shows, which came to define his career in the 80s and 90s. There are few more potent symbols of one kind of late 80s pop excess – what you might call the post-Live Aid desire for grandiosity – than Jarre on a floating stage in the pouring rain in London’s Docklands, abandoning his keytar to play a “laser harp” while wearing what looked like oven gloves.

In person, he’s rather more thoughtful than his reputation as Le Roi of synthesised bombast might suggest. You could probably work that out from his music: as he points out, the blockbusting success of his 1976 breakthrough, Oxygène, tended to obscure what an eerie, melancholy listen much of it was, befitting an album that featured a decaying skull superimposed on Earth on its cover. It’s tempting to say that you can tell he spent the late 60s “being very cerebral and intellectual about the structure of sounds” while studying under musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer: 50 years on, Jarre seems to have an intriguing theory about everything, from how intellectual property should be valued in a world of music streaming and internet piracy (he is president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) to why making electronic music is like cooking (“There is this very tactile, sensual approach to sound,” he says, sounding about as French as it’s possible for a human to sound, “putting your hands in to frequencies, physically manipulating wave-forms with a mouse.”).

Stardust, Jarre’s collaboration with Armin Van Buuren.

The interview progresses via a series of long, fascinating digressions – if I told you the one about why electronic music is more timeless than other genres, it would take up the rest of the article. Suffice to say it variously takes in Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, jukeboxes, Canadian producer Richie Hawtin’s work under the alias Plastikman, the recording of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, Chopin, the invention of both the piano and the Roland TR-808 drum machine and ends with him triumphantly, and not unreasonably, pointing out that, if you heard Electronica 1’s collaborations with Fuck Buttons and the late Edgar Froese, it would be hard for you to work out which featured a twentysomething duo and which a septuagenarian who would die not long afterwards.

Jarre cut an anomalous figure at the start of his career in the mid-60s. A conservatoire-trained classical musician, he attempted to ply his trade as guitarist and vocalist in a garagey Parisian band called the Dustbins – they were, he says, “quite punk” – but was more interested in recording the band’s instruments on to a reel-to-reel tape recorder bequeathed to him by his grandfather, then speeding them up, slowing them down or playing them backwards. His interest in tape recording led him to enroll at Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherche Musicales. He was fascinated by Schaeffer’s belief that “music is not only made of notes or based on arpeggios, but made of sounds”, and fired by the revolutionary spirit of 1968, “in total rebellion with the past”. He poured his energies in to releasing that most pop of artefacts, a 7” single, 1970’s La Cage/Erosmachine. “I thought it was silly that all these schools were being very narrow-minded and ignoring what was going on in the streets. I wanted to create a bridge between experimental music and pop.”

With his then wife, British actor Charlotte Rampling. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Guardian

Even when he achieved his aim with Oxygène – an album that defied one label’s prediction that it wouldn’t sell because “there’s no singer, no drama, all the tracks are 10 minutes long and, on top of that, it’s French” by shifting 15m copies – Jarre seemed at one remove from his peers. The world hardly wanted for continental synth pioneers in the 70s, but Jarre was dashing and glamorous, not adjectives anyone was in a hurry to apply to Vangelis or Florian Schneider from Kraftwerk. He was, and is, very handsome – knocking on 70, he looks about a quarter of a century younger – and had a beautiful, film-star wife, Charlotte Rampling (the couple divorced in 1997).

Most 70s synth pioneers seemed desperate to melt in to the background: Kraftwerk couldn’t wait to send robots onstage instead of performing live; Vangelis immersed himself in a black-painted recording studio named after Jules Verne’s sociopathic undersea adventurer Captain Nemo; Tangerine Dream, as Jarre notes, were given to walking off stage and letting their sequencers play themselves, “as a statement, saying ‘the machine is more important than us’”. Jarre, on the other hand, was more of a rock star. “Coming from the rock scene, I thought this music should be performed, like any other kind of music. But there were problems. It’s not the most sexy thing to stand behind a synthesiser for two hours. The major rock instruments and classical instruments were designed for performance, for sharing the music with an audience, and then later people put microphones on them and recorded them. But for electronic music the opposite was true – they’re designed in laboratories and later we tried to put them on stage.”

Glory by Jean Michel Jarre, featuring M83.

He says he was more interested in “hijacking a place for one night and doing something different, rather than wanting to be a kind of David Bowie or something”. Another of his theories is about why electronic music should be performed outdoors. Either way, the grand spectacle of the record-breaking Jean-Michel Jarre live performance, with its fireworks and laser harps and video projections on the sides of buildings, was born. A million people turned up to see him play at Place de la Concorde in 1979, which made it one of his more understated live shows: 2.5 million saw his performance in La Défense in Paris in 1990; 3.5 million watched his 1997 appearance in Moscow. You can see distinct echoes of the more-is-more aesthetic of these shows in the increasingly preposterous son-et-lumière productions of American EDM raves: like Electronica 1’s cast list, it’s a sign of his influence on current music.

But Jarre is far more equivocal about the huge shows than you might expect. “I feel very privileged to have played China, and the pyramids, all these fantastic places, but it created a kind of smoke curtain between the audience and me as a musician. For me, the concept was an extension of my music and not the reverse, but suddenly I was …” – he searches for the word – “vampirised by lights, lasers and big concerts. I fell in to that excess of the 80s and 90s, this rock’n’roll hysteria. I needed to stop all this and focus on the music.”

At one point, so keen was he to get back to basics, he toured without using a computer, just old synthesisers, played like a classical jazz quartet. “A headache, a nightmare,” he laughs, “but the audience loved it when the old synths went wrong, because it’s human.” Still, he doesn’t think that today’s EDM stars have anything to learn from his experience about not letting spectacle overwhelm their music. “Generation after generation, there is this neverending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.”

I sense we’re heading towards one of his theories, and so it proves. This one concerns nostalgia. “I’m always cautious about this type of slightly reactionary attitude in generation after generation, this silly idea of ‘yesterday was better and tomorrow is worse’. I don’t agree with this. Was the 19th century better? People losing their teeth at 18 years old, no antibiotics, three-quarters of the population starving? We should stop this. These are the great days.”