In 1998 one album soundtracked a generation’s shift from young ravers to (semi) responsible adults. Moon Safari by Air evoked a glamorous imaginary world, its blend of space-age atmosphere, easy-listening comfort and lank-haired hippy balladry so beautifully melodic, so effortlessly transporting, that it kick-started a trend for mid-century modern furniture, minimalist architecture, pretending to understand situationism and other things associated with Sixties/Seventies retro-futurist optimism. And it came from two clever Frenchmen who thought they were simply indulging a childhood ambition of making an album before entering the rather more sombre worlds of mathematics and architecture.
“When we were at school we had a band, like so many other teenagers,” says Nicolas Godin, who was studying architecture in Versailles when he convinced his former classmate Jean-Benoît
