Browsing blu-rays in HMV’s flagship store in London’s Oxford Street, I found myself unable to concentrate on what special edition re-release I wanted this time around, leaving half an hour later empty-handed and with a headache.
While inside, the store’s speakers were playing an intense section of the immensely popular 1978 prog rock album “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds”, from the emergence of the spidery Martian creatures and their heat rays, with driving bass lines and Phil Lynott’s vocoded call of “Ulla!”, through Justin Hayward’s rendition of the love song “Forever Autumn”, the album’s sole cover, mixed seamlessly into the story, to the sinking of the iron-clad warship HMS Thunder Child by the Martians.
I presume the 95-minute album was played in full, but it was heavy going for a Saturday afternoon in a busy store. However, I made sure to listen to it in full, something I had never done before, despite my family always owning at least two copies of it, my parents seeing a live performance of it, and even my travelling to Woking, where the story is set, to see Michael Condron’s Martian Tripod sculpture, identifying it more with the album cover than the description in H.G. Wells’ original novel. My family has always had at least two copies of the original double vinyl release, with gatefold sleeve and booklet of art by John Pasche to accompany the music - it is pretty much my introduction to what an “album” is.
The opening track, “The Eve of The War”, and “Forever Autumn” were released as singles, and a “Highlights from...” album cuts the length in half, but listening to Jeff Wayne’s development of leitmotifs is something I should have done earlier, distilling the essence of Walls’s story into an immersive experience, guided by Richard Burton’s narration as “The Journalist” (recorded in California before he began shooting the film “Exorcist II: The Heretic”).
Progressive rock is named through its aspiration to art through more elaborate composition and arrangement of music and lyrics, taking in other genres. I initially thought that, in this case, Rick Wakeman had walked so that Jeff Wayne could run, through Wakeman’s albums like “The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table” in 1975, and the previous year’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, a forty-minute orchestral adaptation narrated by David Hemmings. However, Wayne had already composed the score for a West End musical adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities” before entering commercial song and ad jingle writing.
Now I have listened to it, something that made me screw up my face was the track “Brave New World”, where David Essex, as the Artilleryman, proposes that humanity can live underground, under the noses of the Martians: “We'll send scouting parties to collect books and stuff, and men like you'll teach the kids not poems and rubbish – science, so we can get everything working.” Fortunately, us art-lovers have Burton’s narration of the Artilleryman unveiling his tunnel, “scarcely ten yards long, that had taken him a week to dig. I could have dug that much in a day, and I suddenly had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers...” How fortunate for humanity that the Martians caught a cold.
Writing this has led me to discover that “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of Spartacus” exists, an album released in 1992 that stars Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, seemingly eclipsed by the enduring success of Wayne’s previous work. I may have to listen to it too.
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