Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical version of War Of The Worlds was one of the most surprising success stories of the late 70s. In 2007, the man behind it looked back on his extra-terrestrial masterpiece.
Jeff Wayne’s house is bigger and better than Ozzy Osbourne’s. As the Classic Rock Trabant trundles to the end of a sweeping gravel drive somewhere in deepest Hertfordshire, we are confronted by a sprawling mansion that makes the Double-O’s look like a bijou Barratt showhouse. Plainly, there is plenty of gold in them thar Martian hills.
When Wayne released his musical interpretation of HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds in 1978, the lavishly packaged double vinyl album was an instant success. To date, on the back of that haunting ‘wee-ooo, wee-ooo’ theme and songs of the calibre of The Eve Of The War and Forever Autumn, it has sold 15 million copies worldwide. Wayne has since turned TWOTW into a awe-inspiring stage spectacle, complete with giant Martian fighting machine, state-of-the-art CGI (computer-generated imagery) graphics, a huge orchestra and an impressive cast of guest vocalists.
Jeff Wayne (top right) with War Of The Worlds narrator Richard Burton (bottom left) (Image credit: Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
“When I first came up with idea of doing TWOTW, people said to me: ‘Are you bonkers?’” laughs the genial composer, who was born in Queens, New York, and has spent most of his adult life in Britain. “In the middle of the punk and disco revolution, I’m coming up with a 96-minute continuous work telling the story of a Martian invasion of Earth – narrated by Richard Burton and featuring artists such as Justin Hayward [Moody Blues], Phil Lynott and Julie Covington. It does sound kind of nuts, doesn’t it?”
Prior to TWOTW, Wayne had made his name as David Essex’s musical director, pioneering an über-cool glitter-rock sound (most notably on Essex’s seminal Rock On album) that is still ground-breaking today. With Essex raking in serious dosh for his label CBS, Wayne approached the company about the WOTW project. CBS agreed to fund it to the tune of £70,000. It ended up costing a quarter of a million.
“The rest was my life savings,” Wayne sighs. “My wife said: ‘What’s Plan B if this doesn’t succeed?’ There wasn’t one. CBS weren’t even obliged to release it.”
What initially attracted Wayne to Wells’s novel?
“First and foremost it’s a good yarn,” he replies. “Wells was really writing about the tentacles of the British Empire spreading, and in terms of relevance today there are still nations invading other nations.”
TWOTW has been part of Wayne’s life for 30 long years. Isn’t he bored with it by now?
“I’ve done plenty of things in between, the most notable of which was a [1992] concept album about the life of Spartacus, the Roman gladiator. I also helped launch Catherine Zeta Jones’s musical career. My next work is based on a Jack London story set in the Alaskan gold rush. It wasn’t really until 2005, when we decided to relaunch TWOTW, that it became a major part of my life again. It grew very quickly from a one-off concert rendition at London’s Royal Albert Hall to a fully fledged arena tour.”
Jeff Wayne in 2007 (Image credit: Patrick Riviere/Getty Images)
When Wayne first took TWOTW out on the road there was a
lot of focus on ‘the Richard Burton effect’ – a giant talking head suspended above the stage. “I’d be the first to admit that the technology wasn’t perfect,” Wayne admits. “The lip-synching was less than ideal and the sculpture was rather unwieldy. For our current run of shows we’re using a proper three-dimensional hologram to represent Burton; it’s never been done before in live entertainment. People will certainly see a major improvement.”
Despite what he’s written about, Wayne has never encountered a real-life Martian. What are the odds on the possibility of extraterrestrial life? Are they still a million to one?
“Well,” he considers, “I don’t believe more than science tells us. In the past couple of years there’s been evidence that there’s some sort of life on Mars. Let’s see where that takes us. It’s presumptuous for us to believe that we’re the only ones out there, that’s true, but let’s see proof.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 114 (December 2007)
