Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds - Classic Or Dud?

who is Jeff Wayne anyway?

Richard Burton is fantastic. And there are some really scary synth sounds that used to freak me out as a kid.

Wasn't Jeff Wayne in somethiing like the Moody Blues, there seemed to be a conection.

Dud: Forever Autumn

Dudder: Disco mix

What about Orbital nicking the martians ooooh laaah's for their track called Oooh! though. Genius or tacky?

Richard Burton's narration between Forever Autumn and Thunderchild is the redeeming factor in this work. The timing of the this piece and the picture it paints is moving - like the orignal. Without it, the story would be lost to 70's disco.

Richard Burton
The illustrations (esp the underground one) amazing to an 8 yr old!
The mega scary outro, that would probably still shit me right up.
The Red Weed, thinly disguised stoner rock indeed!
Phil Lynott
Hearing the breaths between the vocodered OOOOOOLAAAAAAAAAA's

Dud -

Justin Hayward
David Essex

Luxuriously appointed gatefold sleeve and booklet for CD featuring proper painted scenes of Martian-related apocalypse and (ick) crows eating Martian guts = dud, presumably

he has it proudly displayed on a shelf in the living room.

OOOOOLAAAAAAA!

Why did I not go to the live concert of this? Apparently they had a martian war machine charging around on the stage.

This is probably the closest thing to disco I like.

http://www.burningsuit.co.uk/images/head-in-hands.jpg

the live show is coming back to town. has anyone been to it? I hear it is AWESOME.

This is of course a very silly record. But saying that, every sound and texture on it works so well and its so beautifully constructed, recorded and mixed that i'd probably much rather listen to this most days than say Dark Side Of The Moon or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

plus it wins for having this sort of thing at the live show:

3-tonne, 35-foot tall Martian Fighting Machine firing new and improved real flame Heat Rays at the audience & scanning them with its bug-like eyes. For the first time, a member of the cast will be incinerated on stage right in front of the audience's eyes!!

Love this unreservedly, despite (or because of) the ridiculousness of the concept and its execution.

Didn't realise that Forever Autumn goes all the way back to 1969, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coF5k3jq1VY

for some reason they adapted this into a real-time strategy computer game in like 1999. i played it once. all i remember was that it had obscenely high system requirements for the time.

When I was in primary school we had a music teacher who played side A of this about six times in separate classes through one of those Sharp upright portable record players. While it was playing she'd pass around the insert (which was missing what 1/3 of the paintings).

Found this thing called ULLAdubULLA a few years ago, basically a load of imaginationless remixes of parts of the album. Really it only serves to illustrate how good the original was.

I recall a youth club leader inflicting this on us 13 yr olds in a minibus back from Wales. I kind of knew that concept albums were a bit lame by then, but this one had a real charm. Drew the line at fucking Supertramp tho.

ha ha, someone will pop up now saying what's wrong with the s-tramp?

I listened to this last night for the first time in ages. Once you get past how silly the whole thing is it's really very absorbing. The music reflects the narrative quite accurately (I love how the musical themes in side B become progressively harsher and more hectic) and the red weed bits sound genuinely alien (until the electric guitar chops in). Phil Lynott as an American priest (WHAT?!) is a ridiculous piece of casting though.

This was probably my first exposure to anything resembling prog (I don't count Pink Floyd singles on FM radio as prog exposure), and probably set me up for my initial surge of prog discovery/exploration/obsession in the '90s.

i've been singing the THE CHANCES OF ANYTHING COMING FROM MARS part all day.

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/1197/tzrvs.jpg

for some reason they adapted this into a real-time strategy computer game in like 1999. i played it once. all i remember was that it had obscenely high system requirements for the time.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, 14 March 2011 22:04 (3 months ago)

I had this game. It ran fine on my stepdad's computer, but it was so hard I could never get past the first stage.

Once you get past how silly the whole thing is it's really very absorbing.

fucking love the original version.

moody blues vs thin lizzy vs david essex vs richard burton vs aliens from mars.

recent revision ?

no desire.

this is airing on WFMU right now, never heard of it

Richard Burton musta needed divorce money

it reminds me of Jesus Christ Superstar and that's mostly not great

I got this album as a gift for Christmas 1978, aged 8. For the next year I think I listened to it on headphones a couple of times a week on average - every note, every nuance is etched into me, I can still call full audio memories effortlessly to mind despite not having listened to it in probably 20 years. Is there some kind of drug or surgery which could help me?
I think I was about 13 or 14 before I realised that "The Heat Ray" was a metaphor for Jo Partridge's playing, rather than some character I had somehow failed to notice.

for the uninitiated

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/82173

I’ve never listened to it but my dad had the LP and I used to look through the artwork because it was so rad.

It fucking rules, in a cheesy and awful way. It has Phil Lynott playing a priest gone mad preaching violence.

What more do you monsters want?

this is airing on WFMU right now, never heard of it

Wow. This was big in the UK.

Jesus Christ Superstar is better tbf but it has its moments

That Lynott song is a highlight iirc

Heat Ray noise is good

The actual title is "Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds". HG Wells' estate must have objected.

but all the words Burton's reading... surely they could've stopped it if they wanted to, or was it 'public domain'

I think it was probably just out of copyright under the old rules

Maybe had been for ages, was the 50s movie authorised?

Was still in copyright at the time:

I wanted to interpret musically, one couldn’t do it without finding out who was in charge of the estate of H.G. Wells. It took us about three months – there was so internet or email in those days – and when we eventually found it it was agents of Frank Wells, who is H.G. Wells’ son and the rights had been left to him. Frank had agents representing The War Of The Worlds and so I presented myself to them explaining what I wanted to do and they sold my dad and I all these rights because I was the first one who had come along who wanted to stay true to what H.G. Wells wrote, which was this very dark Victorian tale.

http://thequietus.com/articles/14162-jeff-wayne-interview-war-of-the-worlds

I see it’s touring again, almost tempted to see if any tickets are available.