1001 Albums Bonus Round: 1094. Jeff Wayne – The War Of The Worlds (1978)

 

This one, my fifth suggestion for the Seventies, was a strange omission (have I said that for all the others so far?); maybe it was counted too much a musical score or soundtrack to be included, even though it was purely an audio experience for a long time before being retrofitted for stage, and even though there are musical scores for blaxpolitation and Bollywood films featured in the list.

If one takes the idea of an “album” as including the physical artifact as well as the musical corpus, this one more than fits the bill – the vinyl version came with a folio of evocative illustrations – I still recall the visualisation of the Artilleryman’s imaginary underground world, and the image of Parson Nathaniel confronting the Martian war machines based on Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony, or being terrified by Flight of Humanity.

So, too, is it a perfect encapsulation of a concept album, telling an adaptation of HG Wells’ story through instrumentals, song, and the occasional spoken word piece – Richard Burton’s gloriously sonorous voice narrating as The Journalist, encountering David Essex as The Artilleryman, Phil Lynott as Parson Nathaniel, and Julie Covington as Nathaniel’s wife Beth. Also featured as song vocalists are Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues who sings the hit single Forever Autumn (where The Journalist fears that his fiancee Carrie is lost), and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band who sings Thunderchild (where the warship Thunderchild sacrifices herself so that a steamer full of refugees can escape from the Martian war machines, an incident illustrated on the cover of the album).

Side One sees the arrival of the Martians and the mysterious cylinder that lands on Horsell Common before the dreaded heat ray is unleashed, and features the well-known 12-note motif of the Eve Of The War, akin to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth in its iconic simplicity (four bars, three notes apiece).
On Side Two, the Martians have humanity in full flight. The military is in tatters and refugees desperately flee (where the tracks Forever Autumn and Thunderchild turn up), with the Martians ruling England, and maybe elsewhere on Earth, by the end of the first record. 

On Side Three, the Martians have infected Earth with their own flora, the Red Weed. The Journalist encounters a priest, Nathaniel, and his wife, Beth, and they become trapped in a cellar while Martians harvest humanity for their blood. Nathaniel (Lynott) and Beth (Covington) sing a duet, the Spirit Of Man, with Beth trying to raise her husband from the despair of his lost faith. Beth is killed and Nathaniel goes insane from grief before the Journalist has to leave him to his fate. On Side Four, the Journalist eventually escapes, meets the Artilleryman again who has dreams of building humanity anew in an underground realm and taking Earth back with re-purposed war machines, but sees that the Artilleryman too is mad in his own way; his grand project accounts for about five feet of tunnel.

The last section of Side Four sees The Journalist give in to his own grief, deciding to die in "suicide by Martian" and offer himself up to the nearest war machine, only to discover that the invaders have succumbed to infection by Earth’s bacteria. Wayne adds a creepy coda that used to scare the absolute crap out of me as a child, where NASA’s first manned mission to Mars encounters a strange green flare leaving Mars, before the signal goes dead.

The tracks are a mix of synth and real instruments, a mix of instrumental and song, by nature quite theatrical, with repeated theme motifs – there's a motif that suggests the appearance on the scene of a Martian war machine, for example, that becomes very evocative of a looming peril, especially along with the creepy modulated “Ulla!” war cry.

Burton’s voice lends tremendous gravitas to the proceedings, and Wayne wisely allows him to open the album with the chilling prologue completely unaccompanied – the famous strings motif only kicking in once Burton has finished declaiming that “slowly, surely, they drew their plans against us”. Side Three Blues is neatly avoided by being baked in, the deeply depressing "Earth under the Martians" section where the Red Weed creeps across the landscape and Nathanial loses his mind in the claustrophobic cellar.

It doesn’t, I suppose, exist as a step on the evolutionary ladder that is late Seventies music, but as a coherent item that still has cultural significance, it’s great.