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JEFF WAYNE ’s musical version of The War Of The Worlds is celebrating its 40th birthday. Here, Jeff discusses the endlessly popular show and why he thinks it’s passed the test of time
How does it feel to be celebrating 40 years of The War Of The Worlds?
I’m thrilled because if I go back to the beginning, when I was composing and producing the original double album, I didn’t have a guarantee from my record company that they would even release it. When it did come out eventually, the instant response from the public was an unexpected reward that I don’t think anybody was predicting.
What do you put its enduring appeal down to?
It starts with the story that HG Wells wrote. Not a lot of people know that he didn’t write it as a book; he wrote it under commission from a magazine called Pearson’s. He was commissioned to write an episodic adventure, and the whole idea was you’d write a chapter as a cliffhanger so you’d invite your audience to come back and buy the next edition. Although dressed up as an alien invasion, it is about faith and invasion, and even in the mid-Seventies when I was originally writing and producing it, those themes had prevailed since he wrote it in 1897, and now here I am and it’s probably even more current in the world we live in. It was a dark Victorian tale and I’ve always remained true to what HG Wells wrote because that’s what I fell in love with.
How would you say the story is relevant today?
Wars go back centuries, but I think it’s the way faith has been challenged and the cruelties of the world, and maybe because we have instant news we’re aware of this worldwide. We read about it the moment it happens. The invasion into someone else’s land is not new, but there’s something about the way terrorism has spread around the world and it is about taking someone else’s land and taking control over other people, and in a way that’s what HG Wells was writing about; his Martians were very much an imaginative analogy for evil. It just happens they invaded England with the same idea: to take over a nation and eventually the world.
Do you remember the moment you decided to turn the book into an album?
Yes, I do! My dad (who was my partner on The War Of The Worlds) and I were reading all sorts of books for me as a composer to find something to fall in love with to compose and interpret a great story. I was producing and arranging for David Essex and I was about to go on tour with him. My dad came over the night before to wish me luck and said “oh, by the way, here’s
another book”, and it was The War Of The Worlds. This was around 1974 so reading was commonplace when you had loads of time on the road. I fell in love with it and said this is the one. However, it was very much in copyright. It took us a few months to trace the estate of HG Wells – his son Frank. His agents knew my dad who had been a singer, actor and theatre producer but the real nub of why the rights got sold to us was because here was a father and son team who had fallen in love with this book by his dad.
Can you tell us about those new ingredients?
The main ingredients are some giant screens that reside in the audience. We have a back screen about 100ft x 25ft which has an animated film which runs in sync with the live performance. These screens can now connect into one giant image or they can show five different things at the same time; the dimensions change substantially and the audience will be surrounded by these screens. People who sit the furthest away get the least impact from shows so this is very much geared towards them. We also have a bridge for a sequence called Brave New World – it’s increased in size substantially and instead of coming down on the stage, it lands and turns like an arch. If you’re anywhere in the audience you get a different experience than at a traditional show where you’re looking at the stage. Some of the big bands use performance areas and this is I think right up there. We hope to set some new exciting standards.
How important is it for you to keep developing the show?
For me on a creative level, I’ve always said it’s a living work. And so this production has things that would never even have been considered four years ago when we last toured the arenas. When we started in 2006, we were a six-truck show; this one we’re now at 12. It gives you an idea of how much stuff has been added into the production. And these are giant containers that travel around with us every venue we play. The ingredients in this new one are going to be very exciting from the audience’s point of view.
Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds, starring Jason Donovan Carrie Hope Fletcher and Newton Faulkner is playing at Nottingham’s Motorpoint Arena on December 7. Tickets are priced between £52 and £75.60 and are available from ticketmster.co.uk.