UUUUUH-LAAAA! Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds: The Amazing Prog-Rock Acid-Trip That No One’s Ever Heard Of

Still busy on the novel editing this month, so instead of short or flash fiction, it’s more reviews! Because who doesn’t love the 70’s?

 

In the last years of the twentieth century, a time we look back on with fondness and nostalgia and just a slight confusion over how it went horribly wrong (is that just me?) there was a man called Jeff Wayne. Wayne and his buddies were a bunch of dreamers and thinkers in pre-Thatcher England who were riding the purple-haze wave of 70’s rock. And somehow, somewhere, one of them asked:
 

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we did a psychedelic concept album, based on H.G. Wells?”

In any other decade, the answer would have been “give me the bong, you’ve had enough, Jeff.” (The idea was actually suggested by Jeff’s dad, but I imagine the response would’ve been the same.) And in any other decade a silly, fun idea like this would have met with crushing failure. But this was 1978, and the world was inundated with tie-die extravagance, bell bottoms and the wishful artistic idealism of the sixties, which hadn’t completely congealed. So, like a bunch of absolute madmen, Jeff and his buddies went and actually made the album.

Let me give you a taste of its pure, flawless camp.

 How crazy is this? It’s literally just a guy (the excellent Richard Burton, who offered his services after a personal letter from Wayne) grimly reciting lines from the original “alien invasion” book itself. Just when you think maybe you accidentally popped in a book-on-tape rather than a masterpiece of alt-pop, WHAM, they whack you over the head with orchestral silliness! And then there’s the absurdly fun sound effect that goes “P’TCHOOoooo!” as the Martians fire their canisters towards Earth. It's beautiful.

Also hilarious. Are you laughing yet? Good. Laugh now, Earthlings… Laugh while you still can. Because the worst is yet to come. Oh, yes, Earth will have its reckoning. Soon...

In a concept-album tradition, the story jumps directly to the next phase of the story: the Martian arrival, on idyllic Horsell Common. The first track wraps with an Elysian vision of rumbling trains, quiet evening bustle, and general British well-to-do-ness. One of my favorite things about this album is how perfectly it skewers the comfortable homeland atmosphere of Britain: shows like Downton Abbey would have us believe old-timey Victorian Britain was a garden paradise, filled with mincing earls and fancy hats. The reality, of course, was a massively xenophobic empire that ruled the seas with an iron grip for over a century. The insidious attack of the Martians is a sort of “karmic rebound” that Wayne plays with masterfully. Let’s get our first glimpse of these squamous invaders:

Damn! Things are getting real. From the Darth Vader-esque sound effects to the startling, unnerving bleeps and bloops of the synthesizer, we immediately get the sense that Something Wicked has arrived. The Martians don’t speak, or try to communicate: they follow the grim pattern of Wells’ original vision, mercilessly exterminating a band of peacemakers who try to welcome them. These guys don’t come in peace. It’s funny to note how this idea of the merciless invader played with Britain’s fears at the time: for a nation so secure, so comfortably on top of the world, they were awfully paranoid about getting invaded. Wells’ book was immensely popular and to this day carries weird, xenophobic undercurrents: the Bad Other Species is coming! They’re going to ruin your way of life! Watch out! “Hide your kids, hide yo’ wives!” If this sounds a bit Trumpy to you, it’s because it is—Wells was focused on the possibility that the new discoveries of the 20^th century would be grim and horrifying, but his book’s popularity is due to that cow-like fear of the Outsider. The same unreasoning fear which spawned Brexit, and caused the same countries that survived WW2 to reject immigrants fleeing murderous regimes. There are layers to this, and we won’t get into them here… because the Tripods have arrived, and nothing can save you now anyway. 

AHHH! Holy fucking shit, dudes!

The musical cues are so on-point here you can practically see the gleaming metal monsters stomping over Britain’s countryside, demolishing buildings, melting people to ash with their heat-rays and generally acting Big, Scary and Alien. This is the money shot, the moment that establishes how England gets outstripped by alien technology. The military makes a stand against the Martians, and naturally gets their shit slapped. “Bows and arrows against the lightning,” as our Artillery-Man says. It’s a madhouse out there! Run for your lives!!!

Through it all, excellent synthesizer music warbles and trills, swoops and undulates. I’m not much of a music snob, but I know synth music hasn’t been popular since Wayne’s heyday—the only exception being ‘arthouse’ movie soundtracks like Drive or ‘retro’ appeal in Stranger Things. But here, it’s hard to imagine any sound that would so effectively capture both the cheesy tone of the album itself, and the giddy mad terror of a real extraterrestrial attack. This sheer attention to detail calls to mind the famous radio play, where Orson Welles (no relation) successfully convinced most of urban America that the Martians were here to kill them. You can laugh, and shrug off the bleeping and blooping and the zany laser-blasts, but at its heart this scene is serious: people are dying, roasted to death or crushed by the Martians, who stride over it all in their god-like machines with all the callous disinterest of a farmer spraying crops. It’s chilling.

I’m tempted to compare it to drone warfare—the Young Artilleryman, who teams up with Burton’s narrator, has a bad dose of PTSD going on. But there are plenty of analyses of Wells’ work in the context of modern warfare. You can Google ‘em. Instead of soapboxing, I have just one thing to say:

Straight from the track, this is our first exposure to the deeply unsettling, yet comically over-the-top Martian war cry, a noise that makes your eyes bug out and makes you ask “Are these guys serious?” Yes. Yes, they are. And the line gets callbacks throughout the album, so get used to it. Wayne’s interpretation of “UUUH-LAAA” is not up for scholarly debate, but it seems like the Martian equivalent of an Inception-blare, to frighten humans and scatter them for slaughter. It’s much more silly in the book, as the tepid “Ulla-Ulla!” war cry. Wayne and Spielberg rightly thought it could be much creepier, if done properly.

But enough of that—the war for Earth has begun. Let’s move our needle over to the next dose of eargasm.

Yeah, uh… What?

There’s a shift in tone here. “Forever Autumn” derails the earlier action, but it also showcases the variety of music Wayne and his pals have mastered. We go from blaring, stomping, murdering Fighting-Machines to the depiction of mankind fleeing the Martians, accompanied by voiceovers and painfully 70’s vocals and strings. It’s like “Simon and Garfunkel Does the Apocalypse.”

To sum up: The Narrator is riding to the rescue of his bride, the distant and unfortunately song-less Carrie. Carrie is one of several characters who don’t exist in the original novel, and in the album she seems to be added just to give the Narrator motivation to run around like a moron looking for her. Thankfully the songwriters didn’t “fridge” her for the sake of drama, but she only gets one scene and that’s it—poof. She’s out of the story. Kind of a bummer when she’s the Narrator’s ENTIRE motivation for going to London, but whatever.

Anyway, I feel like this track is underrated. Rumor has it that the refrain is actually a Lego advertisement jingle, which Wayne put into the album because Lego rejected it. If that’s true, it does explain the tonal shift, and the “purple” lyrics. “Like the sun through the trees, you came to love me”? Really? How exactly does the sun come through trees to ‘love’ anyone? I’m pretty sure it comes through the trees to cook us with cosmic UV rays, but sure, fine. Every track can’t be a winner—and I challenge you not to start humming “Forever Autumn” weeks after listening to it. It’s an ear-worm, just as insidious as a Martian tentacle.

Moving on, we come to the gangbuster track, the one that will make you pump your fist despite the absolute balls-to-the-wall silliness. Welcome, my shell-shocked friends, to “Thunderchild.”

Below is an accurate depiction of my face, the first time I heard this song:

"FUCK MARS!!"

Excuse me while I set this as my desktop wallpaper, phone screen and screensaver, and lip-sync "FAREWELL, THUNDER-CHIIIILD!" on repeat.

Unfortunately, "Thunder-Child" is the last really intense track the album has to offer. After this point, we are treated to the creepy but very slow-paced onslaught of the Martian terraforming plant, a real thing from the novel. It’s very trippy and surreal, but not exactly a masterpiece—and it gets a “part 2,” likely because Wayne ran out of material while making the album. Truth be told, there is not a lot of narrative substance to “War of the Worlds.” It’s a very straightforward story, told in crisp journalistic fashion. The aliens come, they conquer, they are defeated. Which is where we get tracks like this:

Woof. That’s a rough listen, my friends. Not just for the repetitive lyrics, the over-acting from our Parson (the excellent Phil Lynott, given nothing much to do here, 'cept bitch about Satan) and the lack of ANYTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENING in this track’s narrative. Let me break down the song's theological debate for you:

• The Parson, a character established in the album, is wounded by Martians but alive. His wife comes to say hi. The Parson tells her to bugger off, because she’s a Martian possessed by the Devil… or something.
•  Beth, the parson’s wife, tells him to stop being an idiot—these are Martians, not demons.
•  The Parson is all like “Bro! These be demons, bro. I’m telling you bro. There’s nothing left to live for, we’re done. Game over, man. Game over!”
• Beth disagrees. Rinse and repeat until a cylinder falls on the cast, conveniently killing her so the argument can end. (Sorry, Beth!) 

The “argument” they have is bare-bones, too: it’s made of sweeping statements about Mankind™ and the Spirit of Man™ that don’t really fit in the mouths of the characters. We’ve gone from subtle allegories of xenophobia and broken faith, to LITERAL actual xenophobia and broken faith, and it doesn’t really work. But the performances are passionate, and the music is fairly catchy, which is the best you can ask from a clunky sermon on the evils of humanity. Also, the track gives us badass album art like this:

Tell me you don't want that as a huge poster in your house. I dare you.

This brings us to the lackluster conclusion of the album. Before the second disc wraps up, we are treated to the delusions of the Young Artilleryman, which are… well, a lot of fun, actually.

I love the Young Artilleryman. He’s a great character, and unlike Carrie, the Parson and poor squashed Beth, they actually squeeze a character arc out of him, in this number. He’s gone from a shattered victim of the Martian advance, to a confident (if deluded) one-man rebellion force. This guy makes the cast of Rogue One all look like pansies. “I’m gonna dig a global tunnel network, with ONE shovel! FUCK Martians! Woop woop!”

Good stuff. Aaand then we are sort of rushed to the album’s conclusion by “Dead London,” a spooky but mostly flat track where the Narrator gives up on life after he’s successfully escaped the Martians like, a bajillion times. He hurls himself at the feet of a Fighting Machine, and… Nothing. The Martians are dead, killed in the classic Wells conclusion where they forgot to account for a little something called "bacteria."

(Jesus, Jeff! Do we need to talk about something?)

Which, to me, is like… Okay, maybe they mastered space flight without learning microbiology. Somehow. But it’s still a dud of an ending, redeemed only by the eerie “UUUH-LAAA” refrains, which slowly fade into nothing as the song goes. For the first time, you feel pity for the Martians—they’re dying one by one in their fabulous fighting-machines, victims of the same kind of indiscriminate pain they visited on Earthlings. It’s poetic justice, but it's not exactly a rousing conclusion.

After that, we get a silly epilogue where Wayne tells us NASA’s future adventures to Mars will have a nasty end… Spoilers, they totally find Martians. Science, you have Gone Too Far! Stahp, Science! Cease all progress immediately!! Et cetera.

Well, that’s the album. Incredibly goofy, skillfully made but definitely a relic of its time. Full of galumphing statements about mankind, subtle but eventually over-wrought drama, and lots of cheesy sound effects. And…

It was a hit! It’s almost completely unknown in America, because we can’t have nice things, but in England the goofy bug-eyed tripod from the album cover is a cultural staple. Live shows of the album have been going on for decades. There was a recent techno remix with Liam Neeson. Yes, Liam Neeson, the dad from Taken, calmly narrating Martian attacks. You gotta check it out, it’s hilarious—but not nearly as good as the original. 

The fact that Neeson was even on board should tell you how popular this thing is, in Britain. As recently as 2016, the album was converted to a stage play in London, which I absolutely have to find a cast recording of. It looks great—lots of gears, steam and red lights, and it’s probably just as silly as the album. If you can find it streaming somewhere, let me know. Of course, the play's greasy undertone of xenophobia is present, and noted in the article. The message about scary monsters from another world fleeing their dying planet, to take our resources, has sad parallels in British politics. But hey, it’s got a giant stompy tripod, which walks all over the stage blasting people! That sounds pretty cool. Better than the live-shows put on by Wayne himself, which honestly look like something your uncle who never came down from his high in 1978 might put on, with no understanding of how quickly CGI starts to look 'dated.' Compared to the brief, visionary design of the album, the live-show is pretty tame. At least they have a real orchestra.

But altogether, the album is a crazy, irreverent homage to both Victorian literature and the sheer, creative insanity of the seventies. If I had to salvage a single piece of art from that rotten decade, it would be the music. You wanna know why? I’ll tell you why:

 “UUUH-LAHHH!” That’s why. Any questions? I didn’t think so.

Watch the skies, my friends.