Actor Dominic Gerrard hosts an exciting new series that explores the Life and Times of Charles Dickens: his extraordinary novels, who he was as a person, his career as a performer, and his activism. Guests include: Stephen Fry, Miriam Margolyes, Armando Iannucci, Alice Loxton, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Lucinda Hawksley, John Mullan, Pen Vogler, Andrew Davies, Rosie Holt, Bernard Cornwell .... and many more academics, writers, actors, directors and descendants of the great man himself! Along side these interviews there are special Dickens readings from across his works ... Thank you for listening 🔥
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
36:18
Dominic now to Jeff Wayne about the creation of his masterpiece The Musical Version of The War of the Worlds ...
At time of recording this multiplatinum album has sold over 16 million copies worldwide and is currently running as an Immersive Experience in London.
It features searing performances from Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott as the crazed Parson Nathaniel, and David Essex’s swaggering and delusional Artilleryman, with Julie Covington as Beth bringing real humanity into their performance.
While underpinning every scene and driving the story onwards, is the rich, dark, iconic voice of Richard Burton as the narrator.
All Excerpts from "The War of the Worlds" album in this episode have been used with permission from Jeff Wayne Music Ltd
Hi everyone, welcome to part two of my conversation with Jeff Wayne.
SPEAKER_05
The summer sun is fading as the year grows on.
SPEAKER_06
In the years that followed the run of Two Cities, Jeff was now firmly established as a composer in London and during his session work with artists such as Julie Covington, who he had met during Two Cities and was now performing in Godspell, plus the rising star David Essex, the idea of a major project that would combine Jeff's interests in musical theatre, classical music, and rock into an ambitious concept album began to take shape. The War of the Worlds, based on H. G. Wells's novel, was released as a double album on the 9th of June 1978 to huge acclaim. It follows the story of George Herbert, a journalist who watches with concern the sight of green flares from Mars sweeping across the night sky, while the people around him carry on with their daily lives. As these shooting stars begin to crash to Earth, landing as hot cylinders, crowds begin to gather. The sounds of hammering from the craters where these missiles have struck reveal that there are intelligent life forms buried inside. There is scarcely time for the crowds to comprehend this before these creatures emerge from the cylinders and launch a merciless attack. With technology far beyond the scope of humankind, they turned everyone standing in range into fire with a savage heat ray. An invasion has begun. The first part of the album is charged with an energy of fight or flight, with even its quieter moments carrying a tension and suspense. In the second half, once the earth has succumbed to the Martians, it opens up into an expansive, unearthly soundscape, punctuated with jump scares and searing performances from Thin Lizzie's Phil Linot as the crazed Parson Nathaniel and David Essex's swaggering and delusional artilleryman. The album's sleeve notes read like a theatre programme, with musicians and singers listed as cast members. The performances are intense, but always delivered with a positive energy that carries the listener through every moment of trauma and horror. And while there is never anything remotely comic in the playing of the story, if you listen to the studio outtakes, there are frequent moments of people breaking out in fits of laughter, which perhaps gives a jaunty or quirky feeling to the album that engages the listener. And of course, underpinning every scene and driving the story onwards is the rich, dark, iconic voice of Richard Burton as the narrator. There is no doubt in my mind that if Dickens had ever written a progressive rock album, it would have sounded like this. Regardless, there wasn't a chance in hell that I was going to book Jeff Wayne and not talk to him in detail about this album. It's time to jump back into our conversation. Of course, the album starts iconically with Richard Burton, with just a little bit of reverb on his voice, and he's out in the Gulf of Space introducing it to us.
SPEAKER_00
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even consider the possibility of life on other planets, and yet across the Gulf of Space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes. And slowly and surely they drew their plans against us.
SPEAKER_01
Interestingly, I composed a piece of music to accompany those words and recorded it. I was so convinced that it needed the music. When I put the music with Richard's voice, I thought, nah, less is more. His voice is all you need. It's glorious, it's got the emotion, it's exactly as you've just described it. So I chucked out that piece of music. And in a in a way, Dominic, it was like the best of times. It was an opening passage that if we could successfully grab our audience in the theater or on record with Richard's opening voice, I think we were off to a great start.
SPEAKER_06
Yeah, because I think I mean the starkness, the sort of black and white starkness of his voice. And then when the strings come in, I have to say, Jeff, for me, the recording of those strings and the impact of those strings, I think it's probably one of the most effective use of string ensemble in any any album.
SPEAKER_01
Well, thank you again very much for being very kind, but uh I was very proud of it. What I followed, the opening passage by Richard, uh, was just three notes bump bum bum. But I think what gave it its drama and its size is A, I scored it for a 48-piece symphonic string orchestra. Um in music, uh a pedal note is a common note uh that goes through a piece or a passage, and the pedal down at the bottom creates a tension. Hopefully, not like uh running your fingernails down a a blackboard or the screeching of a cat, uh because if I was ever to play just those first three notes, or then when I added chords to it, uh the the difference of including the pedal note is day and night. That's down at the bottom with bass strings, and above it are celly that played a counter rhythm to bum bum bum. The cellis are doing bop bop bop bop. Uh and so you have three elements. You have a three-note tune, the celly doing their rhythm, which is the same note though, as the bass is playing their pedal note. When you put them all together, that's what created what the listener eventually heard. And uh I I have to say that it's I'm sure it's the only time I ever got a tap by the string orchestra with their bows, they tap the music stand, just sort of an acknowledgement was oh, well done. That's that's pretty okay. It's not great, it's just okay.
SPEAKER_06
But as you're composing this, Jeff, and the things like pedal notes, I mean, many listeners won't know what those are intellectually, but they can definitely feel the impact of that low D underneath then the dissonances that are created above it. Um, but then then the drums kick in, and you've got synth brass. The synths are obviously still analogue at this point in the 70s. But you score the synth brass and woodwind like real woodwind instruments, I think.
SPEAKER_01
No, you're quite right, and that was deliberate, right, in that conceptually I was hoping to give the listener a distinction between when the story is being told through the eyes of the Martians and the eyes of humanity. So when it's through the eyes of the Martians, primarily, it's much more electronic and aggressive. Uh electric guitars, and when the story is more through the eyes of humanity, it's much more acoustic and string-oriented. Uh I also didn't want uh to bring in real instruments, uh, not that the band parts weren't real, that they were live musicians, and and the strings. I didn't want to introduce anything else because it would start to sound more symphonic rather than what the listener eventually heard. So I did choose to score exactly as you've said, and that's really well spotted. But the scents are creating, whether they're brass or or woodwinds, less realistic sounds.
SPEAKER_06
But it for me it hits a kind of sweet spot because I feel like if you've done the album ten years later, when we have sampling instruments and you've got FM synthesis, digital synthesizers, where the sounds are kind of nearer to the sound of a real instrument, you would have kind of lost something. There's something about the machine technology of that period in the 70s, I think, where these synths can overheat, can't they? And you have to switch them off for half an hour. You know, yeah, you're not wrong on some of them, anyway, for sure. I've written this down. This is a this is a two-word question, Jeff. Unscrewing cylinder. Yeah. Could you could you tell us a bit about that? Because that that moment, that phrase dung doom doom doom doom doom, where that comes in is so unsettling, isn't it? But that unscrewing sound and and all of that, how did that come about?
SPEAKER_01
The bass lick uh started off life of uh notation that I wrote and scored it for bass guitar, and I was fortunate to be working with one of the great bass guitarists in the world who's played for just about everybody who uh would be recognized as elite in their careers, from the Beatles uh all the way down to me on The War of the Worlds. And his sound, Herbie, Herbie Flowers, I'm talking about, yeah, uh what gave it its sort of quality, I think, was that Herbie in in his career rarely if ever, I'm I'm I'm not even sure if I I've ever asked him whether he ever played with the type of strings that came with the bass guitar that you would purchase. Because he changed the strings to a much thicker uh bass sound, and it gave him his own sound that uh he was credited. So the notes that you just gave a little rendition of, uh spot on, by the way, in the in the notation, uh he played and I gave it to him as a solo, and until he he passed away a year and a half, two years ago now, Herbie. Uh, but he was on every tour pretty much up until his passing, from when we started touring the arenas in 2006. But um he uh started on stage with a spotlight on him, that lick. And uh, I mean it's just a personal moment that we had that when he did, I'd look over to him and sort of bow in his direction, and he gave me a response as well in a carry on into the piece. Now, your question really wasn't about No, no, but we couldn't not mention the the the herbie flowers lit, could we? But uh but the yeah the cylinder, the cylinder there. The cylinder. Now, the cylinder was um something that comes from H. G. Wells' writing and the description of its size, this giant's cylinder embedded on um Horsel Common in Woking, and we learn that suddenly an unsc unscrewing sound is beginning, and it eventually falls off from the top of the lid of the cylinder and and hits the ground with a giant almighty thud. So sound designers, it's now very much a a full industry of sound designers who are brilliant in creating sounds that are not necessarily in the scope of music. But I was doing that just because of what in this case the story was telling me, and I had an idea of it's a metal plate that another brilliant musician, a percussionist, that showed me a metal plate that if you put it into like a bucket of water with a microphone in the bucket, it would pick up reverberations and create a giant type of sound. And I did use it, but it failed when I tried it on the War of the Worlds. I also tried putting the same metal plate in the toilet bowl at the studio that we were recording in London, and that failed equally. The musician, by the way, Ray Ray Cooper, or as we used to call him, son Ray Cooper, because his vibe was always a very positive one, and he's uh like Herbie, a governor uh within his field. He toured a solo tour with Elton John, where just him and Sir Elton uh did a whole tour. So now, moving back though to how did we get the unscrewing of the cylinder, uh, I can uh thank my wife, uh Geraldine, for having two uh saucepans in our kitchen in London. And when I was telling her about it, I said, I'm needing something that creates a a sound, just it just talking out loud about a problem to solve for the recording. And and she actually suggested, Well, have you ever tried scraping uh a couple of saucepans together? And I thought, whoa, well, I've already recorded Herbie's baselink. So I set up the session to go into uh into an overdub room, which was downstairs from Advision, which was the studio that I recorded all but the strings of the War of the Worlds in. And uh I asked my engineer, another Jeff but with a G, could he set up two microphones to the left and right of me? And I will be in the middle holding these two saucepans and scraping them in a circle in time to Herbie's bass guitar. And and the lick just fell into that groove and worked perfectly. And uh, my engineer, when he started to hear what I did, he he got onto the idea uh in spades because he just super amplified before it went into distortion uh the sound. And because the microphones were in stereo, it gave that circular feeling in a very natural way. And by the time the session was over, we had our cylinder unscrewing. What we didn't have was the cylinder landing onto the ground. Well, uh uh my engineer Jeff was very uh helpful, always desirous of trying any loony idea that I had, uh, which came fast and furious at times, and I asked him, would he be prepared to jump from uh a piano stool onto a big fat cushion and try to land in a way that produced a thumping sound, with again microphones on close mic to the cushion, and he went out and did it. We had a tape opera in the control room, so the tape was running, and and Jeff did no more than two or three takes of him landing on this cushion when we came back and listened to it, adding some echo and anything else that might have been available to us in in that day and age, and we had the lid successfully crashing onto the ground, and it was timed out to give the appearance that the lid had is unscrewing, getting louder, and then suddenly kapow.
SPEAKER_00
Two luminous, disc-like eyes appeared above the rim. A huge, rounded bulk, larger than a bear, rose up slowly, hastening like wet leather. Its lipless mouth quivered and slapped, and snake-like tentacles writhed as the clumsy body heaved and pulsated.
SPEAKER_06
And then, of course, the impact after the lid has fallen. And I'm so glad it's the 70s, so you've got these wahwa guitars coming in. Oh, yeah. That's so effective. That's a fantastic sound, isn't it? The sort of wetness of it and the and the gurgly kind of mouthy sort of effect.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, um, again, it's the tools of the day. And um we had a a voice box that was new in those days. Uh Peter Frampton, I think, was the first uh to use it with his guitar, it was a tube that you put into your mouth and mouthed the notes, and uh the guitar would play the notes. So when you played the note and got the air going into the into the tube, the voice box, as it was more glorifyingly uh identified as, uh created what became a very unique sound. Particularly in the War of the Worlds, uhs, which the Martians exclaim whether they're terrorizing the earth or toward the very end of the story in dead London, uh that too came from a voice box.
SPEAKER_00
All five fighting machines exalted, emitting deafening howls which roared like thunder.
SPEAKER_06
And of course, you have the blistering heatway, which which is that fantastic layered overdrive guitar and everything. That's that's scorching its way through the first half of the oven. That sort of murmury does that use any talkbox? How are you creating the texture there of the weed?
SPEAKER_01
Uh no voice box whatsoever. The uh it's largely keyboard synths, um a virtuoso piano part that at the time um a musician named Paul Hart, a brilliant uh keyboardist.
SPEAKER_00
Next day, the dawn was a brilliant fiery red, and I wandered through the weird and lurid landscape. Of another planet. While the vegetation which gives Mars its red appearance had taken root on Earth. As man had succumbed to the Martians, so our land now succumbed to the red weed.
SPEAKER_01
While I'm okay to compose and to play certain things on the piano, I wasn't a jazzer and I didn't try to be. So Paul came in just for the red weed. He had the chords and he had certain notes that gave an idea of the shape. We did a lot of wild recordings. He he appeared with the band as well, and I was conducting this piece because there was no real tempo. It was I I conducted it very freely. And then after the band left, he did further overdubs of these piano phrases that gave a lot of freedom and uh the beauty of a a grand piano. But the rest of it was either uh synthesizers or my symphonic string orchestra. Uh and that was the lineup. Th there is uh Chris plays a guitar phrase uh that goes against the strings, but it's all essentially musicians, no special devices used uh on that composition.
SPEAKER_06
You know the thing you were saying at the beginning about you had music score to go under Richard Burton's opening uh speech, which you cut. The use of the heartbeat comes in, but the fact that the heartbeat doesn't start and then go for a while, it comes in for a few pulses and then stops. Which I think is so effective, the way because it's a real shock for the listener to go, what's that person just seen, or what's just happened to stop the heart from beating in that moment.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, again, it's great observation. Um yeah, these were intentions. Yeah. Uh Act one is all about the drive and the conquest of the earth. The last words you hear from our journalist is the earth belonged to the Martians. Now flip to the second half, which is very, very much like H.G. wrote his story. It was divided into two books. Book one is called The Coming of the Martians. That's what I gave an overview title to album one. Album two is like his second half of his novel, The Earth Under the Martians. And I felt if I want to do anything to create a mood change, it's to distinguish between all the high-tempo and aggressive sounds that we're hearing in act one or album one, uh, it would be how we start act two, and rarely do we leave uh the mood that the second half represents. So while it's hopefully otherworldly with the red weed, it's very calm, it has a peacefulness to it, but it's what HT created, uh a deadly uh but beautiful weed. And what I wanted, the challenge of writing uh an entire theme written in two separate keys, uh which is what it came out to be. It's it's a grander version to the petal note, uh, but it did have some pedal notes as well in the red weed. So I composed the largest part of the red weed in two separate keys. But there were some common notes and not common notes in that thematic section where it is written in two keys.
SPEAKER_06
Yeah, yeah, I think you've got G major in one half and B major in the other, haven't you? Which to musical listeners will understand that's a real that's a real clash to have.
SPEAKER_01
Well, you're spot on, but my godness, where are you getting all this information from? I didn't say it because I'm a musician as well. You put in the time, thank you. And you're right. It's uh no sorry, if you take a a piano and look at middle C, everything from middle C down was written in the key of G, and everything above middle C was written in the key of B. So you have common notes and you have uh not common notes.
SPEAKER_06
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And it's a very slow tempo because the red weed creeps, it crawls, it smothers everything in its path.
SPEAKER_06
Jeff, this has been so wonderful. I just wondered if I could very quickly highlight a couple of the performances on this side. You've got obviously Phil Liner as the parson. An extraordinary performance there, isn't there, I think. Just beyond anything I had hoped for.
SPEAKER_03
I saw the church burst into flame. Are you all right?
SPEAKER_04
Don't touch me!
SPEAKER_03
But it's me, Beth! Your wife.
SPEAKER_04
No, you're one of them! A devil!
SPEAKER_03
He's delirious.
SPEAKER_04
Lies! I saw the devil sign!
SPEAKER_01
I knew the type of voice I was hoping would play Parson Nathaniel. And uh I was a big fan of Vin Lizzie's.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
So I already knew Phil's voice, and he had just in his natural voice, that sound that the song uh which is a duet that he sings with uh his wife Beth called The Spirit of Man. But there's also acting that the parson had to do in it to be convincing. And it just happened that I had heard again, this just comes back to being a fan of Thin Lizzie, a song called Fool's Gold that Thin Lizzie uh recorded, and Phil wrote uh and sang on it, but the song actually opens up with something like fifteen seconds plus or minus, where he's just talking dramatically. And when I heard that, or it reminded me, now I'm thinking of who could play Parson Nathaniel, and it just to me solidified that he could do both sing and act.
SPEAKER_04
Now darkness has descended on our land, and all your prayers cannot save us Black Fools. We've let the devil take command of the souls, let God get us.
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, the rub of the green, uh just good luck, whatever you want to call it. It got to Phil the idea, and he liked it. And he came into the studio in London, Advision, where I had a good quality demo for him to listen to for, well, anything to do with the War of the Wars, but he was there to hear the spirit of man, and he loved the idea and he came on board immediately.
unknown
Wow.
SPEAKER_06
Yeah, I mean, what I love about his performance is it raises the tempo of that second act, but then David Essex, your friend and collaborator, he comes in and ramps it up another another level again.
SPEAKER_05
Take a look around you at the world we've come to know. Does it seem to be much more than a crazy sucker's show?
SPEAKER_06
I've written three words here, Jeff, all over again.
SPEAKER_05
We'll start. We'll start with the city.
SPEAKER_01
And the lyricist on that was Gary Osborne, who was somebody I had worked with for some years previous to the War of the Worlds. And uh David was very much a cheeky chappie who gave the character of the artilleryman uh something that was uh everything and more that I dreamed, uh, and as did my dad uh and other members of our family, a characterization that was just glorious.
SPEAKER_05
I'm not trying to tell you what to be. Oh no, oh no, not me. But if mankind is to survive, the people left alive, they're gonna have to build this world and you and it's going to have to start with me and you! Yes!
SPEAKER_01
You know, I was so fortunate with the entire cast that came on board because A, they had to believe in a sort of um project that didn't fit into anything really around in those days. It was the height of the disco revolution, and punk was the the revolutionary uh music of the day, uh, with all its anger and angst. And there I was coming out with a double album, continuous play, no cuts anywhere, uh, not even a you know a four-minute single or less uh to be heard, uh, with a Welsh actor telling us the story of his survival of this Martian invasion, having survived six years earlier, and he's recounting his story to his newspaper. It fit nowhere, except it seemed to fit uh when it did come out and was accepted by the public, the media, and it it was a uh a game-changing moment in my career for sure.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Uh but without that cast, the brilliant musicians that played on it, they all contributed to interpreting everything that I had composed and produced, everything that uh the lyrics were saying, and everything that um the acting demanded.
SPEAKER_06
Jeff, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you about all this.
SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much, Dominic. Uh I'm I'm thrilled to have spoken with you, but not only because of Two Cities and my work with my dad on the musical, but also your knowledge of the War of the Worlds. That was uh an unexpected bonus. So thank you so much for that.
SPEAKER_06
To play us out now. One of my favorite moments from the album. The opening section of Dead London, where plaintiff synths are accompanied by drifting harmonics on a tremolo guitar.
