Post by nervouspete on Nov 22, 2006 18:29:23 GMT
Just something I found on 'Fist of Fun's' Stewart Lee's website, where he reviews lots of stuff and writes articles, when not coming up with new top comedy ideas. It's an interview and article on Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds, and is quite interesting. Lee's excellent site is here stewartlee.co.uk/main.html, but for the lazy I've copied and pasted...
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS – SUNDAY TIMES – MARCH 2006
Three decades after its initial release, the former advertising jingle writer Jeff Wayne wants to take his era-defining concept album adaptation of HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds on the road. The live version of the thirteen-million selling 1978 classic is to be a mixture of stadium rock show and musical theatre, two simplistic forms of large scale live art not renowned for their ability to communicate the kind of intellectually slippery knowledge embodied by Wells’ book. Today, most people’s idea of the Victorian science-fiction classic is second or third hand, and takes the shape of the iconic images of Martian Tripod fighting machines, handed down through often cavalier cinema adaptations. But The War Of The Worlds is not so much a novel, as a meditation on the era of Empire, with supporting dramatic evidence. Civilisation’s strengths and weaknesses are exposed as it is put under pressure by seemingly unstoppable alien colonists.
Though music fans of a certain age may wrongly remember Wayne’s progressive rock folly as a fabulously overblown piece of kitsch, where Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott did battle with Martian invaders in a duet with Julie Covington, and David Essex argued with Richard Burton about a Nietzschean notion of mankind’s manifest destiny, it was in fact not insensible to the peculiar strengths of Wells’ original. Abetted by various big names of the day that Punk was about to consign to oblivion, Wayne attempted to render Wells’ terrifying vision as best he could. And he pulled it off. The War Of The Worlds album is sincere in its intentions, genuinely gripping, and ceaselessly inventive, given the technological limitations of the time. Unlike Ben Elton’s Queen musical, Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds was not performed ironically or in inverted commas by its participants, as if in some pre-emptive act of damage limitation. Everyone gave their all. And you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the Justin Hayward’s Forever Autumn, the journalist character’s lament for his lost love, even thought it began life as a Lego commercial.
At 62, Jeff Wayne, also an ex-tennis pro, exudes a healthy glow. And he loves HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds. “There’s no doubt that when I approached it my dream was to write honestly and passionately. What made me want to attempt making the album wasn’t the sci-fi ‘shoot ‘em up and knock ‘em down ‘ part of it, but the fact that HG was writing about Martians, not as some freaky aliens, but as an analogy for good and evil. He was criticising the British Empire, which at the time was spreading its tentacles around the world. It resonates today because it doesn’t matter which side of the coin of democracy or religion you are on, it’s all about conquering or being conquered. That’s what suckered me into HG Wells.” Wayne’s enthusiasm drove the project along. “Two thirds of the money in the album was my life savings so I did it my way. This was going to be out there on its own, whether it was good bad or indifferent.” Wayne’s stepmother Doreen Wayne, author of the 1968 romantic best-seller Love Is A Well-Raped Word, stream-lined and scripted the story, softening some its more unforgiving philosophical aspects, but with such economy that her opening line, as intoned by Richard Burton on the album, now sounds definitive. “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.” Cue the music.
In the Autumn of last year, Wayne was to be found in his massive country pile towering over models of the The War Of The Worlds live experience, like some insane Titan. “There’s two different types of production planned. This production,” he says, pointing at miniature Martian fighting machines stomping through a stadium, “is not the Wembley touring one. This is giant scale, for audiences of approximately 25 000 up. We want to start it off in Beijing just before the Olympic games and then tour very selective venues, like how Cirque Du Soleil tour, taking a week or two to set up and then doing thirty nights.” Wayne turns his attention to a different model. “The tour that I am doing with The War Of The Worlds is this arena sized tour, going to Wembley Arena, the Manchester Evening News Arena, places like that. I’m conducting a ten-piece band and a forty eight-piece string section. There’ll be a forty foot high Martian Fighting Machine, and this will be very impressive for the audience, and it will fire a heat ray, which is a Martian weapon, and the hull swivels and tilts and telescopes up and down a bit. And we are using large projections of animations and still images and lights and surround-sound so hopefully we’ll entertain the audience.”
So far so good. But Wayne continues. “Anybody who knows the album knows there’s certain parts that are performed as characters, and those are being performed live. The one exception is Richard Burton. He’s coming to life as a three dimensional head that suspends over the audience doing exactly what has been heard on the album.” Dave Clark of the Dave Clarke Five directed a hologram of Lawrence Olivier’s head in his 1986 West End musical TIME. It was not received well. The windswept desert of large-scale commercial theatre is littered with enormous abandoned holographic heads, their half sunken shattered visages serving as a terrible warning to ambitious producers. But of course, technology has moved on. “We are digitising images that Richard Burton’s late wife Sally has provided for us,” explains Wayne, who now has the air of Doctor Frankenstein, “The whole process is that there is a gentleman who is an uncanny Richard Burton look-alike and, with make-up and bits and pieces he really becomes a very much genuine looking look-alike of Richard Burton. He is filmed and the digitised images go over him then he sits for a sculpture of his head which then gets projected onto this 3D head and it becomes Richard Burton.” Ironically, Wells’ novel addresses man’s hubris, and his arrogant belief that science can make him a God. Perhaps Jeff Wayne needs to read it again.
This possible error of taste apart, if anyone is equipped to bring Wells’ novel into the unlikely form of a stadium-sized, rock circus it is Jeff Wayne. He has a fanatical enthusiasm for Wells’ book, and having secured the rights to it in all media except film in 1975, has a paternal, protective relationship with the text. Whether Wells would approve, however, of the mobile phone ring-tones available with the new edition of the album is debateable. Wayne’s album itself has survived for thirty years with its legend unblemished. But it is of its time. Why would Wayne risk puncturing the hermetically sealed bubble that surrounds its mid-70’s genesis, and compromising its integrity by staging it? “Well, why don’t you ask me that at the end of the tour, and let’s see if we haven’t blown it.”, he laughs. You can’t help but wish him well.
Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds opens on the 13th April Bournemouth International Centre.
And here I thought the double negative ("in fact not insensible to...") and the run-on sentence had died with the Victorian age. Silly me...
;D
And if you think the double negative is dead - and indeed hate the entire tortured world of them - then for the love of all that is Holy don't go to Lancashire! 