Jeff Wayne's classic adaptation of The War of The Worlds was a technical tour de force and an enduring commercial success. A quarter of a century after its release, it has undergone a complete rework for 5.1 surround.

Sam Inglis

On June 9th, 1978, music journalists were invited to the London Planetarium by CBS Records for a lavish album launch. If they knew the name Jeff Wayne already, it was as the producer of teen idol David Essex; yet what they were presented with that day was a million miles from 'Rock On' or 'Hold Me Tight'. Here was a musical, but one that had never been seen on stage. Here were rock stars in abundance, but as well as singing, they were taking parts in a Victorian science fiction drama. And at a time when punk rock ruled, here was a 90-minute concept album fusing lengthy rock instrumentals, classical orchestration, a hint of disco, and the fruity narration of Richard Burton.

Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds, to give it its full title, might not have seemed like an obvious hit. Yet it remained in the British album charts for six years, with the best estimates available putting sales so far at a staggering 13 million. That figure is likely to rise even further this year, thanks to a lavish re-release incorporating both a new stereo mix and a 5.1 surround version. More than two years in the making, the reissue was put together at Wayne's Hertfordshire manor house by engineer Gaëtan Schurrer, and mixed by Schurrer and Gary Langan, engineer and founder member of the Art Of Noise.

"Back in 1978, Jeff was pushing technology to the limit, and he's doing it again now," says Gary, and it's hard to argue with either claim. When it was made, The War of The Worlds was probably the first large-scale project ever to be recorded to 48 tracks, at least in the UK. "At the time I knew that I was doing a 48-track production, I was dead lucky that the studio I was working at [Advision in London] owned a distribution company, and had just taken delivery of this device called the Maglink, which was the first device that linked machines together," explains Jeff. "I knew that I was going to struggle with 24-track, and I didn't quite know how I was going to resolve that. I was doing something that no-one had yet done in production terms. It didn't mean it was going to be a better composition, or a better piece of work, but technically we were pushing the limits."

Making Arrangements

By the mid-'70s, Jeff Wayne had his own small studio and was an accomplished synth programmer and engineer, but the music for The War of The Worlds was never demoed "in the sense of a record, where you'd do demos and see how it sounds". Nevertheless, he had undertaken a lengthy and meticulous process of pre-production. "It was scored out at the composition and orchestration stage like I would score a movie, to the fraction of a second, and our scriptwriter had to work to those timings. So not only did she have to be creative, but she had to be a technician to work to a given moment, because you may have songs, or you may have lead instrumental sections, or our journalist telling the story. When does that person enter or leave? So you have all these elements that had to be timed very precisely.

"I was trained to write out everything. Whether I work on an electronic score or an orchestral score or whatever, I compose at an instrument, and when it comes to the arrangement and orchestration, that I do away from any instrument. I find it's more free, but I'm from an era when orchestration was taught to me.

"There was a period of scriptwriting, then I did all my arrangements in readiness for the band sessions, which were the first tranche of recordings, and they were recorded as masters. Because some of these tracks were 10 or 12 minutes long, inevitably, what we played as a band had to be built up upon, and where there was a thematic piece, either I or one of the other musicians would play a guide melody on an instrument, just to show the band where the melodies were going to go. Where there was going to be singing I brought in people who were excellent session singers in their own right, and they sang the songs to give us an idea, and to present to the people who were the potential guest artists.

"Most of what we recorded in the band sessions ultimately became the roots of the entire master recording. It's only recently I've come to realise that most people didn't realise it was a live performance piece. It wasn't built upon one musician at a time playing to a click track, or anything like that. It started with a full band playing it live, and then, yes, I brought in my strings, but they were played on top of a live band performance. The guys who played on it were all pretty guv'nor musicians, and we could all sight-read, so no matter what you'd throw at them, they were there."

"The way that Jeff tackled it was that he'd have bass, drums, two guitars, a percussionist, Ken Freeman on synths, Jeff sitting at a piano, and a metronome," adds Gary. "And Jeff would have set the metronome and said 'We'll have a go at this tempo.' No clicks or anything. The amount of tempo changes, kids growing up today would cringe. The bpm's all over the place, but because you've got a cohesive bunch of people all moving together, it sounds enormous. And because the chemistry between those people, as somebody starts to pick the tempo up slightly as they move into another part of the arrangement, maybe it's Jeff who starts pushing them, because they're all working together, they'll all move together and it sounds cohesive."

The Prof

Jeff Wayne, Gary Langan and Gaëtan Schurrer are all effusive in their praise for the musicians who played on The War of The Worlds. From Herbie Flowers's rock-solid bass to the guitar antics of Chris Spedding and Jo Partridge, the performances are all impressive, but the greatest praise is reserved for synth wizard Ken 'Prof' Freeman.

"Ken Freeman was a complete genius," insists Langan, and when you discover exactly how much he contributed to The War of The Worlds, it's impossible to disagree. "There's a lot of orchestration that Jeff wrote for orchestral sounds — brass, horns, flutes, piccolos, oboes — and all of those are synthesizer sounds made by Ken," says Schurrer. "The only real orchestra on there is the strings, and some of the strings are actually string machines.

"He started mainly with a Minimoog and an ARP Odyssey, and then later on in the production when they were nearing completion he got a CS80, and they re-overdubbed a lot of the horns and things. I've actually got the Arturia CS80 plug-in, and tried to emulate some of those sounds that Ken came up with, and I fell well short. I think he had an understanding of real instruments and orchestration that gave him the edge as to how to make the synth respond like an instrument would."

"He could create drum sounds," adds Langan. "In 'The Artilleryman And The Fighting Machine', there's the sound of military drums. When you listen to the mixes from 1978 you'd probably swear that it was a military side drum and a military bass drum, but it's not — it's Ken doing jiggery-pokery on his synthesizers."

Beyond Our Ken

The elaborate overdubs included Ken Freeman's multitracked synth parts, the voices of all the actors and singers, a live string section, solo instrumental parts and sound effects. On some of the recordings, Wayne and the band crammed almost 100 different parts onto the 48 tracks available to them.

"From a composing point of view, I was trying to create melodies, hooks and riffs, but from a sound point of view, as orchestrator and producer, I wanted to subtly create this feeling of a ping-pong match," explains Jeff. "When you're hearing the story through the eyes of humanity you hear this big, symphonic string section. When it's Martian and aggressive, it's the electric guitars, it's the synthesizers that create all the atmospheric sounds, and I deliberately kept true to that throughout the whole 95 minutes."

Creating the right sounds for the Martian themes required considerable ingenuity. Much of this, again, came from Ken Freeman. "He was able to take things that were scored out, and put a sound into them just by us talking," says Jeff. "He would take a look at the score, and separate from the notation, I might have a sound on it that says 'A snowflake'. What is a snowflake? Well, we had worked enough together to work out a shorthand where he'd start by trying to interpret it, and this was the era when you were dealing with sound waves — sawtooths, sine waves and square waves — and he would mix them together and create the sound from the synthesizers that he was playing. You couldn't store them in memory, they were monophonic so you had to build them up, and eventually we'd get to the point where we had something we were both very pleased with."

The only challenge Freeman couldn't meet was to interpret the voices of the Martians themselves, and their war cry of 'Ulla'. "The notation was there, the chords were there, but not the actual sound, which I wanted to be unique. It had to be gigantic when the Martians were terrifying the Earth, but at the very end when they're dying, the same vowels, 'ulla', had to sound like the Martians themselves were dying," says Jeff. "I asked Ken Freeman if he could devise a synthesizer that could produce the word 'Ulla' and play it from a keyboard. He was not only a brilliant musician, but a craftsman from the technical side. He came up with this little box that I recall, and it could go 'ooh', but it couldn't get the 'la', so it was just 'oo-ah'."

The box was jettisoned, and instead, guitarist Jo Partridge multitracked the 'Ullas' using a Peter Frampton-style talk box.

Elsewhere, The War of The Worlds was also heavily laden with foley effects, most of them created by Jeff Wayne's wife Geraldine. "In those days you had to go to sound effects libraries, tell them 'I'm looking for this', and they'd give you everything they had,' explains Jeff. "You'd try all the libraries, listen to them all, and pick the best of what you had, and very little manipulation could be done with them. The ones that wound up on the record, with one exception, were made. The one that always comes up is the sound of the cylinder unscrewing [when the Martians emerge from their spaceship]. The truth of is that it is me with two kitchen saucepans, turning them and scraping them together. Our engineer Jeff Young heard the idea, amplified what was on microphone, and there's this giant sound. He put it into stereo so it could really move around, because he knew the idea I was trying to create, and what the script said. There I am on acoustic saucepan!"

Although the lengthy pieces on The War of The Worlds were all performed in their entirety, there was also a lot of editing before, during and after the original mix. "They mixed it in sections," says Gary. "You couldn't mix it from one end to the other, it was impossible. They probably mixed 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, whatever that bit required, and there would've been two or three of them. Which is how I started — as an assistant you were given the not important faders, and as you got better and better, if you were really good you got the drums."

"The original work that I recorded was just over two hours, so there was a lot of editing and restructuring to get it down to what it became," says Jeff. "It had to fit on four sides of black vinyl, but also to not bore everybody, because it was just too long at that length."

The Eve Of The War

Jeff Wayne comes from a musical family, and the War Of The Worlds project owes much to his father Jerry. "My Dad kept saying 'You set out to be a composer who arranged and produced,' and I was on a long run of producing artists and doing shorter pieces, like film scores and TV themes and music for advertising. I said 'Let's have a go at finding a story that could, from a composing point of view, challenge me.' And that's really how it started. We read lots of different books, and it came down to a few that I remember — The Day of The Triffids, by John Wyndham, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and HG Wells's The War of The Worlds. But with The War of The Worlds, I can always remember, I could hear sound on one read-through. It wasn't a very long book, about 150 pages or so, and maybe that's why it was easy to hear. It turned out there was an agent who represented the estate of HG Wells, and we convinced the estate that we wanted to be true to the story in creating this musical interpretation, and we did a deal. That was 1975, and the whole writing, orchestration, scriptwriting, paintings, recording sessions, everything to do with it, took the better part of two and a half years, between early '75 and June '78.