One of the most educational events (and possibly greatest disappointments) of my youth was the advent of the double LP sci-fi-concept-prog-rock-audioplay majesty that was 'Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds'. Many of my most profound childhood memories relate to this majestic piece of collaborative audio art. With a heavy set of twangly-cabled head phones I poured over the double sleeved artwork and the grisly and imaginative artwork of the accompanying booklet enrapt by the soothing tones of Richard Burton’s velvety voice, the weird electronic alien noises, the strangely tuned bass, and the strange and enthusiastic overacting of Phil Lynott and David Essex. Here was something truly greater than the sum of its parts.
Just imagine 1978, punk rages in the provinces, the city is alive with spiky ethnic-inspired hairstyles and bondage trousers. And some dude decides he has enough balls to create a prog-rock-radio-play-experimental-electronic-novel-thing narrated by an alcoholic Welsh Thespian. Well, people say that punk is dead. But no one says that curious prog-rock-musical-multimedia-vanity projects are dead do they?
Oh, for those countless hours spent with that fantastic whole that will forever stay etched upon my memory.
All except one thing. The ending.
Oh, and by the way, the germs did it. The germs. The fucking germs.
'What are germs?' I asked.
The things that give you a cold.
So they died of a fucking cold? (obviously I didn’t swear so much when I was five years old)
Yes.
A cold, they died of a cold? They had these cool fucking giant walking machines, with heat rays or lasers or whatever, and baskets that they threw people in, and they came from Mars? In spaceships? And destroyed humanity and were generally totally awesome? And they died because they got a cold? With all their vastly-superior-to-our intellects, they didn't have that nice tasting milky medicine that Doctor Goodger makes me take me when I have a sniffle? They blew up London, with the red weed and alien weirdness? Only to have their eyes pecked out by crows because they got a cold? A vast martian-inflicted post apocalyptic Victorian wasteland ripe for colonisation and it ended with a cold? Something so tiny I cant see it? Oh, they just died. Of a cold. That's it, move along. Fuck that.
Worst ending ever.
Except that film with Michael Caine where he’s in the desert in World War 2 and he gets shot in the end. Fuck that too.
Just imagine 1978, punk rages in the provinces, the city is alive with spiky ethnic-inspired hairstyles and bondage trousers. And some dude decides he has enough balls to create a prog-rock-radio-play-experimental-electronic-novel-thing narrated by an alcoholic Welsh Thespian. Well, people say that punk is dead. But no one says that curious prog-rock-musical-multimedia-vanity projects are dead do they?
Oh, for those countless hours spent with that fantastic whole that will forever stay etched upon my memory.
All except one thing. The ending.
Oh, and by the way, the germs did it. The germs. The fucking germs.
'What are germs?' I asked.
The things that give you a cold.
So they died of a fucking cold? (obviously I didn’t swear so much when I was five years old)
Yes.
A cold, they died of a cold? They had these cool fucking giant walking machines, with heat rays or lasers or whatever, and baskets that they threw people in, and they came from Mars? In spaceships? And destroyed humanity and were generally totally awesome? And they died because they got a cold? With all their vastly-superior-to-our intellects, they didn't have that nice tasting milky medicine that Doctor Goodger makes me take me when I have a sniffle? They blew up London, with the red weed and alien weirdness? Only to have their eyes pecked out by crows because they got a cold? A vast martian-inflicted post apocalyptic Victorian wasteland ripe for colonisation and it ended with a cold? Something so tiny I cant see it? Oh, they just died. Of a cold. That's it, move along. Fuck that.
Worst ending ever.
Except that film with Michael Caine where he’s in the desert in World War 2 and he gets shot in the end. Fuck that too.