war of the worlds

As I mentioned previously, there was a comic strip adaptation of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published by Marvel and recently reprinted in the first eleven editions of Doctor Who Weekly between October and December 1979. But the most obvious immediate source for my own adaptation here is the full cast rock concept album by Jeff Wayne, as you can probably tell from the giveaway line. Mum and Dad often played it in the car on long journeys - or at least they did once we got one with a cassette player installed, which may not actually have happened yet - so it’s a strong memory from around that time. There are occasional details I may have invented - the stuff about the green capsule becoming white doesn’t appear to be in the original or any of the adaptations I’ve mentioned - but otherwise it’s a pretty faithful paraphrasing of the main events from the first five chapters of the book. There are occasional Waenisms: the bit where I try to be subtle with “I fancied I’d heard him scream” but undermine it immediately by “I did”; the heat ray turning the narrator’s friends into “human fire.” But it’s largely unremarkable, and despite my specific promise to continue “next English book,” I never bothered going back to it. At least not until 2020 when, in my other career as a composer and music-maker, I was asked to put together a medley of ELO’s Ticket to the Moon with Jeff Wayne’s Horsell Common and the Heat Ray, for a dream sequence in Diane Morgan’s BBC comedy Mandy. At the time of writing (January 2022), it’s only just gone up on iPlayer. Another thing bringing me full circle with my eight-year-old self, and it’s way more entertaining than this.