Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds
Just watched the DVD of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds stage show. A co-worker is going to see the real thing in Auckland; it's not coming to Christchurch or I'd be there.
There are a number of pop-culture artifacts that to me pop out of the background and make me go 'wow, I'm living in the future'. Little perfect iconic capsules of future-shock. They feel as if they belong in science fiction and give me a strange little shiver - did the world just take a wrong turn and I walked into a movie?
1. Microwave ovens. Radar! Cooks food! From the inside out! And doesn't kill people!
2. Compact disc technology. Silver discs! That reflect the light! And so cheap you could literally tile your walls with them if you wanted.
3. The first time I saw a URL advertised on a bus. At that moment I knew the Web had arrived. A globe-spanning data network and it's being used to sell stuff.
4. The Palm Pilot, circa 1997. A real computer, in your pocket. Star Trek's PADD made real. Now they're just 'phones'.
5. Secure Digital Cards. You've seen them everywhere in bad cyberpunk movies, tiny 'data chips', size of a postage stamp, store more info than a CD. Now they're real, too.
and now add another one: Jeff Wayne conducting his 1978 War of the Worlds album live in a huge arena, as a musical, with a movie backdrop, a Martian Tripod that lowers from the gods, while the giant floating head of Richard Burton narrates.
I think it's the giant floating Richard Burton head that sold it to me. The show itself is one of those parallel-universe blips - it's been a 'musical that wasn't' for so long, everyone asks 'so what was the show of this like?' and the answer is always 'there wasn't one! it's not a cast recording! it's a concept album!' Now the universe has walked quietly into another room and there is a show of the show that wasn't. So far, so groovy.
But reanimating a dead actor, and glueing his face to a ten-foot high sculpted floating plastic head... that's magic. Or at least another step toward the Sci-Fi Future, where virtual actors make Hollywood obsolete and suddenly we have stars leading the anti-robot union.
Another of those little shivers of recognition that I hadn't realised, is the link between Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and Space Invaders. I didn't realise that both came out in 1978. I don't know the release dates down to the month, but the game's creator Tomohiro Nishikado is on record that the concept of the Invaders is definitely based on at least the novel of War of the Worlds. Wells' aliens (tentacles, aggressive, advanced technology, death-rays) are of course the prototype for just every 'alien invasion' scenario ever, but I hadn't put Jeff Wayne's piece together until hearing the concert DVD and realising how similar the soundscape - moody synths, an alien 'heartbeat' while the first pod unscrews - is to that whole dawn era of videogames.
Of course, it was 1978 and in 1977 the pop-culture world was already looking toward the skies: Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been blockbusters, Battlestar Galactica was launching on TV, Skylab was struggling to stay in orbit (it would crash in Western Australia in 1979). Star Trek Phase II, then to become The Motion Picture (and then the Next Generation), was in production. Space was cool again.
But was Nishikado inspired to think about H G Wells by Jeff Wayne's album, or it just one of those cases of interesting synchronicity? I'm not sure which idea I find cooler, but the two pop-culture properties do seem to just go together.