It first appeared in my life as some weird broadcast on Radio Caroline, somewhere in the early eighties. They played the whole thing and it was absolutely mesmerizing, haunting synths beaming out of the sky into my small town life.
But I couldn't tell anybody how much I loved Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds for many, many years. It was just so irredeemably cheesy. So very 70s, when the 70s weren't cool.
While I don't believe in guilty pleasures anymore, and can proudly (and possibly wrongly) proclaim that Phil Lynott is a goddamn genius in this thing, I did once had to listen to it only on headphones, because nobody could know how emotional it made me.
I just loved the other-worldly sounds, and its earnestness, and its plaintive pleas for emotional depth. The oh-laas, the dead seriousness of Burton's delivery and the funky, funky beats. Fuckin' Forever Autumn, man!
(It's also got the best adaptation of the thuddingly exciting Thunderchild sequence in any version outside the original book.)
It's accidentally become the theme music to bath time in our house, and I never get sick of it. The chances of anything coming along like that again is surely a million to one.
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