Interview with JEFF WAYNE

June 2025

There are people whose fame is based on a formidable oeuvre, and then there’s Jeff Wayne whose name became familiar to everybody once he composed “Musical Version Of ‘The War Of The Worlds'” which saw the light of day in 1978, and who, to many, emerged out of nowhere and hasn’t delivered anything after his masterpiece arrived on the scene. Yet apart from the fact that it arrived to stay – to be later brought on stage, turned into a stunning spectacle and taken on tour quite a few times – and attain a classic status, Wayne’s work encompasses much more than the sole album.

Jeff’s story started much earlier, and without what went before he transformed H. G. Wells’ novel into melodic novelty on a grand scale he wouldn’t be able to do it – his entire previous experience as a writer, arranger and producer had paved the road to that project – but Wayne didn’t stop there, following up on that hugely successful record with other hits. And still, a lot of listeners associate the veteran with his single, or rather singular, achievement. This year sees the release of the ultimate version of his magnum opus, with 16 CDs and two Blu-ray discs spanning multiple aspects of that musical milestone and going well beyond the original double-longplay, which is why we decided to venture beyond “The War Of The Worlds” too, and find out how it fits in the overall scheme of Jeff Wayne’s career.

– Jeff, most people think of you as a one-hit-album wonder – they don’t realize how well-embedded you had been in the British rock scene before “The War of the Worlds” arrived…

Yeah, that’s true: long before, very long before!

– But you’re an American and you moved over to the UK to work with your father. How did you settle down in London and how did you become part of what was happening there, music-wise?

Well, it goes back even earlier than the reason you’ve just explained. I was born in New York and I first moved to England when I was about nine. My father was quite a well-known singer, actor and performer in the US. He had three Number One singles and did all the major entertainment opportunities. Then, in 1953 he was offered to play the romantic gambler in the original West End production of the brilliant Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls” where he played Sky Masterson, the romantic gambler, so as a little boy with my parents, I moved to England. He did a lot of other work after his role in “Guys and Dolls” ended nine months or a year later, and overall, we stayed for about four years before moving back to New York, where he resumed his performing and recording career. After that I switched from classical piano to taking private jazz lessons with the gifted John Mehegan at Juilliard school of music. It helped me in a different way when I look back at the things that I do as a composer and arranger, because I can sight-read very well, and move from one key to another easily.

About three or four years later, my dad started getting a lot of work offered from California, in film and TV, and continued with recording career, so naturally, me and my mom moved on with him, and I graduated high school and college there. Overlapping with that, my dad decided to go into theater production, and because he always remembered and loved Great Britain as a nation and the British entertainment world, he moved back to England and started producing shows. One of them was a West End musical based on Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” – but it would be a slight exaggeration to say that I came over to help my dad because, if you want to talk about the pinnacle of nepotism, my dad personified that by wanting me to compose the music for this musical. (Laughs.)

Because my career in music had really just started in California, and I had no real major credits that would warrant being commissioned for such a major work, I remember saying to him, “Dad, you can get any top composer to write the score!” but he wouldn’t have any of it. The nepotism prevailed! That’s why I returned to England, and that’s how my career truly began here. “Two Cities’ eventually opened at London’s Palace Theatre, on Cambridge Circus. Because it was very well received, there were some people in media that started to become aware of my name as a composer, and I began receiving commissions to compose music for different media, from commercials to TV scores, plus the occasional documentary and film score. And then I started meeting artists that were looking for a new producer, and my career as a producer began, and with it I started my own label, Jeff Wayne Music. Just one thing kept leading to another. I was very happy with the way my career was moving, very happy, so much so that I stayed in England ever since, and have never returned to live in the United States.

– Was there a bit of culture shock when you moved from to the UK?

Interestingly, what my mind goes back to is the first time we moved to England, in April 1953, just shortly before princess Elizabeth became queens and a few months before the Korean war ended. I remember arriving and being very much New Yorker, a street boy – in a nice way, I don’t mean that in any criminal way. The life we had left behind in the United States was that of a nation resuming to a normal life, but when we arrived in England, rationing was still very much part of the ongoing life here, and that was a real culture shock. There were many other things that made Britain unique to itself, from extraordinarily good ones to the smog I had never encountered until moving here. It was a series of diverse cultural differences – but so many of them were wonderful!

– Your father influenced your career in many aspects, but what did he see in you when he asked you to compose the music for “A Tale of Two Cities”?

He probably remembered some songs that I had written in California and the way I was starting to learn how to do arrangements; he just believed in what he thought was a young, talented musician who was wanting to make his way in the music industry as a career. But I can only ever keep repeating that word “nepotism” – because I didn’t deserve on merit anything to suggest writing the musical score for a big West End musical. I had started classical piano lessons when I was about the age of five, so I was formally trained in certain respects. But my first two years in college in California, I majored in investigative journalism, because that’s what I thought I wanted to be – I wanted to uncover all the unsolved mysteries of the world, to solve all the cold case crimes not yet resolved, and write about them – it was only when I got my two-year degree, an AA, an Associate of Arts, I realized that music was my greater passion, and I switched to becoming a music major at a four-year university. I took professional classes in orchestration, sight-reading, conducting, but I never got the degree because just as I was getting into my fourth year, my dad asked me to come over to England and start writing the musical with him. He also wanted to write the lyrics, and that’s how our partnership came about.

Before “Two Cities” went into production, I attended one of the top UK music colleges, Trinity College of Music, then based just off of Manchester Square in London; today it’s known as Trinity-Laban, having merged some years ago with the dance and performance-based school, Laban. There’s even a connection now with me, where I might be conducting or involved in a production of “The War of the Worlds” next year, and I’m thrilled as an Old Boy, so to speak, to come back and see what I can add to the mix of discussion on music and the arts.

– How did writing jingles help you to expand your stylistic horizons?

Commercials being very short – fifteen, thirty, forty-five seconds, a long one might be sixty seconds – the principle is to be able to communicate a message in the music in that space of time: you don’t have time to evolve it into a formal musical length, whether it’s a composition, a symphony or something like “The War of the Worlds” – and it helped me learn brevity. I also worked with directors during that period that have become world-renowned as movie makers: Ridley Scott, his late brother Tony, Alan Parker, and a range of others that were making their way into the big screen and the TV screen; they had the same challenges as filmmakers to do what I had to do in sound and composition.

– There’s an entire album with Radio Luxembourg ads, sometimes credited to you and other times to Tony Hertz.

Tony was a producer at an advertising agency that used to commission me to do a lot of music. We became friends through that, and we formed a radio production company, called the Radio Operators, when radio was first coming into the UK as a commercial form of communication.

– Out of all those various commercials, “Gordon Gin” became an instrumental track for THE HUMAN LEAGUE and one for Lego Toys became the song “Forever Autumn”: how many more hidden gems are out there?

Between 1968 and 1978, I composed and produced or arranged about three thousand soundtracks, the majority being commercials, but quite a number were also TV and radio themes, and some documentary and feature film scores; and when it comes to commercials, there’s quite a few that have become known that I still get emails or social media making contact about, “Is this one available as a record?” “Have you ever thought of expanding this into a full-blown record?” But I think “The War of the Worlds” has dominated my life so much over the last nineteen years of touring arenas, and going back almost fifty years since its original double album was released. But I have thought about a double album, all based on commercials, TV and film scores, calling it “Jeff Wayne’s Tiniest Hits”! (Laughs.)

– What about the “Gone Fishing” ad credited to THE FISHERMEN and featuring Chris Spedding and Jane Relf?

Jane! What a gorgeous voice she has! It was a sort of a folk ballad that she sang the words to, from a series of commercials for Findus Fish Foods, directed by Ridley Scott. It was one of these where we had a lot of feedback from the public and extended it into a record. And it was a great pleasure to work with Jane.

– Another remarkable piece was a single “The Bittermen Theme” with Spedding’s guitar at the fore. Was that where your long-term collaboration started? And was it around the same time that you started working with Herbie Flowers?

I composed and produced “The Bittermen Theme” for a beer company, and Chris and Herbie would show up regularly on my sessions for whatever commercial I was doing. Originally I didn’t know their musical background and who they had played with – but many were some of the greats of British music and even overseas artists that were household names. They never mentioned it, but as I worked more and more with them, I discovered, “My goodness, I’m in the company of greatness!” And here they are, playing on a commercial for shampoo or lager with as much energy and commitment as if they were playing with some of the biggest names in pop music. Herbie sadly passed away about six months ago, but Chris is still going strong – he was playing lead guitar on our most recent arena tour a few weeks ago. Both of them have become more than professional relationships: we’ve had a lot of laughs of things that we can all think back on, and I was proud to have been asked to say some closing words at Herbie’s funeral. In the program from our most recent tour, I wrote a two-page spread about him and his life, his accomplishments, and some of my memories with him.

– You produced Herbie’s “Don’t Take My Bass Away” single and “A Little Potty” album, so the trust went both ways, didn’t it?

He asked me to produce and arrange a couple of singles, one of those [“Mr Moonlight”] being for his entry into Eurovision as Herbie Flowers and THE DAISIES – that was the band name – and the other just an independent release, “Don’t Take My Bass Away”; and in fact, my closing remark of my tribute to Herbie was “Whether on Earth or in Heaven, no one will ever take your bass away!”

– Of all the early singles you worked on, there’s a couple where you were, for the first time I assume, the primary artist, “Get Movin'” and “Let the Sun Come Into Your Life”: what’s the story behind these two?

Again, they started off life as commercials. “Let the Sun Come Into Your Life” was written for Pledge, the cleaning products, with lyrics by Tony Hertz, and it was sung by David Essex and Julie Covington. Julie went on to sing on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” then play Beth, parson Nathaniel’s wife, on my original “The War of the Worlds” double album. “Get Moving” was for another beer, though, called “Younger’s Tartan”: a piece with a real pulse-y tempo around the words (sings) “Get moving, get moving with Younger’s Tartan, get moving, get moving now!” That was the core of the commercial, and it, too, got a lot of public interest and was extended into a full-blown record. These singles did okay, considering they were themes: some even got into the top 40 of the UK charts. I’m trying to think if I’m cheating myself out of a credit here, but I guess it’s those singles that indeed were my first releases as an artist, rather than as a producer.

– And when did you begin to think about yourself as an artist rather than a composer or producer?

Well, there’s a big difference. If you’re being commissioned, whether it’s for TV, film, commercials, or you’re the producer of an artist, you’re basically taking something and interpreting it for a company or an artist – your job is to bring out a sound that’s unique and the best for that particular performer. But it was my dad who kept reminding me every once in a while that he said, since “Two Cities”: “You’ve always talked about trying to find a story that you feel passionate about and that you could emerge with as an artist, so you just start with a blank page and off you go!” He kept nagging me, basically, because I was having a great run in my career and I was happy, enjoying myself – but he was right. And so, between he, his second wife, my stepmom [Doreen Wayne], who was an author in her own right, and myself, we started reading books of not any one particular genre, and while there were some wonderful books that we read and that I read, I didn’t feel I had found that type of story or book that I could start with a blank page and off I go.

But then, literally on the night before going out on tour with an artist that I had been producing – we were having a number of hit records, and now I was his musical director – my dad came over to wish me luck and handed me yet another book, which was H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” that I took out on the road with me. Bear in mind, this was not the digital age – no emails, no Googling, no mobile phones – so books were quite good material to fill in your spare time if you wanted, and on one read of “The War of the Worlds” I suddenly felt, “Wow, this is a story that I can hear!” It wasn’t a typical “shoot ’em up, knock ’em down” sci-fi story; it was actually quite a dark Victorian tale, based in the UK, of an invasion from Mars. And what H. G. was really writing about wasn’t just invading aliens, it was the subject of invasion: [he was suggesting] that even if it’s your own country that’s doing the invading, that is wrong. And at that point in 1897 or so, when he was writing his story, the British Empire was pretty much at the height of its powers and dominated quite a number of parts of the world. So it wasn’t just external countries, it was his own nation. And I liked that. I also liked his views about faith, hope, love: there were underlying themes that were human. The characters in his story were not strange; they were all people that you could relate to. And even internationally, if you were from another country and read his story, you would relate to the same type of characters that you might have in your own homeland. That was it!

But H. G,’s book was still in copyright at that point, and it took us quite a period of time to locate his son, Frank – not to be confused with a brother he had also named Frank. Frank the son inherited his dad’s rights when H. G. passed away in 1946. By the time I came back from my tour, we had located a law firm in Washington, D.C., who at the time specialized in locating the works of authors, and it was a trail back to whoever was controlling such a copyright. My dad and I met up with Frank Wells and his agents: it was a very interesting and, for me, memorable occasion, because the agents and Frank didn’t know very much about me as a musician, but the agents remembered seeing my dad in “Guys and Dolls” all those years earlier! Frank liked the idea of what I laid out as the way I wanted to interpret his father’s novel: I wanted to place my musical work in the same time and the same setting, with the same key characters and subject headings, without doing what most productions of “The War of the Worlds” had done. Some of those was brilliant, but they were modernized and set in the United States, while I wanted to keep it true to the stark Victorian tale. I just felt more aligned with it. And so between his agency, my dad in “Guys and Dolls” and the way that I outlined how, as a composer and producer, I would want to create a musical version of it, we acquired all the remaining rights from Frank, the only exceptions being the original book publication rights, which were still in copyright, and the film rights that had been sold off many years earlier to Paramount Pictures.

– Let’s go back a bit, please. The artist you mentioned that you went on tour with was, of course, David Essex. How often did you have to actually go on the road?

About once a year. And by the time I finished two or three tours with him, my dad and I had acquired the “War of the Worlds” rights, which just happened to coincide well with David wanting to change his sound and reduce the size of his band. We’re still good friends, David and I; we’ve stayed in touch and worked together since on certain productions, including a very important and major role of The Artilleryman in my musical version of “The War of the Worlds.”

– Your production for his “Rock On” was artillery-like too. You created quite a cannonball sound.

“Rock On” was the first record that came out for David as an artist, with me as his producer, arranger and conductor. He started singing on commercials for me because it earned him some good money, although he was now breaking through as an artist. He played Jesus in the musical “Godspell” and had been in some films, which I did a couple of the title tracks for with him, but one day after a session on a commercial he said that he was moving away from the record producer he had been with. They had tried two or three singles together, and while those were very good, there was no real commercial success. We were in the control room of the studio, and he said, “I’ve just finished writing a song, which I wonder if you’d be interested in listening to…” Since we had finished our session earlier than normal, the microphone was still up, so I said, “Sure, I’d love to hear it. Why don’t you go out to the piano that’s still set up, play it and sing away?” He said, “Right!” and went out into the studio, but he didn’t play the piano – he picked up the trash bin that was right next to the piano, dumped everything that was in out on the floor, put the bin in between his legs, and started banging out a groove.

I hadn’t realized, and learned at that point, that he was actually a very good drummer and percussionist. So he starts singing the song, and there’s no chords and no instruments, other than this rhythm that he’s accompanying himself as he’s singing the lyrics to what was “Rock On”: it was a faster rhythm than when I eventually produced it, but it had a real workiness about it, and it excited me. Then he came in and asked, “What do you think?” I said, “I think this could be a great record. If you’re interested in me being your producer, I’ll make two tracks with you – to masters, fully recorded – and I’ll try to get you a record deal!” We did a deal pretty much on the spot, which has remained in absolutely binding form all these years, and it began what was a long recording relationship of a number of hit singles, albums and some of those tours. But the first record was “Rock On” where my concept was to have no instruments that played any chords, so you won’t hear any pianos, keyboards or guitar there – it was really pushing the bass forward, with a very light rhythm on congas and the hi-hat.

There were only three musicians: Herbie and two Barrys, De Souza and Morgan. Herbie, looking around the room, asked, “Jeff, when’s the rest of the band getting here? And I said, “Guys, you are the band!” (Laughs.) I explained that it was all about an upfront bass and echoes that we’d add on the production after we got a master take. I had two microphones set up for me to not only count the guys in but, if you were to listen to it, right before the song starts, you’ll hear a “shhhooo”, which was me doing just that, but going from left to right on these microphones. And that was it. And what a hit it became! CBS, who I signed to for David’s records, wanted “On And On” – the other song I recorded with him, a beautiful ballad – to come out, but David and I both felt that “Rock On” was far more different, and they eventually agreed. That was the beginning of his recording career.

– You namechecked the two Barrys on drums who would later play on “The War of the Worlds” too, but wasn’t Ray Cooper on that single too?

He wasn’t on the original backing track of “Rock On” but he did add, later on, as an overdub, some tambourine. Ray was a very happy guy, so we named him Sunray Cooper, because of the sunshine he’d bring to all the sessions.

– Around the same time, you also started working with Paul Vigrass and Gary Osborne who would write lyrics for your musical. You composed all the music for their “Queues” album.

Yes, I composed the music, did all the scores, conducted where needed, and played some keyboards and synthesizers. Gary and Paul were sort of a British equivalent of Simon and Garfunkel in their vocals in that era, with all the wonderful songs they were releasing, and one song was “Forever Autumn” which wound up in “The War of the Worlds”: it got to number three in Japan, and they toured Japan because of it. They also sang on tons of my sessions for commercials and other projects, and that established a working relationship with them, because if they weren’t singing on my commercials, they were booking all the vocalists for those sessions. They came close to breaking big time, because they were very talented vocalists, and their lyrics were stunning. When you judge a lyric, there are many pop songs where the words are more like sounds and hooks rather than stories of life experiences, and I think a lot of great songwriting is about the storytelling. Yes, of course, there’s lots of pop and rap and other upbeat recordings that are not story-based, but that’s a different type of music genre. And I always felt that Paul and Gary wrote good stories, that they were in that sort of league, so I found it pretty easy to compose music to their lyrics.

– But it’s a completely different task, to convert a pre-existing story into lyrics, as opposed to writing words for a piece that’s a thing in itself.

Yes, it’s a challenge, and a good lyricist, or one who likes working with projects like that, will probably find it easier than, say, another lyricist whose reputation comes from a different area of songwriting. If we’re talking specifically about “The War of the Worlds,” Gary Osborne was the main lyricist, but he and Paul Vigrass wrote the lyrics to the single “Forever Autumn,” and I wrote the lyrics to the opening theme called “The Eve of the War.”

– On the first Vigrass and Osborne album you had Eddie Offord and Martin Rushent, who would become famous producers in their own right, as engineers. Do you feel you influenced them in some way?

We probably influenced each other. They were the two main engineers at Advision Studios in London, where I used to record a lot, and they did a great job. In the era we’re talking about, with no computers and nothing technological like that, the sounds were developed between producer and an engineer, and there were times when I, as a producer, would describe a sound that I was looking for: if it wasn’t a musical phrase or a note, I was looking for an atmosphere or a sound effect, rather than a sound, and a great engineer would interpret that. There was another engineer named Gary Martin who also worked at Advision, and he was the one I recorded “Rock On” with – he understood, very early on, that I didn’t want to use anything that was making chordal notes, and he contributed a sort of the Fifties-style echo, which helped the slap of the bass guitar, and the echo that Gary put on it made a big impression on the overall sound of the production.

– What changed on the second Vigrass and Osborne album, “Steppin’ Out”? On the first one, you wrote all the music; on its follow-up, you co-wrote only a few pieces.

No, I think I wrote the majority of the music, and there are a few that they wrote. I certainly did all the arranging and production, but I think as the composer I wrote seven or eight songs. [Jeff’s co-credited on three pieces. – DME] It never was a competition: when you work as a team, you talk about material, and they came in with a couple of songs that sounded great to me, so I said, “Sure, let’s record them!”

– Playing on that album was not only Barry De Souza, but also FACES’ Kenny Jones from on drums and Tetsu Yamauchi on bass. How did you engage all of them?

Don’t forget that Kenny went on to be the drummer for THE WHO as well. I was introduced to him and some other players on recommendation, because their reputation sometimes preceded them. But all my scores, particularly in that era, were written out, so I knew the type of interpretation I was looking for. Then, when whoever it was that came in to play, they had the music in front of them – they would learn what I had written and embellish wherever they were able to contribute their magic. I mean reputations are built on not what’s written, but sometimes on what’s not written, and I had the benefit of some great musicians playing on these scores.

– You also scored a very unusual, for you, record: you wrote, arranged and produced “Now My World Is Yours” for Tony Christie.

I had been asked to produce Tony who had come off a couple of big hits, and when you start to produce an artist, you meet them, you talk about perhaps what they’re looking for musically as songs, so I wrote this song with that in mind – that’s the only way to describe it. It was a song that gave his voice – and he has a terrific voice! – plenty of power, because his voice was placed out front.

– Another unusual choice for you was arranging “Seasons In Your Eyes” on “Firing On All Six” by LONE STAR. I mean you never really worked with hard rock,

To me, it was about the band and their music. It happened that their producer [Gary Lyons] was somebody that I had worked with previously – he had been an engineer on some of my sessions – and he asked me to do a string orchestration for them. This was an instance where I was asked to do something very specific, and it was a lot of fun doing it.

– There was a single “Apes’ Shuffle” backed with “Theme From Star Trek” that was released in the mid-Seventies, credited to THE JEFF WAYNE SPACE SHUTTLE. Do you consider it a preparation for your magnum opus?

That’s nothing to do with me, and whoever was making those records under that name, I don’t know if he was doing it knowing who I was, or he was doing it because he didn’t know who I was. I have no idea if there’s another artist called Jeff Wayne, not that I’m aware of, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t. There was a stand-up comic with the same name, though, who was based in LA, and he was on occasion getting fan mail to him which was meant for me, and I was receiving some fan mail that was meant for him, so we briefly got to know each other, and exchanged our various fan mail, but we haven’t been in touch for five or ten years. But I had no involvement with that single, and the whole thing is a bit wacky.

– It was around that time that you began focusing on “The War of the Worlds”: how did it feel to be working on a grand scale as opposed to doing an album as a collection of songs?

Again, it was a challenge – but it was a challenge I was excited about. It wasn’t something that was new territory to me, but it was definitely the first time I started, as I mentioned, with a blank page. Once we had the rights, we were off and running. I read and reread the book. My stepmom became an adapter of the H. G. Wells novel, I had given lots of notes of ideas of what might be considered a key sequence for putting music to, and we eventually came up with a list of the key characters that were going to appear in my musical version. From that point, it evolved as a collaboration of my music, Doreen’s storytelling, and the lyrics, mostly by Gary.

– Did you feel that it would fall in somewhere between ALAN PARSONS PROJECT albums and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals?

No, I never did. I was aware of them, of course, they’re brilliant musicians, and Alan Parsons’ projects were very adventurous from a producing and engineering point of view, but I was just trying to cut my own path. I was interpreting a classic story, the very first science-fiction story ever written, a tale that had a lot to say, and that’s what motivated me. I even composed my score in the same order that H. G. Wells wrote his book, so the first sequence musically is called “The Eve of the War,” which is the same title as Chapter One of his story and which, to me, read like an overture. In that overture, he doesn’t give too much away – he’s setting the scene, and by the time you finish that first chapter, or listening to “The Eve of the War,” you get a sense, I hope on my musical side, that something is coming. We don’t quite know yet what, but there is something that’s about to happen, that’s a major event, and then on it goes.

– Other interpretations of this novel were almost all visual, but you were working on a purely aural thing, and you were aware of the Orson Welles radio play. Did you want your musical to have a similar psychological impact on the listener?

Well, I could only hope that it would reach people in a similar way that the 1938 radio production by Orson Welles had, but it didn’t make me select anything deliberately to try to get that effect. In what I composed and produced, the artists playing the various given roles would communicate enough of a mood that brought it all together and captured you as a listener.

– But you were driving the narrative through spoken word!

Yeah, there’s definitely spoken word by the one non-singing role. That’s the role of The Journalist. The Journalist has survived, some six years earlier, this Martian invasion, and now, six years later, he’s recounting the story of survival for his newspaper. He is the one constant throughout our double album, and all the shows we’ve done and everything else around it, because he’s the one that travels from the beginning to the end and meets people along the way. Some of them survive and some do not.

– Did you find it easy to relate to The Journalist as a person who studied journalism?

Yes, I think very much that. I may have switched to music, but I must say that the disciplines, some of the range of ways good journalists are meant to work in, has stayed with me. And I think I couldn’t have done “The War of the Worlds” and a few other things throughout my career without that, so not only was it enjoyable, but very worthwhile.

– Journalists like labels, but I think you never once called your work on “The War of the Worlds” a rock opera – you always called it your “musical version”: why?

That’s what it is. It’s been called a lot of things, and I have no issue with anybody who calls it a rock opera, a concept album, a prog-rock work. To me, it’s a musical version, because I’m not trying to place it in a category. It’s just it starts and two records later it finishes, and whatever came out of me as a composer and a producer was a work. I didn’t ever think of it in any other way.

– But you still tried to keep it fashionable with the overt use of disco arrangements.

I was composing and producing it in a time when disco was the king of the dancefloor and punk was revolutionary music of the day, so as a young musician I would be influenced by that. So “The Eve of the War” primarily is a four-to-the-floor club groove, if you want to call it that, but what’s on top of that and everything else, that’s just original, without any particular style. But yeah, I mean, why wouldn’t I have been influenced by the music I was living and working in on other projects?

– Speaking of dancefloor, how much involved you were in all the remixes?

There’s been over three hundred remixes – many of them done by third parties on their own, some in collaboration with me and my team and in my studios, and some just done on my own. It’s a mixture. Some have been fantastic, I must say. And a few that I’ve done, I’m very proud of. It’s an art form in its own way, the remix, whether you’re using samples or creating a new recording based upon a tune that you’ve written; it’s a whole area of music that has been around for a long time now. The tempos have changed, usually gotten a bit faster, and the energy level is a bit faster in today’s club music, but “club music” is a very general term: within it, you have all the subheadings of music that you can dance to or hear a different way of interpreting an established piece of music.

– Did some of those remixes use unreleased narration? I think I heard quite a few lines on remixes that I don’t remember hearing on the original album.

Yes, you’re right about that – very well spotted! When we did edits for the original double album’s release, some of the storyline had to be cut to bring it down to a time length that worked on the black vinyl disc, the main format of the day, but we’ve always kept those scripts, even Richard Burton and any other character or artists that played characters. We’ve kept them, and they have found their way back in a few remixes.

– You said that it were Vigrass and Osborne who would find vocalists for your commercials. But who found the singers for “The War of the Worlds”?

With the exception of one, Chris Thompson, who sang the song called “Thunder Child,” all the others were either those who I had known and worked with, or was introduced to and was able to approach them to consider playing a given role.

– But you didn’t know neither Justin Hayward nor Phil Lynott. Phil was an ingenious choice: I’d say it was the most dramatic vocals in all his career.

First of all, I agree with you about Phil. I was a fan of THIN LIZZY, and they had a song called “Fool’s Gold” [on 1976’s “Johnny The Fox”]: if you listen to it, you’ll hear Phil speaking for something like fifteen-twenty seconds before going into the song. When I heard it, I thought, “Gosh, what a dramatic voice! And what a wonderful singer he is, with his own style and his own sound! If he’d even consider playing the role of the mad Parson, Parson Nathaniel, I’d be really fortunate!” I didn’t know Phil, but somebody that I knew knew his managers, and they passed my offer to Phil. And to my great pleasure, he was interested. He came into the studio, and when he heard my demo – I had done demos of all the songs, for anybody who might be interested in singing them – he was very positive about it. You know, it’s interesting: when something is meant to be, it happens – you don’t have to drag it out and suffer along the way. Phil was up for it from the get-go; he came on board and did a wonderful job. And same for Justin Hayward: I didn’t know him either. Both Phil and Justin were great songwriters in their own right who were being asked to sing somebody else’s songs in a project that you wouldn’t immediately say was a common type of project, yet both agreed to do it and were magnificent.

– When the super deluxe edition of “The War of the Worlds” was announced, I expected the recordings that Paul Rodgers, Carlos Santana and John Lodge did for the project would be included, but they still remained unreleased. What’s the problem?

You’re right about all three, but I’d like to clarify some things. Carlos Santana came to London and spent the better part of the day with me, because the contract that had been negotiated was ready for him to sign and we thought it all done and dusted – only his manager decided to change some of its terms. So I’m in the studio with Carlos, going through what would have been his interpretation of The Heat Ray, which is the main weapon that the fighting machine fires, and his manager is spending the time in another room of the studio with my dad, trying to work out the contract, and when we come to the end, suddenly his manager is saying, “Sorry, it hasn’t worked out!” and taking Carlos out of the studio. We had, with all the guest artists, a common clause that was applicable to everybody, so we couldn’t change Carlos’ contract to satisfy him without changing everybody else’s, it was just not possible. That’s how we didn’t record Carlos, and that’s why there’s nothing that I could have put on had I wanted to.

John Lodge was a different story. John did record “Thunder Child” – we did a whole session! – but it was in the wrong key for him: it was too high. And even though his voice was fantastic, we would have had to re-record it in the lower key. But while I was seriously considering offering to do that, he and THE MOODY BLUES left for a big tour across the States and Canada, and I couldn’t wait three months or more, so we never proceeded. And again, out of respect to John, I never considered putting his recording of “Thunder Child” onto this box set, neither in the deluxe edition or the Ultimate Edition.

Now let’s move over to Paul Rodgers. We did a day of recording with him and he sounded great, but he dropped out pretty much the next day or two days later, when he realized that what was left to do were the acting sections for the role of Parson Nathaniel. Paul knew that Richard Burton was doing the role of The Journalist who interacts with the Parson, and it must have built up in his mind that he was now going to be acting against Richard – but Burton wasn’t coming into the studio, because we had already recorded him. So Paul had only been working with Richard’s recording rather than being in the same room very near each other, acting off of each other’s live performance, so he never completed that role, and as a result, we never had a signed contract that we could use anything that he had recorded.

– And you didn’t try to sign anything specifically for this box set?

No. To me, it’s more about what we did and who we worked with, and it’s not something you want to get into hassles with people. Their managers, their record labels… none of those three were on CBS Records, so we would have had to get clearances from their labels, and sometimes you just have to take the simple route. But Carlos, we never recorded. Paul, we recorded the vocals, never edited it together to make sure it added up to a complete performance, because by the time we would have been doing that, we would have also recorded Paul’s acting sections, but because we didn’t do it, he didn’t come in. His manager, the late Peter Grant, tried to explain to him he wasn’t going to be recording opposite Richard Burton, and that’s as much as we ever learned. Maybe you’re not even getting the full story; you can only accept what you hear. We tried, because he’s a magnificent singer, but no, we didn’t get him back in. And in a way, sometimes something wonderful comes out of something that isn’t a good result, and in this case, I met and worked with Phil on it, so I’m not very disappointed at all when you consider the brilliance that Phil provided in playing Parson Nathaniel.

– Back in 1978, “Music Week” wrote that his vocals were recorded in Canada, but there are interactions between you and Phil on a few pieces in this new box set. Did you go to Canada, then?

No, no! Everything that Phil did was recorded at Advision Studios, but he had a break in the sessions with me because THIN LIZZY had a tour.

– The new reissue also has several pieces sung by Chris Amoo from THE REAL THING who didn’t make it to the final release. Why?

When Chris came in to do some demos, I had already known him and the whole band – they had done quite a number of sessions for me on commercials and other things, and they toured with me when I was MDing for David Essex – and I knew he had a fantastic voice, but I wasn’t at that stage of developing the project yet. Those were only demos, and Chris did them beautifully – “Forever Autumn” was one of those tracks – but the style of singing and the type of artist I would ultimately be looking for needed to be of a style and of a character that was known as the sung thoughts of The Journalist. So it wasn’t a question of not choosing him, because Chris’ demos were, and remain, when I listen to them on the odd occasion, glorious.

– After “The War of the Worlds” became a major success, a slew of covers of its pieces followed, with “The Eve of the War” recorded by Allen Toussaint’s orchestra. How did you react to artists of his stature interpreting your work?

If it just is something that I’m notified about, or I get sent, and I see somebody’s name of such stature, it’s a great compliment. It’s an honor to have one’s music chosen by another artist, as opposed to when somebody is wanting to do a remix and they want to use samples and, perhaps, voice recordings as well, because then I know about it up front. But when somebody covers your song, it’s a wonderful feeling.

– At which point did you get the idea of taking it all to the stage and then on tour?

The idea existed very early on. When my original double album first came out, I had approaches from a few promoters to see if I’d be interested in doing it, but what was in my head was more of the type of productions that we wound up doing when we started in 2006. There weren’t many arenas around at that time. The big rock bands and artists might play at the stadiums, which, of course, existed, but arenas weren’t very developed at that point, so the type of shows that I was being asked to do were more concert halls: two-and-a-half- to three-, three-and-a-half-thousand seaters, the Royal Albert Hall about a five-thousand seater, whereas arenas start at four- to five-thousand seaters now in the UK and Europe and go up, like the new Manchester arena that we played recently, to just under twenty-two thousands. But those didn’t exist during then, and it was only some years later that we started developing an idea for what was the forerunner of our current tours.

This would have been around the mid-Eighties, when I approached Richard Burton to sit for a 3D talking head. I met with him in London with my dad, and he agreed to do it, so we took him to the studio that had the technology to build those heads, which began in “The Haunted House” in Disneyland, in Los Angeles, only those models were miniature: they were built around actors who sat to have these talking heads done, and then the bodies were more like a structured build. They weren’t moving, but the heads were. We spent a day with Richard, took him to the studio, and showed him the technology. Richard loved the idea, but he had come into London, having just finished a movie called “1984,” and was going on holiday with his wife, Sally, to Geneva, and then he was coming back to start another movie. So he said, “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Let’s meet again then!” But about a week later, my wife Geraldine came running out into the garden where I was doing some training: she had just heard that Richard passed away. That finished us off for the time being of even wanting to do anything that represented his participation.

Jump forward to 2006, and it was with images of Richard partially supplied by Sally and some others that we had, and the talking head was created – about ten feet in height and four or five feet wide – but not with Richard performing. We had an excellent actor from Newcastle in England, Aaron Robson, who had very similar bone structure and hair to Richard’s and who learned all the ways Richard spoke and acted, so he eventually sat for this talking head. He was fed Richard’s voice and he mimed to performance of all that we had recorded with Richard. But in order to make a talking head work, he had to be clamped quite tightly on the left and right side of his face and top and bottom (shows with his hands how) to prevent movement – he could wiggle his nose and he obviously could move his mouth and any mouth characteristics around your cheeks, but there had to be no movement whatsoever for it to work. So he did all the sequences that Richard did, and then, once that filming was done of Aaron, the modeling began, and they used his performance to model over and to turn him into Richard Burton.

– Why was it so crucial to have the original image of an actor instead of using the narration with a computer generated image of the character?

It’s a different thing entirely. It was Richard’s voice that was heard by the audience, and that was a very appealing ingredient for those who knew my album, because his voice is very iconic. He was considered, if not the greatest, but one of the very few great actors who had voices that were magnetic and rich and mellifluous. So we advertised and promoted our arena tour of “The War of the Worlds” – with me doing a lot of proud talking about it – with the mention of bringing Richard back to life. We used that talking head in our first arena tour, and then we did it again, a year or so later, but not as a talking head, but with 3D holography, which was now available, with another actor, filmed in California. And again, models were made to look like it was Richard live in this production.

– What you eventually got on stage, did it live up to your imagination?

You have to judge it in the time that whatever technology you’re using is being compared with anything else, and we were using the most advanced technology available at the time, and I think it was recognized as that, certainly going by the audience’s reactions and reviews, but technology moves on. In this tour that we’ve just recently finished – it’s now and has been for some years – we use the hologram of Liam Neeson. We, again, filmed it in 3D, and then brought to screens that should have had clear imagery, but the art screens were not actually very good compared to the razor-crisp 3D we now have even in the very biggest arenas that we play where people in the back row or up in the gods, far away, can see clearly, and it’s as crisp and believable as one could have ever hoped for. In fact, there were, which we never anticipated, friendly arguments going on: some people were saying that it was really Liam alive on stage, and somebody would answer, “No, it’s not. He’s in a technological creation!” And they’d go back and forth. (Laughs.) That’s how good our technology now is. It turned out, and we didn’t realize it at the time, that the screens made the difference, because we are the first entertainment that’s ever used them. They come from a different usage, from big department stores where you see life-size images in the windows advertising whatever they’re promoting, but we used them for our tour, and the difference was extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary!

To give you a couple of examples, we have two what we call “tricks” in the show. Well, we have several, but two tricks involve The Journalist. One is when he’s in his house, in Maybury Hill in Woking: he’s just escaped safely from the first Martian cylinder that landed nearby, on Horsell Common, and then he hears somebody crawling into his house – it’s a young Artilleryman, who thinks the house is empty until he hears the voice of The Journalist. They suddenly see each other, and The Journalist takes pity on The Artilleryman and offers him a glass of water. Now, remember, our Journalist, Liam Neeson, is 3D holography, he’s not alive on stage, but The Artilleryman, is, and takes the glass from The Journalist and drinks it, and it is so believable now that there’s been debate: How could that happen?

And there’s a second occasion, deep into the second half, when our Journalist meets Parson Nathaniel and his wife, below ground in a cellar, in a building, and the Parson eventually loses control of himself – he is raving, and he’s too loud – and he comes across to The Journalist, who tries to stop him from behaving like this because the Martians are above, and they can hear the Parson, or will hear him, if he continues to rant, so The Journalist knocks him out with a right cross. Liam used to be a top amateur boxer, so when he throws the punch, it’s truly believable. The Parson is right up close to where the punch would land, and he reels back and is knocked out. Between that and the glass of water, we’ve been playing this for years, they’re not new tricks, but so many people after this tour have commented, “How did they do that?” It’s been there since our very beginning; it’s just the screens weren’t good enough for it to really register, unless, maybe, in the front rows of the arenas. We have big orchestras, and on this occasion, a number of our string players asked, “When did those moments get added in?” Because they could see The Journalist from where they’re sitting, but they never knew those tricks were in.

– The visual elements are great, but you also have great musicians on stage, including those who were on the original album – Flowers, Spedding, Hayward, Thompson – but also Laurie Whitefield who didn’t play on it. Was it you who picked all those players?

It was a mixture: I was introduced to some of them, others came about being recommended – Chris recommended a lady who played harp and electronic percussion – but most of them I’d worked with previously over many years. If you know somebody’s style, you know how they play, and it’s a big starting point to know if they’re interested in working with you that you know they’re going to really do it superbly well. Laurie came in on the second or third tour, and has remained ever since; he plays not just electric and acoustic guitars but also the mandolin and the Persian tar – he’s a very versatile musician.

– You didn’t stop working on other projects after “The War of the Worlds” became a success. The following year you worked on an interesting album titled “Illusions” by WINDS OF CHANGE, again with Herbie and Gary, but also with Del Newman, Tony Hymas and Simon Phillips

WINDS OF CHANGE were a four-piece band who came from different walks of musical life. Not that they couldn’t play anything, but one was more involved in jazz, another in classical music, so between the four of them, they played all the wind instruments that were out there. I had worked with three of the four of them, and got interested in this album, with a view toward presenting a whole range of genres. I actually performed on a funk piece called “Sneaking Up Behind You” – I played vocoder there – and the others that you mentioned were people that I brought in for different reasons to help out. It was one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever been involved in, and while it wasn’t a huge commercial success, it received probably the best reviews that I’ve ever had. As a producer, I signed the band to my label, and it was just a very satisfying album, certainly on a musician’s level. Some of what we selected was wonderful, well-established music, and there were a couple of original pieces that I commissioned to a couple of the band members.

But because the album itself was complex in terms of the diversity of music we were recording. I was doing a number of the arrangements, and I invited Del Newman, who was a very highly regarded string orchestrator. I asked him to do a version of “Pachelbel Canon”: it’s a gorgeous piece, and the string orchestrations existed already, so Del was taking that original orchestration and adapting it for the string orchestra that I booked for the album; he did the arrangement and conducted the session on that track, while I was in the studio, acting solely as the producer. I was thrilled that Del signed on to do it, as I was about what Simon Phillips did, I had worked with him on some sessions – not many times, but enough to know that his style of drumming would be perfect.

– There would be one more collaboration related to classical music: “Beyond The Planets” where you worked with Rick Wakeman and Kevin Peek and where you added your own piece to Holst’s “The Planets” suite.

I didn’t make the decision. It started with Kevin, whom I knew from some sessions back here in London and who was one of two guitarists in a band called SKY, where Herbie played the bass and tuba. They were about to start a new album, which was going to be an interpretation of the “Planets” suite, and I was asked to compose an opening piece as a prelude to it, while Rick was asked to compose a piece after it was over. We both agreed, but soon thereafter, Kevin returned to Australia, parted company with SKY, and took over that project. So even though both Rick and I did our particular compositions, it didn’t wind up on the album for the band; it wound up on Kevin’s debut solo album, and it did quite well. To my surprise, it garnered good reviews, but then, Kevin was a brilliant guitarist.

– What about the “Matador” single? I think it was a football-based thing that, apart from Herbie and Jo Partridge who had worked on “The War of the Worlds,” had Dave Mattacks and Clem Clempson.

“Matador” was the theme music for ITV’s World Cup coverage of 1984, when it was played in Spain, so the title comes from, of course, the Spanish matadors. It did quite well in the singles charts, to my surprise, because it was thematic, and it’s hard to get a theme to break through into. As for the players, if you develop really close working relationships with musicians – or singers, for that matter – you don’t have to say as much as when you’re starting with somebody who is less familiar with me, or I’m less familiar with them, or when sometimes somebody walks in cold, and doesn’t know you at all, to evolve into a part that is either written out in full or close enough to be handed to the given musician. If you’ve worked together, he or she knows how to interpret that – you talk it through, they try things out, and you say, “Yeah, that’s good!” or “No, perhaps you can move it into this direction…” And you eventually get there.

– A little earlier than that you’d became Justin Hayward’s producer. You didn’t know Justin before “The War of the Worlds” but ended up working on his albums? So your friendship developed?

Yes, it did. We did get on very well and became pretty good friends during and after “The War of the Worlds.” His work with THE MOODY BLUES also included a solo album that he was due to record, and he asked me if I would write or co-write some of the songs and arrange and produce the album. It would eventually be called “Night Flight” after the first single, which happened to be one that I wrote the music for and Paul Vigrass wrote the lyrics. Justin, of course, did all the vocals. It was a great record. I really felt that, and if you go by the reviews, that this was going to be quite a big success around the world.

– Justin keeps returning to your live productions, right?

Yes, indeed. He’s done about five tours over the years.

– What do you find special about his performance to keep working with him?

The fact that, on my original double album, his vocals personified the quintessential British singing voice – it’s very distinctive. And his feeling for some of the material… Listen to the material he wrote for THE MOODY BLUES! Because he responded so well to my approach for him to sing “Forever Autumn” and “The Eve of the War,” I was just thrilled that he agreed to come on board. And he did those tracks very quickly, not just his lead vocals, but all the harmonies that he knew would help give the sound that people would know from his band.

– And how did you get involved with Roger Daltrey?

I first met Roger when I asked him to consider playing the role of Parson Nathaniel. He came into the studio with his manager, Bill Curbishley, and they were very impressed with what they heard. But Roger had just played a priest or a man of the cloth in a film quite soon before I was doing “The War of the Worlds” and he didn’t want to get typecast in that all he’d ever do was people of faith. And so he passed, but they remembered my work, and they knew some of it as well, particularly with David Essex. Now jumping forward a year and a half or two years, to around 1980, I was approached by Roger’s management company to see if I’d be interested in composing the score, as well as arranging and producing it and various songs that were being written for the role of John McVicar, who was known at one point to be Britain’s most dangerous escaped prisoner. But you wouldn’t be seeing Roger singing – it would be over the action of the sequences, because it wasn’t meant to be a musical film; it was a dramatic film, but there were, however, many songs that were meant to be the voice of McVicar.

I was a big WHO fan. I remember I was in college in California when the British Invasion came about and THE WHO, THE BEATLES, of course, THE ROLLING STONES and THE MOODY BLUES were the four big groups that led it. So there I was being asked to do a whole movie score and work with THE WHO, who were to play on all the backing tracks. Anything that wasn’t singing that you heard in the movie was my compositions, including “Escape” that was in two parts, with “Escape Part One” ending up a the B-side of a single. And Roger, I remember this very clearly, and the rest of the band thought that music was most exciting and worked perfectly with the sequences on screen.

– Did you find it easy or challenging to score films?

A bit of both. Coming back to my background, a commercial is very short by comparison with long sequences in a movie, and TV themes are their own length, but what they have in common is, if you’re being asked to compose something, you’re being entrusted by a director, a producer, a movie company or a client with getting a sound for their work, and that is daunting. But if you get your head around the fact that you are being asked because they believe you’re the right person for that job, it relaxes you. I had confidence in myself as a composer, an arranger, a producer, a conductor, so I can’t think of many of the countless recordings that I did that I ever had to reconsider. Maybe I got it wrong, and on those couple of occasions I redid it. I never questioned myself, though, because I felt the director and the producers of whatever it happened to be knew what they were looking for, just as I, when I’m wearing my producer’s hat, know what I’m looking to create. It may take a while to get there, but it’s my job to communicate that, so I always respect it in reverse.

– Still, with commercials and TV themes, you’re shown the complete work that you have to score, but with movies, it’s usually fragments and rushes from various parts of the movie, often not in the correct sequence. It’s the main challenge, isn’t it?

You’re right: if anybody who’s asked to do a movie score is put into that situation, it makes it harder for them because – and I can only give you my experiences – they’re looking at a big work that’s telling a story which may have different layers to it. Sometimes, the music is meant to be the opposite to what you’re seeing – it’s a counterpoint – and if you don’t get a true breadth of what the movie, the characters, the storyline are about, you’re working in more of an isolated capacity. You’re looking at it as a sequence on its own, and then another sequence, and as you just said, not even necessarily in the order in which it’s eventually going to appear. In today’s world, editors have such an impact on their own, they’re far more than just splicing film together – they have a creative input of how rhythm and the flow of music and images, and action, and dialogue all come together, and I find that very exciting. But it can be a challenge, there’s no question about it.

– Now on to the “Spartacus” album. You could go the easy way and create a musical version of, say, “The Time Machine” and continue drilling into Wells. Why the story of Spartacus?

It’s interesting that after “The War of the Worlds” came out and was this very substantial hit, I was sent first editions by H.G. Wells’ publishers of just about everything he had ever written who wanted me to do a musical work to those books: “The Time Machine” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau” were only two of them, because he was a very prolific writer. But what I wanted to do after “The War of the Worlds” was to find something from a different sort of genre. I was, and remain, keen in stories that touch the human condition, and “Spartacus” was a true story about a slave, set at the height of the Roman Republic. Spartacus was from Thrace, which is today Bulgaria, who was captured as a prisoner of war and, because of his physical size and strength, sent to a school of gladiators in Capua, Southern Italy. From there, he led a revolt with about two hundred other gladiators who followed him, and that’s what began what became known as the Third Servile War. It came close over two years, bringing down pretty much every legion that the Romans could throw at Spartacus and his armies.

– I assume you had read a novel titled “Spartacus” by Howard Fast.

Yeah! What a moving story it was! So after the War of the Worlds, my dad, Doreen and I started talking: shall we do another one? CBS, before it was Sony, were keen for me to take on another project, and “Spartacus” came up. I reread the Fast novel and saw the movie that starred Kirk Douglas, which came out in 1960, and when I started researching it – by then we had the beginnings of the Internet – I began making contact with museums and libraries, first in Italy and then in Bulgaria, and I found how opposite the telling of the Spartacus story was. Rome was enraged with the success that he and his armies had, and all the Romans wanted to do was to demonstrate what a mistake it was for him and his followers and to expunge the name of Spartacus from Italian history under the Romans. The other side of the coin was that Spartacus was seen a little more accurately, from what he did to how he succumbed after the last battle. I wound up spending about three years researching that subject, so the amount of information I gathered was voluminous, but very enriching, and it came to remind me that, as moving as the Howard Fast novel and movie were, it wasn’t the real story of Spartacus. It didn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of accuracies as well in Mr. Fast’s novel, but I felt that I was going to treat my version of Spartacus as a piece of history and not try to put the Hollywood spin on it, that between my dad, Doreen and myself, we’ll come up with our own version.

We had just started on it when, tragically, Doreen died from breast cancer in California, and that set us back – it took us a while to get over that loss, but we did, and we began working with a few different writers, each having their own view about the same story. Eventually it settled down, and out came my musical version of “Spartacus,” albeit it was quite a number of years after “The War of the Worlds” was released, and it came out in a different period of time, with the music scene having changed. Digital technology was now pretty much in the forefront, so it was a different environment, and while it did well, it didn’t come close to matching the breadth of the success of that double album. But it’s still a work that I’m proud of, and I want to revisit it with a view to perhaps putting it on as a live presentation. It’s a natural for visuals, in its own way, just as “The War of the Worlds” proved to be.

– There was an interesting selection of performers, including Fish and Jimmy Helms, but also Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Indeed, my cast was sensational. I can’t say more than that how wonderful it was to work with such artists. And there’s something about the Welsh voice, because Anthony – who I called Sir Tone, because he became a Sir and he had just won the Academy Award for “Silence of the Lambs” when I worked with him – and Catherine are both from Wales, and Anthony is from Port Talbot, where Richard Burton and Michael Sheen, who I also worked with, were from. You can see my grand piano in the back: on tea breaks and lunch breaks in my “Spartacus” sessions with Anthony – we did all of his work here, in the main room of my studio – he used to come over and play it like a professional classical pianist, so I used to look forward to our breaks. A brilliant player! He was a joy to work with.

– Again, was it you who selected the performers?

Over the years I get asked, “How did you choose those artists?” and my answer is the same I don’t choose them – I can only hope that, once I’ve thought about who might be great for a given role, they would agree to work with me.

– But Sir Anthony and Catherine were not particularly known as musical artists.

Well, Anthony didn’t sing on “Spartacus,” but he sure as heck acted extraordinarily well. He’s an amazing and varied actor. But Catherine started off singing and dancing in working man’s clubs in and around the Bristol area and near where she was from, so it was something she was trained at from a young girl. Some years later, she was in the chorus line of a Broadway musical that came to London, to, I think, the Drury Lane Theatre – she was the understudy for the leading lady who, as in entertainment stories that occasionally pop up, got ill, and Catherine stepped out and took over as the lead. She does have a big, beautiful voice, and that’s how she came to play the woman of Spartacus. I say, “woman,” because nobody really knows, historically, whether Spartacus had a wife, but it was known he was with a woman whom we gave a Thracian name of Palene. She and Anthony were like a ping pong match: if the story was going to the side of the slaves, she was the voice of it, as well as her personal relationship with Spartacus that she would tell about, and If it was through the eyes of the Romans, that was played by Anthony who also performed the role of Marcus Crassus, a senator, a wealthy man who was credited with doing what those who preceded him failed to do, with the defeat of Spartacus.

– How did Fish and LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO came on board?

Fish was just somebody whose work I admired. I knew of his work with MARILLION, and knew that he wasn’t their original lead, that he came on a certain time after, but I didn’t know Fish personally, so somebody who knew him introduced me to him. He was keen and worked so well here, in my studio. All of this was pretty much done in my studio, with the exception of LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO who played the voices of the slaves that came from not only Africa, where they were from, but also from other nations. I, like many, many others, became familiar with them from their work with Paul Simon on his “Graceland” album, and I made contact through their management company based in New York. I did demos for them, and they were very eager to be involved, so I spent a week in New York with them and others on our production team.

As I discovered very quickly, they never wore headphones and weren’t specialists in singing in English – they sung their best parts in Zulu – and it took us a while to settle into how were we going to work together. It required a second week, but they were going back on tour with Paul Simon, so there was about a two-month gap before they came into this studio. It was a brilliant experience, one of my most prized memories of working with a ten-piece a cappella group. Gorgeous voices, beautiful people to work with, a cherished memory! But I also have to mention Alan King who played Spartacus – I deliberately wanted somebody who wasn’t known, and I was introduced to this great singer named, who was signed to the same management company as THE WHO – and Bill Fredericks from THE DRIFTERS, although not the original incarnation, who came in to sing the lead on “Going Home” that was done with LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO, and who should definitely be remembered.

– And who the instrumentalists were? I don’t recall the album’s booklet listing them.

This was not quite the same approach musically that I had for “The War of the Worlds,” where I organized a band before I started adding symphonic string orchestras and all sorts of other instruments; this was essentially an electronic production, because I had in my own mind a style of sound that I was looking to accomplish. There was no band that ever came in on any one session, it was individual musicians that would come in. Jo Partridge was the main guitarist, and Pino Palladino played bass on one or two of the tracks.

– On that album, a piece called “The Eagle & The Hawk” stood out as a dance track, which reminded me of your use of disco on “The Eve of the War” all those years ago.

Oh my! Interestingly, musically, it’s not a four-to-the-floor type of disco beat, because it changes time signatures and all that, but it’s an exciting piece. The reason it’s called “The Eagle & The Hawk” is that Spartacus had a hawk-like nose and had a nickname, the Hawk, while eagle was the insignia for the Roman armies, so that piece represented the Roman armies against Spartacus in a climactic battle that ended the first half of the album.

– You’ve got two great albums to your name, apart from the records you produced. Is there anything else that you hope you will do one day?

I hope so. What I never anticipated all those many years ago was that “The War of the Worlds” would grow into what it’s become and that, starting from 2006 right up to just a month or so ago, I’d be spending a large part of my life touring these giant arenas. We played the West End and all sorts of other interpretations of my musical version, and that’s probably what’s kept me from everything else. All these many years, I’ve been asked to get involved in quite a number of projects, from film work to other opportunities, and have done very few outside of fighting Martians.

– So, basically, you’ve been preserving the legacy of “The War of the Worlds” for all these years.

I’m very much hands-on, and anybody that works with me, or has worked with me, knows that I feel very protective of it – right down to reminding people when they call it “War of the Worlds” instead of “The War of the Worlds”: not so! H. G. wrote about it as if it was the defining war of all worlds! The fact that George Lucas gave so much of his life, and probably still does, to “Star Wars” and what he developed from one movie, gives you an idea of what something can grow to if you remain believing in it and loving it. If I, at any point, stop loving “The War of the Worlds,” I can’t imagine any reason I’d hang around and keep working on it. I don’t believe in just exploiting something for the sake of it. Trying to nourish it, grow it, interpret it: that’s why I’m still on it.

– Is that why you consider it so important to personally go on the road and not sit home while others perform?

Absolutely! For most musicians and singers, live work is the zenith of why you’re in music. Conducting my own music, in this case a musical work, is about as good as it gets, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to conduct every tour that we’ve ever done and perform certain guest conducting roles that I’ve done with other orchestras. It’s simply because I love that element. As a composer, a lot of your time is very much alone – if you’re writing and arranging, even when you’re producing in a studio these days, you’re often with your engineer or a programmer and not many other people, unless it’s a big film score, and that’s great fun when you’re working with brilliant musicians in a studio. That’s not the same but almost as exciting as a live performance, where you only get one shot at doing it.

– Speaking about performance.. A silly question: why didn’t you get an OBE yet?

I’m not British, so I don’t think I would qualify even if I was considered. I’m not a citizen. I’m a permanent resident – that’s all I’ve ever been. What would be the benefit? Probably now, in the way tax laws have changed and everything, but it’s complicated and it’s expensive, and I like a simple life.

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