Orson Welles' gripping 1938 radio adaptation of Wells' 1898 novel stirred up a degree of panic among those who were foxed by its realism, while the 1958 movie version stands as a sci-fi classic.
When the cumbersomely titled double album Jeff Wayne's Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds was released in 1978, it seemed we humans were once more ready for an intoxicating fix of the heebie-jeebies.
Wayne, a musician of only moderate success whose collaboration with fading Brit heart-throb David Essex got him a foot in the door with the financiers, secured the project's success when actor Richard Burton signed on as narrator (the Journalist).
Burton's resonant spoken-word pieces evoke much of Welles' gravitas, balancing the rest of the cast's less accomplished dramatic efforts as the adventurous prog-rock set piece wends its way through the battlefields of London.
Essex (the Artilleryman) plays it like a bewildered refugee from a school production of Peter Pan, while Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott (Parson Nathaniel) chews up the scenery in an hilariously mad rant against the Devil. Julie Covington as Nathaniel's wife Beth can but meekly protest before a plummeting cylinder mercifully accounts for her.
But it's all great fun, and very much secondary to the memorable music that propels the story along.
The Moody Blues' Justin Hayward delivers stirring vocal performances in Eve Of The War and hit single Forever Autumn, while Wayne cobbles together some evocative effects out of a saucepan and toilet bowl (the unscrewing of an alien cylinder's lid) and a bottleneck slide (the heat ray). If your skin doesn't crawl at the sound of a tripod's "Ulla!" war cry, you're simply not human.
