Woebot
Well-known member
Get your hankys out BTW
This was playing int the office the other day and it was the first time I'd heard it since it I was nine years old. I've mentioned before how "No Nathanial No" breaks me up something serious, as this was the music i was listening to as I was being sent back to prep school (i was packed off from home at the age of seven). The feelings of emotional devastation, pretty much compounded by the fact that I was also miserable and alienated at home (I know I know its a real blubberer this one) just made the impact of this record overpowering.
Anyway yesterday was the first time i'd heard it since then, and I was struck firstly how bloody good it is. The music, I know its only Jeff Wayne, well its pretty excellent. All that quite controlled bombast, spooky kate-bush-esque martian leitmotifs, clangorous sliding guitars, the bleeps; the whole thing coming across like an anglophile Goblin- thats to say super-slick nasty sleaze rock. Burton (as k-punk I think mentioned somewhere, scarily world-worn)
It dawned on me too that the reason I must have identified it with it was that commonfolk, the victems of the martians, Richard Burton included, are so entiely helpless. They're quite completely at the whim of forces outwith their control. Reduced to the state of orphans, children. There are resonances too between the state of the martian attack and London's predicament at the moment. And again, perhaps more appositely, between the state of Iraq's subject to the invasion of the faceless American war machine.
What added extra depth to my own personal recollection of it was that I was introduced to it, almost forcibly, by my housemaster of the time. A very fucked-up man. Essentially a child-abuser who really relished the powerlessness of children (wont go into it in too much detail, suffice to say that he would, amongst other things, beat me every week for things which I hadnt done, for reasons I never understood) I suppose he was the monster who lurked awaiting my return to school. Ended up commiting an auto-erotic suicide. Vile.
I was so totally knocked out by hearing the record again that I actually had to slip out of the office and hide. It hit me like a juggernaut. Whats the film like incidentally? Anything with Tom Cruise in it is, as a yardstick, utter crap.
This was playing int the office the other day and it was the first time I'd heard it since it I was nine years old. I've mentioned before how "No Nathanial No" breaks me up something serious, as this was the music i was listening to as I was being sent back to prep school (i was packed off from home at the age of seven). The feelings of emotional devastation, pretty much compounded by the fact that I was also miserable and alienated at home (I know I know its a real blubberer this one) just made the impact of this record overpowering.
Anyway yesterday was the first time i'd heard it since then, and I was struck firstly how bloody good it is. The music, I know its only Jeff Wayne, well its pretty excellent. All that quite controlled bombast, spooky kate-bush-esque martian leitmotifs, clangorous sliding guitars, the bleeps; the whole thing coming across like an anglophile Goblin- thats to say super-slick nasty sleaze rock. Burton (as k-punk I think mentioned somewhere, scarily world-worn)
It dawned on me too that the reason I must have identified it with it was that commonfolk, the victems of the martians, Richard Burton included, are so entiely helpless. They're quite completely at the whim of forces outwith their control. Reduced to the state of orphans, children. There are resonances too between the state of the martian attack and London's predicament at the moment. And again, perhaps more appositely, between the state of Iraq's subject to the invasion of the faceless American war machine.
What added extra depth to my own personal recollection of it was that I was introduced to it, almost forcibly, by my housemaster of the time. A very fucked-up man. Essentially a child-abuser who really relished the powerlessness of children (wont go into it in too much detail, suffice to say that he would, amongst other things, beat me every week for things which I hadnt done, for reasons I never understood) I suppose he was the monster who lurked awaiting my return to school. Ended up commiting an auto-erotic suicide. Vile.
I was so totally knocked out by hearing the record again that I actually had to slip out of the office and hide. It hit me like a juggernaut. Whats the film like incidentally? Anything with Tom Cruise in it is, as a yardstick, utter crap.
