Jeff Wayne, Gary Langan and Gaëtan Schurrer are all effusive in their praise for the musicians who played on The War of The Worlds. From Herbie Flowers's rock-solid bass to the guitar antics of Chris Spedding and Jo Partridge, the performances are all impressive, but the greatest praise is reserved for synth wizard Ken 'Prof' Freeman.
"Ken Freeman was a complete genius," insists Langan, and when you discover exactly how much he contributed to The War of The Worlds, it's impossible to disagree. "There's a lot of orchestration that Jeff wrote for orchestral sounds — brass, horns, flutes, piccolos, oboes — and all of those are synthesizer sounds made by Ken," says Schurrer. "The only real orchestra on there is the strings, and some of the strings are actually string machines.
"He started mainly with a Minimoog and an ARP Odyssey, and then later on in the production when they were nearing completion he got a CS80, and they re-overdubbed a lot of the horns and things. I've actually got the Arturia CS80 plug-in, and tried to emulate some of those sounds that Ken came up with, and I fell well short. I think he had an understanding of real instruments and orchestration that gave him the edge as to how to make the synth respond like an instrument would."
"He could create drum sounds," adds Langan. "In 'The Artilleryman And The Fighting Machine', there's the sound of military drums. When you listen to the mixes from 1978 you'd probably swear that it was a military side drum and a military bass drum, but it's not — it's Ken doing jiggery-pokery on his synthesizers."