It starred Richard Burton as the narrator-protagonist, Justin Hayward (of The Moody Blues), and David Essex.
"Forever Autumn", "Thunder Child", and "The Spirit of Man" were some of the individual songs.
The repetition of "Ulla!", the sound of the Martians' Heat Rays throughout the musical and certain musical refrains pull the musical into a tight coherent whole.
Burton was recorded separately from the other actors, which means that in scenes where he has to interact with other characters he sounds a little detached.
The official album comes with several paintings by Peter Goodfellow, Geoff Taylor and Michael Trim that help to illustrate the story from beginning to end.
A sign of the album's influence and enduring popularity is that the 1998 computer game based on The War of the Worlds not only featured music from the album and alien war machines based on the illustrations on the album cover, but was actually called Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds.