ULLA!!! (B-Side Treasures - No.1)

There are many things that I can get a bit obsessive over...some of these will become apparent over the life of this Blog I'm sure. One of them is "The War of The Worlds", whether it's the H.G.Wells novel, the 1952 Byron Haskin movie or the Jeff Wayne musical version from 1978.

I have an ever increasing collection based around this fantastic piece of work, many different versions of the book (I'll post some of the covers up here one day, some great ones), artwork and promotional material from the 1952 film and all manner of musical bit's and pieces from the Jeff Wayne project.

Anyway, this post is taken from the 1978 7" version of "Forever Autumn" sung by Justin Hayward and taken from the Jeff Wayne album. The single was quite a hit and I clearly remember hearing it a lot at the time, it's a beautiful song and stood out to me even as an 8 year old. Years later I'm listening to the single and decide to give the "B" side a spin, "The Fighting Machine". I'd assumed it would just be a short version of the Album track probably just with a fade out, but it was a lot better than that. This is a fairly drastic re-edited version, with a new intro and managing to cram in all the best bits of the LP version into a pretty exciting track (at least from my biased viewpoint). A couple of the edits are a bit clunky but overall I really like it and it makes a great 7". I've not seen it appear on CD yet, not even on the massive 7 disc collectors edition from a few years back so here it is. As usual I've ripped it at High Res (96/24) and also created a 320 MP3 version, links in comments.

This post is also the first in a completely random series of "B-Side Treasures"

UUUUUULLLLLAAAAAAA!!!!.