"Other than a forty-eight-piece string orchestra, everything else was the band or synths." The story of the global hit inspired by Lego and Simon & Garfunkel that soundtracked a Martian invasion
By Alex Burrows ( Classic Rock, Prog ) published yesterday
A decade in the making, the classic ballad featuring Moody Blues singer Justin Hayward was a standout on Jeff Wayne’s epic prog sci-fi album The War Of The Worlds

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“It was a very acoustic, near-Simon And Garfunkel melody,” he says of the playfully whimsical Bookends-style folk-pop tune that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the era. Even now it sounds ideal for a children’s toy advert. But despite using the same tune, it’s a million miles from the ballad conveying tragedy wrought by a Martian invasion of Earth that eventually became Forever Autumn.

The Lego commercial soundtrack didn’t have lyrics. Session singers/songwriters Paul Vigrass and Gary Osbourne – who’d worked on ads with Wayne previously – simply hummed along in a style akin to the intro of Mrs Robinson. Proving incredibly popular, countless viewers contacted the company asking how they could buy the record – even though it was only a 30-second tune.

With vocal skills and pinup good looks to match, Paul Vigrass subsequently joined soft rock/bubblegum pop band Edison Lighthouse. He appeared on their 1971 debut album Already which contained the proto-glam Bobby Sherman/Bay City Rollers-stylings of their UK No.1 hit single Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes). Despite that initial success, the band stopped short. Vigrass then reunited with Gary Osbourne – by then a solo singer – and in 1972 the duo released the album Queues, written and produced by Wayne.

Capitalising on the Lego commercial tune’s former popularity, they revisited it to include as a track on Queues and titled it Forever Autumn. Vigrass and Osbourne wrote the lyrics and Wayne expanded it into a full three-minute soft-rock orchestral number. More up-tempo than the eventual iteration included on Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds, it brought the guitar-picking melody to the fore.

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