Comments for Wayne, Jeff, Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of Spartacus

Sounds promising, doesn''t it? So much wasted talent! With artists as great and diverse as Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta Jones, Fish and Chris Thompson (to name but a few) it''s hard to make excuses, but the blame for the awfulness of this album as a whole must be lie with Jeff Wayne himself. Wayne seems to have capitalised on all the (fairly minor) weaknesses of his previous epic, "The War of the Worlds," whilst utterly eliminating any of its strengths. The music is generally thin and repetitive, the lyrics uninspired (anything rhyming "together" and "forever" is pretty pedestrian) and the vast majority of the narrative is given to the two, very overworked spoken parts. The choice of this merciless story for such a musical rendering, with its one way plod into ultimate doom, seems questionable anyway, but all the synthesised music (and the absence of real orchestration) is both anachronistic and inappropriate to a repellent degree. There are promising moments here and there, but the long, laboured whole of this work is so relentlessly awful as to discourage any but the most resilient from repeated listenings. It''s terrible, horrible and not very good. Avoid! (Ian C. Thomas)

All tracks by Jeff Wayne/Gary Osborne (lyrics) except for 3,4, 14, 16 & 17 by Jeff Wayne, 5 by Jeff Wayne and James Cassidy (lyrics) and 18 by Jeff Wayne/Gary Osborne/James Cassidy

Spartacus is a worthy successor the Jeff Wayne's classic War Of The Worlds. Anthony Hopkin's narration is the album's major strength and anything else you may have read about this album is completely untrue. Rating 9/10

It's ... just really, really not very good. There are some decent moments, but not too many. As with "The War of the Worlds," the instrumental tracks tend to be better than the vocals; but in this case, the instrumentals are only so-so, and the vocal tracks are mostly bad.