And the Bond Played On

Some of you may suspect by now that The Rap Sheet has a soft spot for Ian Fleming’s secret agent, James Bond--and you’d be right. Then again, this is the Ian Fleming centenary year, so we have an excuse. And we’re not alone in celebrating Bondage. In yesterday’s London Times, for instance, Bob Stanley contemplated the significance and relative merits of the Bond film songs over the years.

John Barry has called it “million-dollar Mickey Mouse music”, but a James Bond theme on your CV is as close as pop gets to an Olympic gold medal. As Jack White and Alicia Keys prepare to add to the canon, they should be aware that when you create a bad Bond theme you are disappointing the whole world and you will never, ever, get another chance.

The best--Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, A View to a Kill--are internationalist anthems. Some themes have been more literal than others. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service may star the worst Bond, George Lazenby (who was allegedly so unpleasant that his co-star Diana Rigg chewed garlic before each kissing scene), but it has one of the best title cuts, a wordless Moog-driven monster, suitable for skiing at breakneck speed or dancing with equal abandon.

License to Kill, on the other hand, features a brazen, smoking barrel-blast of timpani after Gladys Knight sings “KILL!”, just in case you’d forgotten that the following movie may include strong language and scenes of a sexual nature.

The real signature of the Bond features, however, is the main series theme, which was cooked up in the early 1960s by both Barry and Monty Norman. As the Times recalls:

Barry was 26, he says, when he got a call from Noel Rogers, “a big supporter of mine at United Artists music. He said: ‘There are these two guys called [Harry] Saltzman and [Albert] Broccoli and they own the rights to the James Bond stories.’ I said: ‘I only know Bond from the Daily Mail comic strip. He said: ‘That’s all you need to know.’ They wanted a theme--two minutes long.”

Monty Norman wrote it; Barry arranged it: “I remember standing in line at Piccadilly to see Dr. No. And the theme was all over it. Every time he said, ‘The name’s Bond’, it went ‘dung-dug-a-dung-dung’. They paid me £250! Noel said: ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I’ll try and get you the next Bond score--it might become a series.’ ”

There is also coyness that separates the best Bond themes from also-rans. It’s one of pop’s toughest asks, says Lulu, who gamely handled Man With the Golden Gun. “You need to have the largesse of John Barry and be true to Ian Fleming. The suggestiveness of Don Black’s lyrics still make me smile, but it can’t be plagiarism. [Paul] McCartney did it, taking it out of John Barry’s hands--he worked it beautifully. It’s a big, big track. Big bangs work well! Because you want to have a little snigger, you want to go, oooh.” Roger Moore, who also knows thing or two about Bond movies, thinks that “the most successful songs, and those that are now deemed Bond classics, are invariably the ones with a narrative within the lyrics.” His favourite is Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better, “because nobody did. No, it is a terrific song as it embodies everything about Bond’s character and why he is better and more popular than other movie spies.”

You can read the entire Times piece here. And the newspaper makes its own picks of the top 10 Bond songs here. More on the battle for the lyrics to accompany the 22nd Bond movie, A Quantum of Solace, can be found here. The Times’ previous take on why some Bond songs that “leave us neither shaken nor stirred” can be read here. Finally, if you’d like a two-part reminder on Bond songs from the past, click here and here.

READ MORE: “The Ties That Bond,” by Paul Bishop (Bish’s Beat).