Adele's Skyfall theme: top 10 James Bond songs - Telegraph
James Bond
Adele's Skyfall theme: top 10 James Bond songs
Adele's 'Skyfall' has the makings of a James Bond classic, says Thomas H    Green as he looks at what sets the best 007 film theme tunes apart.
By Thomas H Green
12:17PM BST 05 Oct 2012
This Friday will be exactly 50 years since the first James Bond film, Dr No, hit British cinemas. The franchise is arguably cinemas’s most successful ever and, to celebrate the occasion, singer Adele makes her theme to the latest Bond, Skyfall, available online at seven minutes past midnight – or 0.07 as the publicity, naturally, has it.
Every Bond theme is an event in itself, one of the highest markers in a singer’s career (so iconic it seems perverse that Rita Coolidge and Sheryl Crow snaffled one each). Recorded at Abbey Road with a full orchestra, Adele’s song – judging from the minute-and-a-half briefly leaked earlier this week – has the makings of a classic.
This is heartening as the best Bond themes live on outside the films to become standards, songs whose kitsch aspects are somehow matched by a streak of genius and genuine passion. Here’s our top ten.
1. You Only Live Twice by Nancy Sinatra
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So luscious is John Barry & Leslie Bricusse’s ultimate Bond corker that its sweeping strings have seduced generations of musicians into covers and wholesale borrowing, from Coldplay to Robbie Williams, Soft Cell to Cee-lo Green. Released in 1967, it features lyrics dipped in that era’s hippy whimsy: “You only live twice, or so it seems, one life for yourself and one for your dreams.”
Coming off the back of gigantic hits Somethin’ Stupid (with dad Frank) and These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, Nancy Sinatra was, nonetheless, hugely daunted by taking on a Bond theme. She needn’t have been. Forty-five years later it has yet to be topped.
2. Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey
While the Bond franchise was firmly established by 1964, it was sassy 27-year-old Shirley Bassey salivating over “the man with the Midas touch, a spider’s touch” who set the musical template in stone. Written by louche playboy actor and easy listening oddball Anthony Newley with lyricist Leslie Bricusse, Bond regular John Barry added his characteristic undertow of jazz raunch and hip modernism. Although much parodied, notably by Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films, for Bassey it became a career-crowning glory, remaining her signature song ever after. Also features pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page on guitar.
3. We Have All The Time In The World by Louis Armstrong
Sixty-seven-year-old Louis Armstrong returned from heart problems and depression over the death of his manager for a final resurgence in his last years. It began with this song, on which he doesn’t play trumpet but, working with John Barry, sings a delicious growling vocal to build a much-adored elegiac ballad. However, it had to wait until a Guinness TV ad in 1994 to become a bona-fide top five hit.
Playing over the end credits of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, its title is taken from 007’s final words to his assassinated wife in what remains the most striking conclusion to any Bond film.
4. Diamonds Are Forever by Shirley Bassey
Harry Salzman, the Canadian-British entertainment impresario who had originally won big by gambling on optioning Ian Fleming’s Bond books, was not impressed with the song Diamonds Are Forever. He hated the massed double entendres (“Hold one up and then caress it/Touch it, stroke it and undress it”) but his partner Albert “Cubby” Broccoli forced the issue so Shirley Bassey returned for her second Bond theme in 1971, injecting it with a nuclear dose of Las Vegas pizzazz and even laying down an Italian version, Una Cascata di Diamanti (Vivo de Diamanti), for the film’s release in that country.
5. Live And Let Die by Paul McCartney & Wings
In 1973 Live And Let Die’ became the first Bond theme to be nominated for an Oscar. It was originally intended to be sung by an African-American, in keeping with the blaxploitation-tinted plot, but its writer, Paul McCartney, wouldn’t play ball unless his new band Wings played it.
Containing one of pop’s greatest grammatical clangers – “this ever-changing world in which we live in” – hasn’t stopped it becoming the heaviest-rocking Bond theme until Chris Cornell’s somewhat less well-loved You Know My Name for Casino Royale in 2006.
6. Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon
Carly Simon’s career, with You’re So Vain five years behind her, appeared to be on the skids by 1977, but her melodramatic power ballad for The Spy Who Loved Me put her back on top. The song, written by A Chorus Line composer Marvin Hamlisch and his girlfriend Carole Bayer Sager, is a blatant ode to the potency of a lover, and its title has repeatedly been used to promote the Bond franchise. There have been many cover versions over the years, but perhaps the best and most unlikely is by Radiohead.
7. From Russia With Love by Matt Monro
Like the 1960s themselves, the formula for a Bond theme was only just crystallising in 1963 and the second Bond film didn’t showcase its song to much effect, over the end titles and as a brief clip from a radio during the action. Composed by Lionel Bart in his immediate post-Oliver! pomp, the song featured syrupy orchestration by John Barry and the easy-going croon of Brit pretender Matt Monro. The song, like those first Bond films, has developed its own much admired afterlife.
8. The Man With The Golden Gun by Lulu
A controversial choice, as it’s often regarded as one of the most preposterous Bond themes – but that’s the point. Roger Moore’s 1970s Bond was preposterous, as well as sexist and comic, and the song, which its composer John Barry put together in just over a fortnight and grew to loathe, is undoubtedly over-the-top. Its appeal lies in the way Scottish pop lass Lulu belts out perennial Bond lyricist Don Black’s ludicrous lines – such as “He has a powerful weapon/ He charges a million a shot” (and worse) – with blues-rock gusto, while tinny cartoon rock throbs behind her. An acquired taste.
9. The World Is Not Enough by Garbage
Latter-day Bond composers face the difficult choice of whether to pastiche the established style or risk opprobrium by breaking new ground. Madonna notably came unstuck attempting the latter with her incongruous electro-disco Die Another Day, but David Arnold, who’s been in musical charge of the five most recent Bonds (but not Skyfall), usually gets it right. The World Is Not Enough, produced with Garbage in 1999, is his most successful, a crafty blend of classic orchestration, electronic tics and outright rock, effectively fronted by Shirley Manson, who, from the promo video’s robot assassin antics, clearly revelled in her Bond moment.
10. Living Daylights by A-ha
In the mid-Eighties, Bond embraced the planet’s biggest teen-pop heart-throbs. First Duran Duran for 1985’s A View To A Kill, then Norwegian trio A-ha for the Timothy Dalton relaunch, The Living Daylights. The former was a Bond and a band past their peak but A-ha remained on firing form. Unfortunately, they didn’t get on with co-writer John Barry and released their own album version of the song, which, in truth and for once, is better than Barry’s, whose fiddly orchestral flourishes clashed with their synthesisers. They are also the only artist ever to perform a Bond theme who are neither British or American.
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