Bond themes - can nobody do it better?

The question “When was the last classic James Bond song?” is not, many would argue, one designed to start a debate — unless you can call three or four seconds of consideration followed by an emphatic answer a debate, asks Times Online.

Duran Duran’s A View to a Kill (1985), co-written by the master, John Barry? Great verse, yes; but the chorus is a screeching Simon Le Bon shocker, so let us not linger there. Today’s Bond producers would like our answer to be “The new one, for Quantum of Solace” — but Jack White and Alicia Keys’s Another Way to Die (you can see why they steered clear of the film title, can’t you?) is, to judge by fan sites and message boards, unlikely to join a roll of honour that began in 1964 with Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger and arguably ended when Carly Simon sang Nobody Does It Better in 1977. Purists would contend that the sequence of greats concluded earlier, with 1973’s Live and Let Die. A Wings song that ticked most of the Bond-song boxes — melodrama, bombast, sonic explosions, a hint of cheesiness — it was so good, we forgave Paul McCartney the grammatical howler “In this ever-changing world in which we live in”.

The White/Keys collaboration continues the producers’ recent track record of seeking to sex up the Bond brand with star names, both in the songwriting and singing departments. Bono and the Edge writing GoldenEye (1995) for Tina Turner to perform must have seem like a match made in marketing heaven, but the song was a stinker, not least for Bono’s risible lyric “It’s a gold and honey trap / That I’ve got for you tonight”. Garbage failed to breathe much life into 1999’s The World Is Not Enough (Shirley Manson as a singing torso-less robot in the video was far more memorable). Dear old Madonna vocodered her way through Die Another Day in 2002. Her blustering and beyond-bad contribution included the unforgettable “Sigmund Freud, analyse this”, with the unwittingly hysterical implication that Madge had something to teach the father of psychoanalysis. Sheryl Crow sounded barely awake on 1997’s woeful Tomorrow Never Dies, an example of another bizarre aspect of the producers’ approach: they often choose the wrong piece of music. For both The Living Daylights and Tomorrow Never Dies, they opted for inferior songs to open the film (A-ha for the former, Crow in the latter case), relegating much finer performances — the Pretenders’ If There Was a Man and kd lang’s Surrender — to the closing credits.

The Garbage and kd lang tracks were both co-written by the film composer David Arnold, who has been scoring Bond films since Tomorrow Never Dies. (Shaken and Stirred, his 1997 album of Bond covers, with singers such as Jarvis Cocker and Iggy Pop, attracted the attention of John Barry, who recommended him to the film’s producers.) Arnold contends that any aspiring Bond-song writer needs both to honour the canon — and its sonic staples of brass and strings — and to throw away the rulebook, which he concedes can be a tricky task. “I don’t think you can completely escape the history of these songs,” he says. “Not only have many of them become standards, they have been around as part of the British musical landscape for more than 40 years. It’s something to embrace, rather than dismiss, but in doing that you immediately draw comparisons with the greats.” As for the brass-and-strings trademarks, he argues that “those elements are one of the things the public feel defines the sound of a Bond song”.

Thus, White chucks a small arsenal of effects at what is essentially a very weak melody, its one moment of excitement — a jagged and portentous bridge — detumescing into a non-chorus that seems to mark the point where he ran out of inspiration. Keys turns in a rock vocal of extraordinary and intriguing power, but she can’t save the song. It’s by no means the worst Bond song — that title would be claimed by Crow, Madonna, Rita Coolidge’s All Time High (for Octopussy) or Sheena Easton’s wan and witless For Your Eyes Only — but it is nowhere near as daring and inventive as you might expect from two such bold artists. It’s as if White strode confidently into the recording studio, only to be gripped by the same self-consciousness that has hampered other Bond-song composers before him.

Arnold believes the question of public expectations imposing limitations on a songwriter — and a song — is part and parcel of the whole Bond brand. “In the films, there is an expectation that you will see action, adventure, violence, girls, gadgets and guns,” he says. “If you don’t see them, you may feel you’re not really watching a Bond film. And if the equivalent musical elements are missing from the song, it isn’t considered a Bond song.” That sounds creatively pretty stifling to me, but Arnold is too canny, proud or diplomatic to say so.

He hints at the complex process arriving at a singer and a song can be. “I am just part of a group of people who makes these decisions,” he says. “The studio, the music department, the producers and the director all have a say. I look at each film as like casting a role. Each film has a certain identity, and part of the challenge is finding the right singer for that film. I may love the idea of Björk or Alison Goldfrapp, for instance, but if it doesn’t feel right for the film we’re making, it would be foolish to choose an artist for the wrong reasons.”

Amy Winehouse was originally mooted to perform the lead song for Quantum of Solace, co-writing it with the producer Mark Ronson. This was abandoned, with the Bond team rumoured to have looked askance at her drug and drink addiction. Then someone, somewhere, presumably in a meeting involving discussions about budgets, marketing reach, demographics and “youth”, suggested White and Keys. Will that suggestion pay off? Well, the song will chart, certainly, so the cash registers will ping. Is it a match for Goldfinger, We Have All the Time in the World, You Only Live Twice? Oh, I think not.

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