THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN by PAPERNUT CAMBRIDGE

we're a little early because of today's sad news: this week's blog, track and video are dedicated to The Man With The Golden Gun, Christopher Lee 1922-2015


Corgi 261 – The James Bond Aston Martin DB5

One of my earliest memories of growing up in 60’s suburbia was a fascination with cars – I remember giving my own names to them before I knew what the makes and models really were. A Ford Anglia was a ‘Smiling-Back-To-Front-Car’ according to my toddler logic (which seems no less convincing to me now actually) and a Morris Minor was a ‘Brenda Car’. Not that we knew anyone called Brenda - the car just seemed to be ‘saying’ it.

I had a collection of Corgi and Matchbox toys, many of which I seem to remember inheriting from our next door neighbour Ken Perry who was a few years older and had grown out of his. Sometime about 1966 or 67 I got the James Bond Aston Martin – Corgi 261: for many the crème de la crème of toy cars – although I can’t remember if I had mine from new or if it was one of Ken’s. It definitely had the baddie in the ejector seat included, so if it was his, Ken had been very careful not to lose him in one of his earlier carpet- or table-top- based missions.

Now….we are at the risk of edging dangerously towards Top Gear territory here I know – the model is such an icon that it’s inevitably been written about before – and not surprisingly James May has covered it in a piece here where he goes through lots of the nerd-magnet info you’d expect: that the car isn’t gold in the movie, the rear lights are not the correct shape etc.

For me at the time, of course, it was one of my favourite toys along with other gadget based, weapon-firing TV or film spin off merch like the Batmobile, the lesser known Green Hornet Limousine (I didn’t know the character but his car was excellent with a missile and a nifty spinning radar disc that flew out of the boot), and the brilliant Captain Scarlet vehicles. Two that I coveted and never got were the Monkeemobile the incredible Chitty Chitty Bang Bang model.

Bond, as a concept, wasn’t really any more significant to me that any of those others. I was aware of the movies, perhaps the music more so. I knew the films were sort of ‘sexy’, like the Carry On movies only more glamorous/serious. But of course in the wonderful synaesthesia of childhood the toys, movies, TV, sweets, music, school etc. all merge together somehow…... I could be casually zooming the golden DB5 across the carpet towards an absurdly small Stuka, pondering my deep love for Mrs Peel in the Avengers, and at the same time imagining the dark wardrobe world that Pink Floyd were spinning in my head as I listened to See Emily Play - which is one of the earliest records that really captured my imagination.

I didn’t want any of that to go away – the slightly surreal connections between all the things I loved - it did for a bit I suppose, as I got older, but in later years I’ve managed to get at least some of it back. I got seriously into model aircraft as an older kid, and later in my 20s and 30s rediscovered and honed that hobby into an all consuming obsession to fill the free time alongside my jobs playing in bands back then. I became fanatical about detail, colours, scale and accuracy (that bullet proof shield on the Bond DB5 would be totally impractical if it was full size you know. It would be about 4 inches thick and the tyres could never take the weight!). The smell of enamel paint or cranked-up Scalextric motors will always be linked to some of my favourite records and TV. The glint of a tiny jewelled headlamp can conjure up much more than just the movie the car was in.

I didn’t stick with Bond movies beyond the 70’s I must confess. But my love of cars never went away, and even the most mundane gadgetry in a real motor can give me almost as much of a thrill as those tyre slashers on the Bond DB5. As I hit mid-life I went through a few classics – I wasn’t quite as bad as Jamiroquai, and a real Aston Martin was never going to happen obviously – but after a series of questionable (blind) eBay purchases that I didn’t keep for very long, I’ve settled on something suited to my age, psyche and need for comfort. It’s not a Bond car. But it’s the exact car that Roger Moore drives in the movie he made three years before he first played 007 - The Man Who Haunted Himself……..

The Song:
I chose The Man With The Golden Gun because it’s definitely one of the underdog ones (although this is now its second appearance in this project!!). As a song, people seem not to rate it much in the Bond canon, but it’s actually brilliant - that arrangement is really…..naughty sounding. And Lulu is cool. She was pretty great early on - I loved her version of The Boat That I Row as a kid - and at the time of this theme she was going through her Bowie collaboration too, so became even cooler to the likes of me at the time. If you think about it this tune does have a little Diamond Dogs-era Bowie drama about it, though I doubt John Barry and Don Black were thinking about that when they wrote it.

The Video:
When I asked fellow Papernut alumni if they wanted to contribute anything to the track, I wasn’t quite expecting what Ralegh Long came up with – namely no music, but the offer to use some video footage from a spoof Bond movie called Blackeye that he and some friends had made when they were schoolboys. It’s the perfect thing, looks loads of fun, and it’s quite sobering now to realize that when they made this I was already the wrong side of 30 playing and touring with Death In Vegas, and probably not being any more grown up than they were!

Here’s a few words from Tom Kingsley, Blackeye’s director:

“This video is an extremely condensed version of an hour long James Bond film that some friends and I made in 1998, when we were twelve.  It has about five minutes that are actually good, and fifty-five that are almost unbearable to watch. This edit makes it look a lot better than it really was. Blackeye was shot on the school camcorder, with the assistance of most of our year group, who enthusiastically died many times on camera. When an athletic French exchange student called Alexis came along in the summer term, we roped him in to doing a lot of extra stunts in the final showdown sequence. We shot the film in chronological order with a story that we made up as we went along, and so the film gets better and better towards the end, when *SPOILER* James Bond fails to stop Blofeld blowing up the entire planet.”

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN by CROCK OSS

Mark is also a part of Saturday's School of Noise at the Union Chapel

The Man with the Golden Gun by Crock Oss

It’s all my wife’s fault. Since we met ten years ago she had been telling me how we must go to Thailand, about what an amazing place it was. Whilst I had little doubt this was true I was put off by the thought of spending a day or so travelling to get to a place where it would often be too hot to do anything except sit around on a beach. Well last year I finally broke. I agreed we would spend the Easter holidays in Thailand, provided Becca did all the organising.

I worried about flying via Moscow with Aeroflot. I worried about bags going missing in transit. I worried I wouldn’t be able to find any food that I liked. I worried that I was going to be bored.

I had a vague recollection that there was a James Bond film that had been shot on location in Thailand somewhere. When we arrived it became apparent that we weren’t too far from the location, which seemed to be universally referred to as ‘James Bond Island’. All the local tour companies advertised day trips which included the island, usually in combination with seemingly unlikely companions such as canoeing, ‘floating Muslim village’ and ‘Buddha cave temple’.

A little research revealed that the island location had been used for the hideout of the villain Scaramanga, played by Christopher Lee, in the 1974 Roger Moore Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. Many of the reviews of the film were less that favourable and I tried to recall if it was one I had seen.

I grew up in the 1980s, when Roger Moore’s Bond was a staple of Bank Holiday Sunday afternoons. As a child I don’t think I saw beyond the car chases and pretty girls but with the benefit of hindsight some of Moore’s films are, well, not very good. The Man with the Golden Gun, is a case in point. A reclusive assassin decides, for some reason, that taking out contracts for ‘a million a shot’ isn’t good enough and he decides to corner the World’s market in renewable energy. By stealing and murdering. This won’t do of course, so Bond is dispatched to sort it out. His stunt man does some kung fu. A naked girl called ‘Chu Me’ (really) swims for no reason. Some school girls do kung fu. He has a chase accompanied by a really annoying ‘comedy’ American sheriff. The best stunt in movie history is ruined by a swanee whistle. He is supposed to be helped by Britt Eckland, but she’s useless. Bond kills the baddies and then makes a ‘coming’ joke. MI6 have Scaramanga’s had phone number all along. The End.

I remembered seeing on Twitter than wiaiwya were doing this blog/album so, half joking, I sent a tweet offering to ‘sing into my phone’ on the beach. The reply told me to go for it. The Man with the Golden Gun is John Barry’s least favourite Bond soundtrack (he had two weeks to write the complete score) and the theme song, sung by Lulu, is great big messy single entendre. But that was what it had to be.

We booked a trip to James Bond Island and, after an hour and half in a beautifully air conditioned mini bus and twenty minutes on a long tail boat we arrived at the island. Khao Phing Kan and Ko Tapu, known collectively to tourists and locals alike as James Bond Island, are instantly recognisable. The 20 metre tall islet of Ko Tapu is ingrained in the subconscious of anyone who’s seen even bits of The Man with the Golden Gun. The islands look the same, the beaches look the same. However, where once were the funky seventies entrances to Scaramanga’s lair are now a collection of gift shops selling tat. And of course the island is no longer the home to just a triple-nippled assassin, his midget butler and beefy mute technician. It is now crawling with tourists recreating Bond and Scaramanga’s dual, videoing the ‘turn to the camera’ gun aiming move (we did both) and trying to spot which parts of the island doubled for which part of the lair.

You only get half an hour so on the island so I quickly set up the iPad, recorded the sound of the sea and the tourists and whispered the vocal into my phone (unused it the end, although a similar vocal recorded in Bangkok survives, almost imperceptivity). Photos taken, we re-boarded our boat and at this point it became apparent what an impact the film has had on the area. Prior to 1974 the islands were little visited, now thousands a day disembark to explore. Not only that, the majority are then taken to one of a number of river cruisers, moored permanently in a channel off the main bay. Here they are loaded onto canoes and paddled around the sea caves by a local oarsman. Next the boats set off for the village of Koh Panyee. When the village’s original Muslim inhabitants arrived from Indonesia, it was prohibited for non-Thai nationals to own land. Thus the fishing village was built on stilts. Much of the income of the village still comes from fishing, but in the dry season a series of huge waterfront restaurants serve a simple lunch to the James Bond Island tourists and a market behind sells souvenirs and local produce.

I found it remarkable that a few short scenes in a, pretty bad, 1974 film have led to the creation of an entire regional tourist industry. Hundreds of people’s livelihoods depend, if not fully, then partially on the existence of two tiny islands where Roger Moore and Christopher Lee once stood back to back against the stunning tower karst seascape.

Returning to the song, having programmed a basic version of music for the Island recordings, I worked on them further at out hotels in Railay and Bangkok. As we were flying home via Moscow it seemed that I must record something there, so I dictaphoned an announcement on the aircraft and did some more work on the track in an airport coffee shop. When we finally got home I added a few more bits, mixed it all together and then, finally, took a drive to Pinewood Studios. If this was to have proper James Bond location credits then those credits had to end with ‘and at Pinewood Studios, London, England’.

Mark Williamson records iPhone pop as Crock Oss and works with field recordings and found sounds as Spaceship.
www.spaceshipmark.wordpress.com
www.spaceship.bandcamp.com

JAMES BOND THEME by THE GREAT ELECTRIC

Baby, You're the Best – James Bond is Forever
by Kelly Snape @lostinindiepop

Bonds always have and always will be Sunday afternoons. My first, glimpsed through a fug of cigarette smoke from amassed relatives in my Nana's front room, was almost certainly Moonraker. Richard Kiel's Jaws, rather than Moore's Bond leaving a lasting impression on me as a kid, as he did for many of my generation. But if you come to love Bond, like I love Bond, those Sunday afternoons – like, I imagine Saturday afternoons at the football, if you're so inclined – have a way of permeating into the other days, weeks, months, years and decades of your existence.

My (now ex-) husband, a talented engineer, had an odd job ('scuse the pun) that combined practical scientific knowledge with jumping out of helicopters for a living. He'd nearly, very nearly, worked somewhere else. But we don't like to talk about that. We lived, for a while, in the picturesque riverside village where Richard Chopping (who drew the original covers to the Fleming novels) had lived. As spouses we had little in common but what we did share was a love of all things Bond.

At some point we progressed from just being armchair Bond fans and for a while, all the day trips and weekends away I planned seemed to have some sort of Bond connection. The Ian Fleming Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (I had to be forcibly removed from DC's bloodstained shirt).....Bonds on the big screen in the Barbican on our anniversary weekend (Connery on the big screen makes so much more sense)....the Sunday lunch hotel pianist, who when I requested a Bond theme played us a medley of every single one and some rejected Bond themes to boot....three days in an obscure part of Austria just so we could visit the opera set from the Quantum of Solace on the way home...a trip to BAFTA to watch Guy Hamilton talk about Goldfinger....Vesper Martinis in a fancy hotel bar in Brighton...three nights in Monaco for my 30th including a trip to the Casino de Monte Carlo, where I asked him to order me a Vodka Martini (it tasted like meths...not that I've tasted meths but you get the idea). My then husband's Dad was unemployed, his Mum was a cleaner, my Dad left school at 16 with no qualifications. There were times in our new life where we had to pinch each other.

And yet...all was not well. Or at least I wasn't. In 2006, I was diagnosed with depression. It was a feeling of heaviness within my soul that never really went away. But I distinctly remember the first time that feeling left me, just for a few hours. It was somewhere between the word “considerably” in the pre-title sequence and the last shot of the opening titles of Casino Royale. It was like someone had given me a shot of adrenaline: my brain had crisp, clear thoughts again and I remembered there was Bond before I was born, Bond in the now and Bond in the life yet to come. Thank god there was Bond in the life yet to come. And no, it wasn't just the homage to Ursula Andress. Let's address this right now. Daniel Craig's biceps are eleven kinds of awesome, but I couldn't understand why everyone was raving about his exit from the sea and not how masterfully he was wrestling around on the floor with Solange...An adrenaline shot indeed. It was normally a short 15 minute walk back from the cinema to home. That night we got a taxi.

Adrenaline shots (unlike diamonds) don't last forever and a few years later cosy Sunday afternoons curled up in front of Bond were replaced with stony silences and marriage guidance counselling. Unlike, say, The Simpsons, which I couldn't watch for years, Bond didn't feel like he belonged to “us”, he was most definitely mine. He was mine as I bought in New Year's Eve alone watching Casino Royale on a laptop in what had been our and was now my bedroom, until a few weeks later when I was forced to start a new uncertain life, alone and soon-to-be unemployed in a grotty flat. He was mine as my friend Lynne kept me from despair, showing me Roger's worst hits on what otherwise would have been lonely, rainy Sundays. And thankfully he was still mine as, years later, over a hundred miles away, I sat watching Skyfall in Sheffield's Odeon. I'd say I was watching it alone but you never feel alone amongst other fans. A packed house at 5pm in the evening. A Mum with her eight year old to my right, an eightysomething four rows behind me, all waiting for our hero to return.

When we got married, I'd wanted Nobody Does it Better as our first dance but this was swiftly vetoed by my fiance. Knowing what I know I now, nearly four years after our divorce, I suspect he feared living up to the title. I couldn't possibly comment. Despite some rocky years, I'm still a romantic at heart, which is why my favourite piece of Bond music isn't a theme song but instead is City of Lovers, David Arnold's refashioning of his earlier Vesper theme from Casino Royale. It accompanies, what is to my mind, five of the most romantic minutes of cinema ever, running from the scene where Bond throws Vesper onto his hospital bed, then through the section as they sail into Venice and ends as they leave their hotel room, Vesper putting her arm across Bond's chest, the absolutely picture of romantic, filthy, gorgeous love. Until a few minutes later, when she disappears off with the treasury's money and meets a grim, watery end, the way that Bond girls so often do. David Arnold, the heir to John Barry, just gets it, so, so right. Every soaring delicious romantic string. Heavenly. I've played this three minutes of soundtrack on my mp3 player whilst travelling on buses, trains and even walking around my local Asda. It never fails to lift the mundanity of life into a glorious adventure.

A penchant for fancy hotels, a fascination with a certain type of ego, a place where brutality meets seduction; three decades of Sunday afternoons in the presence of arguably the most famous fictional character on the planet can't help but weave a thread through your life. Bond got me through the bleakest of times and he's still here in the glorious now, as I knew he would be, and will be in the life yet to come. Some people have football, or Doctor Who or an allotment. I have an alcoholic, womanising hitman with a penchant for sadism and serious commitment issues. And, in his current guise, utterly delicious biceps. Nobody does it better, makes me feel sad for the rest. I love you, 007. Baby, you're the best.

Kelly Snape

and as a bonus, here's Monty Norman talking us through writing the Bond Theme

THREE BLIND MICE by DEERFUL

Dr. No and the Three Blind Mice

Emma Winston: synth, vocals
Mixed by Darren Hayman

www.hummingbirdheart.co.uk
http://twitter.com/deer_ful

Until this month, I had never seen a James Bond film in full, and had never released any of my own music.

I suppose you could say that I fell into this project. I am at home playing other people's music (you can also hear me, specialising in Wurlitzer and swooning, on Darren Hayman's version of 'Goldfinger'); I am less at home left to my own devices to come up with a cover of a cover of one of the most ubiquitous tunes in history (the earliest appearance of 'Three Blind Mice' in print, if you were wondering, was in 1609. 1609!). Whatever I did, I said to John, it was bound to be ridiculous, and that was precisely the reason I wanted to do it; it left me with nothing to be afraid of, and no excuses to abandon the song before it was completed. And complete it I did.

It seemed only fair, then, that I watched Dr. No, beyond the opening sequence I had pored over to extract any musical motifs and lyrical fragments I thought I could poach for my own version. Bond, it has to be said, is not really my thing; I find the bravado and the violence and the opulence all at once hard to get my head around. The soundtracks are another matter entirely, and the theme is iconic for a reason, moody, urgent and superbly orchestrated, a punch in the musical gut from the second the opening credits roll. Dr. No's soundtrack, as far as I can make out, seems unique amongst the series in that the film is shot through – pun unintended -- with calypso music.

Much has been written about the sometimes stereotypical treatment of non-white characters in the Bond franchise (Daniel McClure's chapter in James Bond in World and Popular Culture is a good, if dense, example and can be previewed at Google Books) and Dr. No, product of the sixties, is certainly no exception (The Complainist's entertaining blow-by-blow review comes highly recommended if you're interested in picking this apart a little more). 'Three Blind Mice', however, along with a few other tracks, seems (at least as far as I've been able to dig up) to have been contributed by still-active Jamaican band Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, placing it in authentic contrast to Monty Norman's pastiche 'Underneath The Mango Tree' which also appears in the film.

I am very aware that, in covering a calypso version in straight four-to-the-floor style, however many layers of my beloved synths I add, I'm erasing a lot of what makes the original uniquely interesting. Love it as I do, the indiepop scene, not unlike Bond himself, remains extremely white, and my debut on this blog is no exception. Listen, make of it what you will, then check out the Dragonaires' original version, and perhaps fall down the rabbit hole of their (still-growing!) ska, calypso and soca discography if you like what you hear.

I have a hunch that Dr. No might remain the first and last Bond film I make it all the way through. I do hope, however, that 'Three Blind Mice' won't be the last you hear from me.

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER by CITIZEN HELENE

I’m pretty sure The Spy Who Loved Me was my first Bond film, on the telly one Christmas or Easter before 1983 (when i saw Octopussy at the ABC in Maidenhead, followed by a trip to the Berni Inn  for a treat (and yeah - i saw Morons From Outer Space there too))


I already had the Lotus Esprit with the missiles and the pop-out fins (it replaced a wind up swimming frog and an empty Matey bottle as my go-to bath toy) and the smaller Corgi Juniors one too, which was stuck in submarine mode (it was the same size as my other cars and made more sense to me despite doing less cool stuff)... I even had Stromberg's helicopter, so it was nice to finally give them some context.

It is, of course, the best Bond film (ignore anyone who says Goldfinger is - they think that an ejector seat and a changeable number plate are cooler than turning into a submarine... an ACTUAL SUBMARINE)...

Of course you know it's a great big romp with a woman-eating shark, the pyramids, a microfilm, a beautiful Russian agent, a fight on a train, an underwater lair, explosions, one-liners and the foiled destruction-of-the- human-race-by-an-unscrupulous-villain, but the Spy Who Loved Me also has a Hammer Horror henchman (sharing a name with the then highest-grossing film), a fantastic car chase ("four different types of enemy, multiple weaponry, a leap from land to sea and Bond’s car turning into a submarine halfway through"), a submarine eating tanker, a classic catchphrase ("good evening Mr Bond, I've been expecting you") and THE GREATEST BOND PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE EVER.

Every moment from the missing submarines, to the Dymo digital watch, past "something came up" and "so does England", into the disco ski chase down the Austrian mountain (actually a Canadian glacier), off the edge, through 20 seconds of breath holding silence (longer than Rick Sylvester intended) and THAT parachute to Nobody Does It Better, is sheer JOY...


... in fact, i'm going to watch it again right NOW

GOLDFINGER by DARREN HAYMAN

and we have a double header of Goldfinger below too - 

Balfron Tower by Darren Hayman

2 Willow Road by Tim Hopkins

No-one, or at least no-one you can turn up with a lazy google, seems to know for sure why Ian Fleming hated Ernö Goldfinger so much. As a kid I was told that it was because Fleming hated the Balfron (in Poplar, as beautifully illustrated by Darren Hayman here) and the Trellick (in North Kensington): two big concrete housing blocks which stand to the East and West of Central London. I can’t find any evidence to back this up; it was probably just my big brother telling me lies.

Better-informed opinion seems to suggest that Fleming objected to the demolition of some picturesque cottages on Willow Road in Hampstead, to make space for a terrace of three Goldfinger houses just before the second world war. If that’s right, it was a real lapse of taste on Fleming’s part. Those houses (although ten or fifteen years ahead of time) seem to me the epitome of the understated mid-century cool that runs through the best of Bond.

The Goldfinger family moved into number 2 Willow Road, the middle of the terrace. Some of them still live there, though the house has now been partitioned and (I’m delighted to say) the upper portion is open to visitors. It’s a wonderful thing (baby). It’s been a year or two since I last went, but here is a top five of the things which have stuck in my mind:

1) the way the office and the studio on the first floor are one light, airy space but made distinct by one being raised by 18 inches or so, and those 18 inches being beautiful storage
2) the best and simplest bookshelves I’ve ever seen, made from planks, poles and dowling
3) the rooms being put together to allow privacy in rather a small space, but (I think as a result of clever use of light from outside) never feeling cramped or poky
4) TWO small stairwells which meant that people could move about the largely open plan house without disturbing each other
5) the Goldfingers’ art collection, which includes a delightful print but the under-appreciated genius Stanley William Hayter, something which makes me feel especially good because theres one of those hanging behind me in our front room right now.

Go and take a look for yourself, I promise you a treat.

Apparently there’s a third school of thought: that Fleming used the name because he played golf with Ernö's wife’s cousin, a fellow who hated Goldfinger. Haters, eh?

One more slight teaser from the back of my mind: the three buildings mentioned stand north, east and west of central London; Goldfinger's other most famous London building stands South at Elephant and Castle. Now a fancy housing complex called Metro Heights, it was built in the early '60s as NHS office space and bore the name Fleming. Not a tribute to the Bond author, though: the building was named after biologist / pharmacologist Alexander Fleming. I sometimes wonder whether Ernö decided to join in the naming game, but subtly suggest that the penicillin is mightier than the pen...

A VIEW TO A KILL by THE SLY AND UNSEEN

the new album from the Sly and Unseen is available here

Bond In Motion

a trip to the Bond in Motion exhibition today where i mostly saw exciting Bond moments reflected in shonky models of the classic vehicles, also enjoyed that Steed was in A View To A Kill,  Catherine Gale was in Goldfinger and Mrs Peel was in OHMSS

so, statistically, Bond sleeps with more women in A View To a Kill than in any other Bond film (Four - Mary Stavin, Grace Jones, Fiona Fullerton and Tanya Roberts) and, in terms of charts and sales, it has the most successful theme (there has yet to be a number one Bond single!)

happy May Day, by the way

A View To A Kill

Goldfinger

OHMSS

Skyfall

You Only Live Twice