JAMES BOND WILL RETURN

the A Girl And A Gun album can only be complete when there are no more James Bond themes to cover (god forbid!)


so please keep popping back to check for updates, keep supporting the amazing acts that have recorded their own versions of these themes, and keep telling your chums about this album

thanks - and JAMES BOND WILL RETURN

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE by THE LEAF LIBRARY

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed that the last theme to be covered it the Matt Monro classic, From Russia With Love... so here we go, Ladies and Gentlemen - THE LEAF LIBRARY!


I’d like to be able to say that we’ve recorded this version because of my name-based kinship with Matt Monro, or that I personally identify with trying to bump off a British agent with a deadly shoe whilst dressed as a maid. But no, someone else got to The Living Daylights before we did. Dalton’s always been my man – melancholy, minimal and with really good hair. Plus, copping off with a la-di-da cellist always heavily appealed to me. (As it is I ended up with a violinist so can’t complain too much). Anyhoo, ‘From Russia With Love’ was the track we were allocated and there was no way I was going to let ‘M’ Jervis down.


I vaguely remembered the film from sleepy afternoons at gran’s house (mainly the ridiculous shoe/chair fight and JB’s subsequent smug smirk as they chug off into the Venice lagoon) but I didn’t know the song at all. Not the most memorable at the best of times, it has a weirdly vaporous quality that sees it drift away and instantly forgotten as the last note fades. I was so bored by it I couldn’t even be bothered to look up the chords online so we dispensed with trying to recreate it altogether. Instead I found a random Russian folk tune, played in the modern, highly polished style so beloved of our friends behind the curtain, and stretched it to a truly evil 750%, before setting my henchman Lewis loose with all his Russian-themed Ableton synth plugins. Add to that Kate’s gloriously deadpan and detached vocals (literally phoned in) and that’s about the whole of it. I’ve actually really grown to love the lyrics, as wishy-washy as they are, and Matt’s Wikipedia entry makes for some entertaining reading (including being billed on Peter Sellers album as Fred Flange). I like to think our version invokes the sounds of dying nuclear reactors and humming Siberian shortwave radio masts, so let’s just say that it does.

I have never been to Russia although I have read the Master and Margherita. That’s alright, isn’t it?

YOU KNOW MY NAME by REBECCA JADE aka LADY LOWREY

and as we all know, Casino Royale was the first Bond film without a classic gunbarrel sequence - here's the lot of them:

ANOTHER WAY TO DIE by KEIRON PHELAN AND DRITA KOTAJI

Bang, bang, bang…

I adore James Bond films. I adore the gadgets, the guns, the sexism, the violence, the villains and I entirely embrace the emotional Fascism. Consider; cats (by nature) are sleek, self-satisfied, vicious, promiscuous, immoral death machines. Yet they are greatly loved. So; why not Bond?

The only thing I dislike about the films is that they are rarely as good as the books. To this day I can recite, verbatim, the entire meal (food, type of wine, cocktails, etc.) consumed by Bond and M in Moonraker Chapter 5, ‘Dinner At Blades’. Time was I could remember the exact four hands of cards held by Bond, M, Sir Hugo Drax and Meyer in the final Bridge rubber played in Chapter 7, ‘The Quickness Of The Hand’.

Tragic, isn’t it?

Listening to the Bond theme songs, as a totality, the remarkable thing is how consistently good they are. There are, of course, some weak spots. ‘Another Way To Die’ (from the excellent, in my opinion, ‘Quantum Of Solace’) is sometimes considered to be one of those. However, I would contend that Jack White generated an exciting and appropriately Bondesque atmosphere in this song. It’s that atmosphere, therefore, that we’ve tried to junk and replace with something entirely different. Because, James Bond never really follows the orders, does he? So, we’re playing his rules…

Keiron Phelan: Vocal, guitar, piano, organ, flute, fuzz-tone electric flute.
Drita Kotaji: Vocal
Simon Trought: Bass, drum machine.
Q Branch: by Simon Trought.

LICENCE TO KILL by TIM THE MUTE

A shy, bookish ten year old with no toys, I threw myself headlong into the exciting world of books. I would read anything at the library whose titles I vaguely recognized from pop culture. James Bond was an obvious contender, his action-man status recognized through several generations of ten year olds as an untouchable ideal of cool. When my favourite teacher took away my James Bond books and told my mum I was reading filth, I was confused. Never had I thought to feel ashamed of my own titillation at the hands of sex and violence. Suddenly, I knew myself.

some new SPECTRE artwork and a tv spot have also been released today:

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS by SNOW LEOPARD BROTHERHOOD

this week i learned that Miffy creator Dick Bruna also designed James Bond Book covers (if you are in Holland you could always go to this)

can we get the Snow Leopard Brotherhood to cover the whole a-ha back catalogue?

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY by CHARM BRACELET and RAMESH

as Sheena Easton is the only singer of a Bond theme tune to appear in the opening credits we have a few videos for you today, starting off with those credits (and what title designer Maurice Binder referred to as her "70mm lips")


then a demo version of the Sheena Easton theme with the early lyrics


and here's a beautifully restored 35mm trailer from the 007 Dossier


and finally, the royal premiere:

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER by THE LEFT OUTSIDES

DOUBLE BASSEY!

erm... sorry...

Diamonds Are Forever was the 7th Bond film (and the last EON one to star a tired Sean Connery, returning after Lazenby's OHMSS)... i'm not sure if you had already suspected, but this album (and blog) started life as a quick side project for the wiaiwya-7777777 singles club - a number seven obsessed seven inch vinyl club.

subscribers to wiaiwya-7777777 were to get seven 007 songs as a mid-year bonus... thankfully it all took on a life of its own, and more incredibly talented people than i could have imagined said yes to recording cover versions - among them the remarkable Left Outsides (fresh from releasing their latest long player)

anyway, it co-starred Jimmy Dean (as Willard Whyte) perhaps most famous for "Big Bad John"


i'm currently reading Diamonds Are Forever too - an ex-library copy of those lovely anniversary editions with Michael Gillette covers (one day i'll treat myself to a Live And Let Die print)

MOONRAKER by DJ DOWNFALL feat. THEORETICAL GIRL

it's been a fun week for Bond music, with William Hill suspending bets on who will be recording the SPECTRE theme after someone whacked fifteen grand on Radiohead - before they took it offline the odds were:

Radiohead (6/4)
Sam Smith (2/1)
Ellie Goulding (4/1)
Adele (5/1)
Lana Del Rey (14/1)
Lorde (14/1)
Coldplay (33/1)

and now I think about it, if it's not Lana Del Rey, I kind of like the idea of Ellie Goulding singing with Radiohead.

"that's a wrap"

Moonraker was the third Lewis Gilbert Bond film (after You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me), and was filmed primarily in France (there were a lot of tax exiles about), which meant John Barry could return to do the soundtrack (his previous one had been the Man With The Golden Gun in 1974)



we all of course know that James Bond should have returned in For Your Eyes Only, but the world went space crazy in 1977 (oh, i just noticed Boba Fett was in The Spy Who Loved Me), and Moonraker was made instead... and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with the theme:

Moonraker was originally written by John Barry and Paul Williams for Frank Sinatra, and when (for whatever reason) that didn't happen it went to Johnny Mathis. Apparently Barry asked Williams to rewrite some of the lyrics, but Williams refused saying "when Sinatra likes a lyric, it's finished". Then the Mathis' recording wasn't quite right, and Kate Bush was considered. Finally, after calling Hal David in to write new words in a weekend (having not seen any footage or read the book) the Shirley Bassey theme was recorded.

Speaking of Dame Shirley - we're going DOUBLE BASSEY, with Diamonds Are Forever next Friday 7th August... see you then

TOMORROW NEVER DIES by ANI GLASS

Aug Stone on Bond

Atlantic City, 1984. I’m eight years old and we’re on a family holiday. It’s now evening and the adults are off at the casinos whilst my older cousins are doing their version of babysitting. I’m playing with some penguin-on-wheels toy my grandmother has bought me earlier that day on the boardwalk when I hear my cousin Mark exclaim, “Yes! James Bond is on!” The excitement in his voice is that usually reserved for Van Halen coming on the radio and I wander into the other room to investigate what could possibly be so thrilling. On the television screen there are men in all black on skis intently pursuing a figure slightly ahead. I sit down captivated. There was just something about it all.

The film being shown is of course On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And so I was introduced to the world of James Bond via George Lazenby. Who – although the question is a difficult one to answer – in the days before Daniel Craig, I would still rate as my favourite Bond. And OHMSS as my favourite film, and of course, I think most people are in agreement on this, the best book. A few years later in the sixth grade, I brought in OHMSS for our quiet reading time and the teacher called my mother saying this was ‘wildly inappropriate’. The OHMSS theme is also one of the coolest pieces of music ever written.

Let’s jump around a bit, shall we? The year before this, I fondly remember my father telling me one day, with an unusual excitement in his manner, that we are going to the movies this afternoon. This was no casual trip to the cinema. There was a new James Bond film out. Importance hung in the air. As the room darkened and The Living Daylights began I was once again enthralled. That opening scene, again a pursuit down a snowy mountainside, this time Bond and Maryam d’Abo escaping via a cello-case-cum-sled. Timothy Dalton was a damn good Bond. The Welsh one, after Lazenby’s Australian. Before the reboot with Daniel Craig, effectively a year zero, there was each a Scottish (Connory), Australian (Lazenby), English (Moore), Welsh (Dalton), and Irish (Brosnan) Bond. In my wildest imaginings, should they ever crazily opt for an American, I’m still game. Strange about Roger Moore. Much as I love his work, he was much more Bond as The Saint than he was actually portraying James Bond. It somehow became all one-liners then. But of course the films and the books should be treated as separate entities. I was very lucky. Before I saw any of the more outlandish films, my grandmother gave me her rad 1960s Pan editions of the books.

When I first moved to London in September 2003, I brought OHMSS with me to re-read on the plane. And was gutted mid-way through the flight to find that pages 160-168 had at some point become loose from their binding and had parachuted out of the book, deep now on a mission I knew not where. One of the first things I did, after checking in to my hotel off the Moscow Road, was to hightail it to the Notting Hill Waterstones and read those missing sections. That first three-and-a-half month stay in London was one of the best times of my life, and of course a wildly drunken affair. So much so that when I returned to the U.S. in January 2004, something quite special popped into my head. The character of James Vagabond, star agent of Britain’s Drunken Secret Service. It was the most ridiculous idea I’d ever had, and therefore I knew it was worth pursuing. I sat down and in five weeks wrote the first draft of Off-License To Kill . It was marvelous fun to revisit all the old Bond books and watch the films again. What particularly struck me was how in Moonraker it’s actually the girl (Gala Brand) who saves the day. How different from Holly Goodhead in the film. An over-the-top affair overall but I’m still thankful for it. Shirley Bassey’s theme is such a gorgeous piece of music. Back to the books, there was a bit in Goldfinger that has always stuck with me for some reason. Fleming writes about a British agent who had attempted to asphyxiate himself in order not to crack under Nazi interrogation. But he couldn’t do it. Life always wins out.

Goldfinger for me has all sorts of cool and strange resonations. The titular character’s first name being Auric, that ‘Au’ reflected in my own name, and of course being the chemical symbol for gold. Another film having an Avengers presence with Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (both Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley are in OHMSS and Patrick McNee – R.I.P. – in A View To A Kill. If only Linda Thorson had appeared in one…) Years later I learned of a rather amazing coincidence involving Goldfinger. There’s a minor character in the story named Mr. Solo who opts out of the gold heist and is then crushed to death in his car. One of my favourite songwriters, Mikey Georgeson from David Devant & His Spirit Wife, began a musical project in 2006 under the name ‘Mr. Solo’, taking the moniker from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In 2011, Mr. Georgeson was driving home one night and was hit by a vehicle carrying two tons of gold coins just stolen from Tower Mint. Crashing into Mikey thwarted the thieves. You can read the whole account here 

I wonder how many other such strange coincidences between two of my big loves – Pop Music and James Bond – lurk somewhere beneath the visible aspect of their connection, the James Bond theme tune. A song of cultural importance. This is a fact that needs to be recognised and gotten back on track. LET GOLDFRAPP DO IT. They’d make something worthy of the grandeur. The last time we had a really great theme was ‘View To A Kill’, 30 years ago.

It was exciting to learn in 1997 that various bands were asked to contribute songs for the Tomorrow Never Dies theme. Pulp did one, later surfacing as a b-side of ‘Help The Aged’. I’ve heard that Marc Almond and The Cardigans, as well as a few others, were also approached. And Saint Etienne contributed one.

Now, as obsessive as I am about Bond (more evidence here ), I may even be more so for Saint Et. When they’d play in Boston, Sean Drinkwater and I would go to that show then make the five hour drive to NYC for the two shows there, sleeping on floors and suffering miserable colds. But it was worth it. You can’t imagine the excitement when, after joining the fan club in 1999, I received my copy of the Built On Sand: Rarities 1994-1999 cd and finally got to hear their truly excellent Bond theme. And this only in demo form. When John Jervis asked me to contribute a cover to this

project, their ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ immediately sprung to mind, and the first thing Sean replied when I asked him was ‘Can we do St Et?’

Back then Sean and I always talked about having a St Et style band of our own, the two of us and a female singer. Who sadly we never found. The name of the project would’ve been the R.A.F. But we were busy anyway with Lifestyle. Sean at one point wrote a Bond theme of his own, ‘Never Go Uptown’ (https://soundcloud.com/lifestyleband/never-go-uptown-1999 ). (I think we only ever played this once, at one of the first Lifestyle shows of the 2001 line-up. A good tune though, that should be revisited.)

But things always have a way of coming together. This year Sean and I have been producing Ani Glass’ solo songs (Ani from The Pipettes and The Lovely Wars. First single out July 20th. Have a listen here - https://soundcloud.com/aniglass ). We record trans-Atlantically with us in Massachusetts and Ani in Cardiff. And when the opportunity arose, the three of us contributed our respective strengths to make a version of Saint Et’s ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ I couldn’t be more pleased with.

Postscript - On my first visit to Cardiff last year, on a night out in Grangetown, Shirley Bassey’s name came up and Ani pointed towards the bay and said ‘she was born right over there’. And that’s of course what used to be known as Tiger Bay, the title of Saint Etienne’s third album.

NEW SPECTRE TRAILER

TOMORROW NEVER DIES by RALEGH LONG

when i asked Ralegh if he wanted to write anything about his cover of Sheryl Crow's theme to the 1997 Bond film all he said was "Teri Hatcher"

as a bonus, here are all the Bond title sequences:

SURRENDER (from Tomorrow Never Dies) by PICTUREBOX

 
James Bond, for me, was definitely more TV than cinema. Childhood TV too. Hence the “was”. So in that sense he was a lot like Batman or The Six Million Dollar Man, less so Wonder Woman. He didn't have any super powers but lots of gadgets and his own special vehicles. Again like Batman. I didn't associate him with anything in the real world at all. I certainly never thought who the enemies were or why he should be after them. The same as never questioning why The Penguin was The Penguin. They were just these enjoyably far-fetched films that appeared on TV, mostly at holiday times it seemed, when we weren't out playing football.

I know I enjoyed them as I remember rushing off to draw bits on the reams of “computer paper” our elder brother recycled our way from work. I also remember seeing “The Spy Who Loved Me” on Betamax, taped off the telly and thinking “That's Ringo Starr's wife,” as Barbara Bach played tunes on the gears in the van. And being confused by Jaws, thinking 1) isn't Jaws a shark? And 2) why has he got big metal teeth anyway? They were no advantage in Moonraker, one of the only ones I ever saw at the cinema.

My brother had the toy Lotus Esprit car, the white one with fins that came out to help it go underwater and several red plastic missiles that could be fired. Or, more likely, lost. I think I had a Starsky and Hutch car myself, as everything had to be fair.

I didn't see much of Mr Bond from the early 80s on till he chucked the Queen out of a helicopter at The Olympics. But I did hear the music.

For this version of “Surrender”, I tried to imagine I was on Chemikal Underground, maybe in Arab Strap, doing it for The Breezeblock or a Peel Session. Cos you have to start somewhere. I wanted that slightly discordant picking guitar which I'd never played before, I wanted it as slow as I could go, and the vocals as low as I could go, even lower, till I chucked them for a robot. The lyrics sound incredibly creepy, so having them as an unwelcome message on an answer machine seemed ideal. And a message left by a robot, why not? It was all experimental. I began to feel quite sorry for the robot by the end. So it seemed like time to call a halt.

CASINO ROYALE by SEKS BOMBA

once again, i'm sorry to say we're dedicating this post to another screen legend - Sir Godfrey Tibbett and of course John Steed - Patrick Macnee

 

Casino Royale by George Hall

Like most kids my age, I grew up on James Bond movies.  Between the impossibly cool title character, giant technicolor explosions, absurdly ingenious devices and beautiful cars (I still have my toy Aston-Martin), I - a nerdy little kid parked at his parent's TV - was immediately hooked.

And then there's the music, with its dark minor keys and fiendish deployment of the augmented fourth (aka the "Devil's Interval") coupled with sweeping, ominous strings and twangy rock 'n' roll guitar.  Composer / arranger John Barry became an early musical hero, though I didn't know his name until years later (or his guitarist, the perfectly named Vic Flick).

In a world without TiVo, video rental or on-line streaming, the only way to see the earlier Bond movies was to scan the TV Guide pocket magazine for listings.  At a certain point, I was sure I'd seen all of them, but it turns out I missed one: "Casino Royale."

It turns out that long before Sean Connery's Bond debut in 1962's "Dr. No," James Bond had appeared as (of all things) an American in a 1954 episode of a US TV show.  The episode, titled "Casino Royale," took it's name from Ian Fleming's first Bond book. The film rights were later re-sold, then re-re-sold to a certain Charles K. Feldman who, after failing to put together a deal with "proper" Bond film series producer Albert Broccoli, decided to try another tack.

Having seen "Dr No," Feldman knew he couldn't possibly compete - but it being the 60's, with Batman, Susan Sontag and general post-modernism bringing camp into the mainstream, Feldman thought "why not a camp James Bond?" A team was assembled, which included such bona fide legends as Orson Welles, John Huston and Charles Boyer along with contemporary stars David Niven, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and even onetime "Bond girl" Ursula Andress. Hi-jinks necessarily ensued, budgets were broken repeatedly, coherence was out the window, and (spoiler alert!) everything blows up at the end.

Make no mistake, the movie is a mess best enjoyed in snippets by fans of 60's kitsch (you know who you are), but the music was another thing entirely.  Assigned to hit songwriter Burt Bacharach, who'd worked on Allen's "What's New Pussycat" and "After the Fox," the result was nothing like John Barry, but quite wonderful its own right and even included a couple of hits in Dusty Springfield's timeless smooch-inducer "The Look of Love" and the title track, a #1 Easy Listening hit for Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.


The latter is covered here by Seks Bomba - a mostly instrumental band from Boston, MA who absolutely revelled in this sort of thing - in a version which originally appeared on their intermittently obscure 2nd release, 2001's "Somewhere in this Town."

Personnel:
Lori Perkins - Hammond organ
George Hall - guitars, ebow
Chris Cote - guitar
Matt Silbert - bass guitar
Brett Campbell - drums

Recorded & mixed by Pete Weiss

LIVE AND LET DIE by THE ELDERLY

we're a day early again, but this time for happier reasons

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MACCA!


Live and let Die by George Hall

THE MOVIE

Live & Let Die was the first Bond movie I saw in a theater, and I loved it. In fact, I still love it, despite (or perhaps because of) not having seen it since – I mean, why subject a perfectly good, happy childhood memory to the inevitable trauma of informed, adult scrutiny?

I remember the giant, colorful explosions - our TV at home was still black & white - making up for the disappointing lack of a singular, iconic Bond mobile (not an Aston Martin to be seen!), along with the creepy exotica of New Orleans which, come to think of it, made it my first "blaxploitation" film as well. The switch from erstwhile Bond Sean Connery's vaguely and/or not-vaguely menacing drollery to Roger Moore's blithe (and veddy English) dispenser of one-liners was apparently reviled by "serious" Bondophiles, though I don't recall this being a problem. at least as long as stuff kept blowing up. There was also a boat chase,possibly the greatest in the history of cinema, by my entirely unscientific reckoning.

But above all, there was that Paul McCartney theme song.

THE SONG

As a Beatle freak from the moment I caught a TV re-run of their movie "Help!," I was prepared to love it no matter how terrible it was, but - luckily for me - its combination of high kitsch, pop smarts and absurd-yet-flawlessly-musical lyrics made it an instant classic. I must've been 10 or so when I first heard it, and I'm still 10 whenever I hear it, even today!

THE ELDERLY

The Elderly are a widely unknown supergroup from Boston, Massachusetts, comprising members of such regionally popular performing units as the I Want You, the Weisstronauts, Kingsley Flood, Eddie Japan, New Million Box, Seks Bomba and others. They are responsible for 2 releases, one of which is better than the other.

Jim Gerdeman - vocals, guitar, tin whistle
Kevin Quinn - vocals, bass guitar, patois
Joe Kowalski - misc keys, riddim assemblage, samples, tympani
Michael Spaly - violin, zipper, misc strings, bg vocals
George Hall - guitar, bg vocal
Rafi Sofer - guitar, technical jibber-jabber
Will Davies - drums, bg vocals
Chris Barrett - trumpet, euphonium
Recorded & mixed by Rafi Sofer at Q Division Studios, Somerville, MA

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...