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?
(thanks to Jeff Mellin in Q division who has worked his magic with Daniel Craig)
yep, it's finally here - TODAY IS A GIRL AND A GUN RELEASE DATE, and to celebrate, here's the Vatican Cellars take on Thunderball:
thanks to everyone who has kindly given their time and hard work to this album; the writers, illustrators, designers and musicians who made these amazing covers of the fantastic Bond themes - just as a reminder (and in order of release):
27-MarJack Hayter - Die Another Day
03-AprRobert Rotifer - GoldenEye
10-Aprthe Weisstronauts - James Bond Theme
17-AprSimon Fox - All Time High
24-AprMichaelmas - We Have All The Time In The World
01-Maythe Sly and Unseen - A View to a Kill
08-MayDarren Hayman - Goldfinger
15-MayCitizen Helene - For Your Eyes Only
22-MayDeerful - Three Blind Mice
29-Maythe Great Electric - James Bond Theme
05-JunSpaceship Mark - The Man with the Golden Gun
12-JunPapernut Cambridge - The Man with the Golden Gun
19-JunElderly - Live and Let Die
26-JunSeks Bomba - Casino Royale
03-JulJeff Mellin- You Only Live Twice
10-Julpicturebox - Surrender (from Tomorrow Never Dies)
17-JulRalegh Long - Tomorrow Never Dies
24-JulAni Glass - Tomorrow Never Dies
31-JulDJ Downfall feat. Theoretical Girl - Moonraker
07-Augthe Left Outsides - Diamonds Are Forever
14-AugPam Berry - Underneath The Mango Tree
21-AugCharm Bracelet - For Your Eyes Only
28-AugMaija Sofia - Never Say Never Again
04-SepSnow Leopard Brotherhood - The Living Daylights
11-SepTim the Mute - Licence to Kill
18-SepKeiron Phelan - Another Way To Die
25-SepRory McVicar - Writing's On The Wall
02-OctMs Goodnight - Skyfall
09-OctRebecca Jade - You Know My Name
16-Octthe Fenestration - The World Is Not Enough
23-Octthe Vatican Cellars - Thunderball
30-OctCee Bee Beaumont - Death of Fiona
06-Novthe Leaf Library - From Russia With Love
07-NovEd Dowie - James Bond Theme (Union Chapel Organ version)
please tell your chums to drop by and download the complete album (and to pay-what-they-want), and to come along to the launch party at the Union Chapel on the 007th November
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:
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
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)
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.
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
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
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.”
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
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)...
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
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 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!)
I’m feeling Italian and musical, so I’ll take on the world that way: biretta, claret, expense account. It’s such a perfect place to start. In the next room or this very one, I dropped my Rolex and it exploded. That’s me, that’s my life. I’m not the only spy out here. What does it matter to you if I poison the odd prime minister? They’ll make more. Another man as he stands right behind me looking in the mirror feels my presence in the crowd. I’m going to close my body now before he strikes like thunderball. I’ve seen diamonds cut through harder men. Hold one up and then caress it, then return it to the glove compartment of my hydroponic Lotus. There’s some kind of magic inside me issued by Q Branch, but you’ll never have my heart as it technically belongs to Her Majesty’s government. That fatal kiss is all you need. I’ve seen places, faces, and smiled for a moment; you’ve seen my smile in a thousand dreams. The wild, abandoned side of me has left his gold paint in Miami, but my lies can’t disguise what you fear. Love is a stranger who beckons you on. In the blink of an eye, I’ll be there too. With the cares of the world behind us, I’ll file my report in the morning. Hey, driver, where we going?
Pete Weiss: guitars
Nathan Logus: drums
Kenny Lafler: guitars
Kevin Quinn: bass
Recorded by PW at Armory Sound, Somerville MA
Mixed by PW at Verdant Studio, Athens VT
www.weisstronauts.com
50 Years of James Bond: The Movie:
Approximately five minutes from each of the 22 Eon produced James Bond films have been cut together, in order and in sequence, beginning with the first five minutes of DR. NO (1962) followed by minutes 5-10 of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), minutes 10-15 of GOLDFINGER (1964), minutes 15-20 of THUNDERBALL (1965), continuing on through each of the remaining 18 Bond features (accounting for variables in each title's running time) culminating with the final five minutes of 2008's QUANTUM OF SOLACE:
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