Beyond the guns, gadgets and girls, if there’s one thing associated with James Bond it’s song. And in this week’s Bond and Beyond Prom, Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser and the BBC Concert Orchestra are honouring that music. They have a wealth of soundtrack gold from which to choose, of course, from 1962’s (which introduced Monty Norman’s famous ) right up to Daniel Craig’s 2021 swansong , which had Billie Eilish doing the Grammy-winning musical honours.
But how to choose the setlist? Just as everyone has their favourite Bond, so every fan knows the song that leaves them both shaken and stirred. “This is not easy,” acknowledges Simon Le Bon, frontman with Duran Duran, performers of the theme to 1985’s A View to a Kill. “Over the course of six decades, the producers have enlisted songwriters, performers and producers at the top of their games. And they have made some bangers.”
One of the earliest creators of said “bangers” is Don Black. The lyricist, now 88, co-wrote his first Bond theme for 1965’s (sung by Tom Jones) after being approached by John Barry, who had composed the music to the previous two, and . To Black’s expert mind, “a Bond song should be provocative and seductive, with a whiff of the boudoir about it. It’s got to suck you in – what happens next? When the song finishes, it should be a cliffhanger.”
“If the Bond song is doing its job, it makes you want to watch the movie,” agrees David Arnold, also a serial Bond composer and collaborator with Black on and The World Is Not Enough. “It’s a movie’s shop window. It says: this is the world we are creating. It’s like you’re going past Hamley’s and they’ve got their Christmas display up. As Don frequently says, it’s a beckoning.”
Of course, what’s behind that window is frequently a world of wonder. Is it Las Vegas gambling tables or a volcano hiding a villain’s lair? A Lotus Esprit that turns into a submarine or a Scotsman who, er, turns Japanese? The theme songs, then, have to be equally wide-ranging.
As Arnold puts it, “All the songs, like the actors, are completely different to each other. and are Bond songs. So is from The Spy Who Loved Me, but that could almost be a Broadway tune. Live and Let Die is a rock’n’roll thing. Billie Eilish’s is internalised, darker and deeper.
“And yet they’re all doing that [same] job at the start of the film. They’re saying, this is our world – welcome.”
But which Bond themes take you to double-0 heaven? On the right, some key Bond music maestros share their own favourites…
The Bond and Beyond Prom will be televised at a later date on BBC TV