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Best Bond Song - EVAH!; From Mark Steyn
Topic Started: Nov 17 2008, 12:38 PM (180 Views)
George K
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Finally
GOLDFINGER

Monday, 17 November 2008

Song of the Week
by John Barry, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley

We've been marking the arrival of A Quantum Of Solace in US cinemas over this last week at SteynOnline, and it seemed appropriate to round things out with a song - a Bond song, that is. Bond songs are a famously mixed bag. At the London premiere of Die Another Day, in the moment of silence that followed Madonna’s theme for the title sequence, Shirley Bassey yelled out: “Rubbish!” I find it hard to disagree with Dame Shirley. The latest Bond song, by Jack White and Alicia Keyes, is less rubbish than Madonna's. I assume Mr White is a different Mr White from "Mr White", the film's mysterious villain. On the other hand, the first Bond villain to pen his own theme song would be kinda cool.

Music is a subjective business, of course. Nonetheless, my faith in my old chum Anthony Lane as a reliable film critic was badly shaken when he cited, as an example of a great Bond song, “Nobody Does It Better”, the cheesy Marvin Hamlisch/Carole Bayer Sager soft-rock ballad Carly Simon sang for The Spy Who Loved Me, when Roger Moore was at the peak of his game, legover-wise. In attempting to select the definitive Bond song, one should surely have a few rules of admission, the first being that it has to be by John Barry, who was responsible for the cool signature style of 007’s music for most of its first quarter-century. Think of that marvelous moment in the second film, From Russia With Love, when Bond prowls his Turkish hotel room, feeling his way round the walls, searching for bugs, accompanied by the famous theme tune, insistent with menace. It’s one of the best ever deployments of the Bond music.

So any “best Bond song” ought to be by Barry. And, if only to avoid any further incidents like the heckling of the London premiere, it ought to be sung by Shirley Bassey. Over the years several songwriters told me that, when they got the call asking for the title song, they wrote it with Shirl in mind and were underwhelmed to discover which passing pop fancy the producers had signed instead. La Bassey has the size of the occasion. The songs for You Only Live Twice, The Man With The Golden Gun, Octopussy and even “Nobody Does It Better” would all have been different with Dame Shirley to goose them up. She even gave us the song which (though cut from Thunderball) defines the entire genre: “Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”.

Other than that, you can hear her on three title songs: Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker. I have a soft spot for that last one, but it’s not as beloved as the earlier two. A couple of years back, I was driving through the mountains when “Diamonds Are Forever” came on the radio and, not for the first time, I found myself marveling at one of the two all-time great Bond songs. I’ve always loved the way it captures Ian Fleming’s view of Tiffany Case in just a few lines, the sense of a woman damaged by men:

Diamonds Are Forever
Sparkling round my little finger
Unlike men the diamonds linger…

I don’t need love
For what good will love do me?
Diamonds never lie to me
For when love’s gone
They luster on…


John Barry’s music with Don Black’s words. I was always interested to know how Don had dug so deep into the character and the situation to be able to distil it so brilliantly. But sometimes the “And then I wrote…” anecdote doesn’t quite go the way you expect it to. “Don’t think of the song as being about a diamond,” Barry advised Black. “Write it as though she’s thinking about a penis.”

Oh, well. That works, too:

Diamonds Are Forever
Hold one up and then caress it
Touch it, stroke it and undress it…


In Wrestling With Elephants, his biography of Don Black, James Inverne gave rather more thought to the penis than either the songwriters or Tiffany Case. “Diamonds Are Forever”, he writes, is “not so much about a penis, as a penis substitute - diamonds as dildos. And Barry’s music is suitably raunchy, caressing the stave, teasing in the verses, hinting at what's to come, before the big ballsy climaxes.”

Caressing the stave? Really, the song deserves better than that. To modify Freud, sometimes a penis isn’t just a penis.

Which leaves us with “Goldfinger”. The third film in the Bond series was the one in which so many elements – the “formula” – fell into place. You can hear it in the confident swank of Barry’s score in the very first scene, as the camera eases in from high above Miami down to the hotel pool and into the story. Goldfinger (1965) was the first Bond film with a real title song. In its predecessor, From Russia With Love, the song’s heard instrumentally over the credits and then reprised from a transistor radio, as a more or less conventional love ballad (by Lionel Bart). But “Goldfinger”? How do you get a hit song out of a title like that? The third movie was the first for which Barry wrote the song proper as opposed to the dramatic score. He started with three notes:

Gold-fin-ger!

When he played that opening to his lyricists, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, they immediately sang back at him: “Wider than a mile…” In fairness, Barry’s three-note title phrase is entirely different from Henry Mancini’s for “Moon River”, especially when introduced by that little brass figure the final orchestration opens up with. But you can understand why the particular character of the song might not have been apparent with Barry plunking it out at the piano.

Barry, Bricusse and Newley had never worked together before, but they used to have lunch every Friday, together with Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, at Bricusse’s London restaurant, the Pickwick Club. And, as Anthony Newley once told me, he and Barry happened to be sharing the same divorce lawyer at the time. Invited by Barry to write a song called “Goldfinger”, Newley responded: “What the hell kind of title is that?” But, as with Don Black and the “Diamonds Are Forever” penis, Barry was ready with the answer: “It’s ‘Mack The Knife’,” he said. “A song about a villain.” And with that they were off:

Goldfinger!
He’s the man
The man with the Midas touch
A spider’s touch…


The song set the standard for the series. No matter how goofy the title, go with it. Much as I like Barry and Tim Rice’s “All Time High”, they really shouldn’t have ducked the challenge of writing a song called “Octopussy”. Perhaps Barry had been fingered too often by that point. After hearing the title song for Thunderball for the first time, the film’s director started calling it “Thunderfinger”. In fairness, “Thunderball”’s lyricist had an even less promising gig: it wasn’t even the name of the villain, only of some obscure plot. So Don Black eventually settled on: “…so he strikes like/Thunderball!” – whatever that means. “You know where they went wrong with ‘Thunderball’?” Leslie Bricusse once said to me. “They put the title at the end of the phrase. ‘Goldfinger’ works because we put that word up at the front and so everything that follows fits in.” He has a point, but you realize how perilous the whole game is with the second section:

Such a cold finger
Beckons you
To enter his web of sin
But don’t go in!


The decision to rhyme the word “Goldfinger” could easily have rendered the whole conceit ridiculous. But, in fact, “cold finger” – despite its somewhat clinical vividness – works splendidly. Anthony Newley was a rather sad and faded figure by the time of his death in 1998 and Leslie Bricusse has done himself no favors by spending the Nineties as lyricist to Frank Wildhorn, a Whitney Houston power balladeer briefly touted as Broadway’s answer to Andrew Lloyd Webber. But they were pretty darn good in 1965. I once asked Newley why he split with Bricusse and he furrowed his brows and answered thus:

Quote:
 
“Why did we stop? Neither of us knows the answer. Newley and Bricusse would both like to find another Newley and Bricusse, with somebody else - just to change the sheets. You have mixed emotions about any collaboration – there’s a lot of subjugation, a lot of domination.” He stopped, furrowed his brows again and stared with closed eyelids into the distance, as if wrestling with some strange new insight he didn’t quite trust me with. “Being gifted without discipline is a wasted gift. I lack discipline. Leslie brought form to my passion. In print this won’t look too good over breakfast, but I have to say there is more to this chapter of our being then we know. I have probably been in a family relationship with Leslie in 12 previous lives.”


If so, it’s news to Leslie. I asked Bricusse more or less the same question and got a rather different answer: “Newley had these intellectual pretensions that I’d try to hold down. He always wanted to declaim from the mountain, and eventually succeeded. He made a film called Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe And Find True Happiness? where he stood on a mountain top dressed like Jesus and sang ‘I’m All I Need’. It was nice, but I think I would have stopped him doing that.”

Forty years ago, Newley wasn’t yet a self-parody. He made a wonderfully pared down jazzy little demo of “Goldfinger”, stripped of the John Barry orchestration and the Shirley Bassey burly chassis delivery and he makes the song very sly and insinuating:

Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can’t disguise what you fear
For a golden girl knows when’s kissed her
It’s the kiss of death from Mister
Goldfinger…


It’s impressive how much the lyric anticipates, not least the gilded demise of Jill Masterson. It’s a textbook example of a great title song, one that captures tonally the character of a film. In America, the soundtrack LP knocked the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night off the top of the album charts and never stopped selling. It so defined Shirley Bassey’s image that she made an album called Goldsinger. Every Bond film since has operated in the shadow of “Goldfinger”, to the point where the only good bits of the song in License To Kill are the John Barry brassy wailin’ an’ a-broodin’ they lifted from his “Goldfinger” orchestration – though, of course, Gladys Knight can’t match Shirley’s big finish:

He loves only gold!
Only gold!
He loves gold!
He loves only gold!


Repeat for 20 minutes, louder and louder and louder, and then hold the final note until Tuesday lunchtime. Everybody’s wanted to match that melodramatic recapitulation ad infinitum, and “Diamonds Are Forever” certainly comes close:

Diamonds Are Forever
And ever!
And ever!
And ever!
And ever!
And eeeeeeeeeee-ver!


Etc. But, if I had to name one spy movie theme that captures the old “Goldfinger” big finish better than anybody, it would have to be the otherwise underwhelming 1996 Leslie Nielsen spooferoo Spy Hard, with Weird Al Yankovic giving it the full Bassey over the opening titles:

And just in case you came in late
Allow me to reiterate
The name of this movie
Is Spy Hard!
They call it Spy Hard!
It’s Spy Hard!


And on and on. Which is kind of appropriate. Because that's what Fleming started - a franchise that's forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and eeeeeeeeeeeeever!
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Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
I am partial to Live and Let Die -- it capture the bombastic cheesy Bond motif quite well.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Red Rice
HOLY CARP!!!
I'd like to put a word in for "GoldenEye", as performed by Tina Turner; very sleek and menacing.

"You'll never know how I watched you from the shadows as a child
You'll never know how it feels to be the one who's left behind
You'll never know the days and the nights, the tears, the tears I've cried
But now my time has come and time, time is not on your side"

I may be biased because it's the first Bond film I ever saw in a theater.
Civilisation, I vaguely realized then - and subsequent observation has confirmed the view - could not progress that way. It must have a greater guiding principle to survive. To treat it as a carcase off which each man tears as much as he can for himself, is to stand convicted a brute, fit for nothing better than a jungle existence, which is a death-struggle, leading nowhither. I did not believe that was the human destiny, for Man individually was sane and reasonable, only collectively a fool.

I hope the gunner of that Hun two-seater shot him clean, bullet to heart, and that his plane, on fire, fell like a meteor through the sky he loved. Since he had to end, I hope he ended so. But, oh, the waste! The loss!

- Cecil Lewis
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big al
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Bull-Carp
Here's another man's top 20 list: Total Music Geek.

Personally, I rather like "Live and Let Die".

Big Al
Location: Western PA

"jesu, der simcha fun der man's farlangen."
-bachophile
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Luke's Dad
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Emperor Pengin
Quote:
 
But, if I had to name one spy movie theme that captures the old “Goldfinger” big finish better than anybody, it would have to be the otherwise underwhelming 1996 Leslie Nielsen spooferoo Spy Hard, with Weird Al Yankovic giving it the full Bassey over the opening titles:

And just in case you came in late
Allow me to reiterate
The name of this movie
Is Spy Hard!
They call it Spy Hard!
It’s Spy Hard!


:thumb:

I remember that one!
The problem with having an open mind is that people keep trying to put things in it.
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dolmansaxlil
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HOLY CARP!!!
My fave is Goldfinger. I love Bassey.
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George K
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Finally
I have to agree with Steyn's analysis of why "Goldfinger" was the perfect song for a Bond movie, but I also always had a fondness for "For Your Eyes Only."
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Red Rice
Nov 17 2008, 01:11 PM
I'd like to put a word in for "GoldenEye", as performed by Tina Turner; very sleek and menacing.

"You'll never know how I watched you from the shadows as a child
You'll never know how it feels to be the one who's left behind
You'll never know the days and the nights, the tears, the tears I've cried
But now my time has come and time, time is not on your side"

I may be biased because it's the first Bond film I ever saw in a theater.
My gosh, you are young. :lol2:

My first Bond in a theater was Goldfinger. 1964 I believe.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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