578 replies to this topic

[Mr_Wint]

There is a melody.

That is a rather brave statement! I'm not so sure about it...

Even if it is integrated with the score, no one will notice it. Arnold is up for a big challenge if he's going to base the score on this.

Just like DAD, the only thing that works is the intro, IMO, and that is about 10 sec.

[SecretAgentFan]

That intro gets a reworking after the two minute mark.

[NATO Sub]

Just listened to the full version (or at least the full version that has been leaked). I really like it up until the "oooooaaaaaa"s start @ 2:28!

That section does, I admit, sound a little tuneless. If you edited that out (hoping they do for the titles mix) it's a good song and should fit the tone of QoS well.

I love the intro though!

[Joyce Carrington]

I like it. Really do. Gets my head bopping. Has a good feel to it that fits the tone of the movie, I think.

Still a bit confused as to lyrics though. Not that I need to understand them, I'd just like to know them.

Another bringer with a slick trigger finger ?

A bomb on the table ?

And the first line of the chorus... not a clue.

Anyway, all in good time.

[Mr Ashdown]

I like it. Really do. Gets my head bopping. Has a good feel to it that fits the tone of the movie, I think.

Still a bit confused as to lyrics though. Not that I need to understand them, I'd just like to know them.

Another bringer with a slick trigger finger ?

A bomb on the table ?

And the first line of the chorus... not a clue.

Anyway, all in good time.

I can't be doing with this new-fangled music. I remember when you could hear all the words. And you could singalong to the tunes. And the singers looked nice and clean and wore nice suits and had proper haircuts.

Edit. Damnit, how do you put smileys in these posts? The above is supposed to be a joke, yet without the smiley, is sort of comes across as a bit arsey. Which really isn't my intention at all!

Edited by Mr Ashdown, 18 September 2008 - 08:59 AM.

[Zorin Industries]

It is a lot easier to criticize than actually create something "better".

Beautifully said. Perfect words for A LOT of griping and anorak moaning round here.

No, it's a nonsense argument.

And calling people "fanboys" and "anoraks" because they happen to have a different opinion to your own isn't very nice, either.

I stand by my thoughts (as echoed by NVT) that a great many followers of the series still do not get the films - how they work, why they work and when they work. Of course we all have favourites and they should be separate from everyone else. I don't think GOLDFINGER is the Best Bond Ever. I have a favourite, but it is not the best Bond film by a long stretch (though I could defend why it might be). A lot of fans are unable to separate the film and the canon from the film in the cultural context it arrived in or the cultural zeitgeist it is reflecting.

And all of this moaning tends to come from people who could not do any better. That doesn't mean they cannot moan at all. Of course they can. But to do so from a perspective that is damning someone else's creative efforts without an understanding of the context of their work is foolish and gets the fan world of James Bond 007 nowhere.

Getting back to the song....

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, GOLDFINGER, A VIEW TO A KILL, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, LIVE AND LET DIE, THUNDERBALL ... they were all songs that were as much about the cultural era they emerged in as they were Bond song standards. What happened since 1995 was that we had 007 title tracks that were trying harder to be 'Bond Songs' rather than solid pieces of contemporary music. When Madonna, Cornell, White & Keys come along and create solid Bond songs AND contemporary sounding tracks at the same time, a lot of people panic and let nostalgia damn the tracks.

Moses did not come down from that viewing theatre on the Mount and declare all Bond songs should contain brass, guitars and Shirley Bassey. The first Bond song ever heard on film was a Jamaican calypso ditty that couldn't be less 007 if it tried.

Beg to differ. You're not taking into account that having a title song at all is obsolete by hollywood standards. It wasn't at the time FYEO came out but by the late eighties it had become expendable. LTK suffered the most from changing demographics as not only did it have the dubious honour of being the first film in the series to credit a music consultant (fancy name for an A&R who hires sub-par artists to fabricate a "hits" soundtrack). I still remember that awful sticker on my vynil copy heralding it as "this year's hottest soundtrack". Ouch! I was young and dumb then and would champion anything official even if my gut was having trouble digesting it. By today standards, Bond movies wouldn't even have a prologue as having titles up front on a specially designed sequence is passé and would end up with some gangsta rap. The fact they have kept the titles is to honour tradition and anyway the songs no longer chart so I don't see the point in updating them to please a demographic that doesn't care.
You contradict yourself by defending the song by saying Bond songs needn't have brass in them when the song falls into the same cliché. In fact, AWTD tries so hard in being both retro and "cool" (read new) that is hard to see what you mean with it being "aboutthe cultural era it emerged".
Incidentally, could you do any better? Please let me know when your name appears in a Bond film. Last time I checked, we were all mortals here.

"Beg to differ"...? I actually agree with most of what you say. Title songs and title sequences are passe. Heck, even having any nod to a title caption is de rigeur. Though that doesn't mean they are obselete altogether - as ROCKNROLLA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER MAN testify.

I'm not a musician. But I do have experience of using music on film. I know how it can be done well and I know how it can be done badly. "Has my name appeared on a Bond film?". I will not answer that one but due to circumstances I am a teeny bit less of a "mortal" when it comes to defending Eon Productions and their creative and business decisions.

And I didn't slate the song. I like it. The "can you do any better?" mantra is surely left to those that slate the song on odd grounds. Hate it by all means. But let's not do so just because "Arnold won't intergrate that!!" neurosis.

Personally I find TND to be a more interesting and original song than Surrender.

Personally, I find the opposite to be true. I find the TND song rather dreary, whereas I believe "Surrender" is the best Bond theme we never had.

Absolutely. Don Black's finest and most secret of moments.

[Zorin Industries]

I've listened to the full version and it is a dirty whore of a tune... and Bond songs are allowed to be slutty.

And this will be reworked to fit the titles anyway.

I like. A lot.

[marktmurphy]

"Beg to differ"...? I actually agree with most of what you say. Title songs and title sequences are passe. Heck, even having any nod to a title caption is de rigeur. Though that doesn't mean they are obselete altogether - as ROCKNROLLA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER MAN testify.

So... they're not passé . Loads of films have them. Some do, some don't- it doesn't mean that either are passé.

Personally I find TND to be a more interesting and original song than Surrender.

Personally, I find the opposite to be true. I find the TND song rather dreary, whereas I believe "Surrender" is the best Bond theme we never had.

Absolutely. Don Black's finest and most secret of moments.

Seriously? 'Tease and tantalize' and all that old nonsense? This proved to me that Black wasn't really the man for the job. 'You'll cherish the world that I create' just felt so awkward to me. I do enjoy Surrender, but TND is more interesting creatively, and I very much enjoy it despite the lyrics.

[marktmurphy]

Who said anything about ditching the titles? I said ditch the crappy songs.

I don't know what you're asking for- you change your mind every time you post! Again; I think you've confused your opinion for fact and you're trying to drape it in some over-convoluted nonsense about marketing when all you're actually saying is 'I don't like this song'.

You should try rereading your own posts. They're so full of bad grammar (So if you don't watch any films where is all this proclaimed knowledge about what they do and don't do coming from?, etc.) that I'm finding increasingly difficult to make any sense of them. It was you who first quoted me and not otherwise, so if you're up for a verbal fight, do some training first.

I haven't mentioned your grammar as I'm not certain that English is your first language and it would have been extremely ungracious of me to mention it ( e.g. "As it is evident by the reports on this site alone, QOS had an open call for a title song, similarly to TND where Pulp's was rejected." 'Similarly to'? "Will you able to say so about AWTD when the hype is all gone?" Did you mean 'will you be able to say the same of AWD when all of the hype is gone?' etc.) , but let me assure you that there's nothing wrong with mine. If you can't understand that sentence then that's really your problem; not mine.

[dee-bee-five]

"Beg to differ"...? I actually agree with most of what you say. Title songs and title sequences are passe. Heck, even having any nod to a title caption is de rigeur. Though that doesn't mean they are obselete altogether - as ROCKNROLLA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER MAN testify.

So... they're not passé . Loads of films have them. Some do, some don't- it doesn't mean that either are passé.

Personally I find TND to be a more interesting and original song than Surrender.

Personally, I find the opposite to be true. I find the TND song rather dreary, whereas I believe "Surrender" is the best Bond theme we never had.

Absolutely. Don Black's finest and most secret of moments.

Seriously?

Seriously.

[Vauxhall]

Another bringer with a slick trigger finger

"I know the player with the slick trigger finger"

A bomb on the table

"A phone on the table"

I think...

[Makeshift Python]

I find it to be very dull. Very sub-par for a Bond song. Not down the level of DAD, but pretty underwhelming.

[Zorin Industries]

"Beg to differ"...? I actually agree with most of what you say. Title songs and title sequences are passe. Heck, even having any nod to a title caption is de rigeur. Though that doesn't mean they are obselete altogether - as ROCKNROLLA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER MAN testify.

So... they're not passé . Loads of films have them. Some do, some don't- it doesn't mean that either are passé.

Personally I find TND to be a more interesting and original song than Surrender.

Personally, I find the opposite to be true. I find the TND song rather dreary, whereas I believe "Surrender" is the best Bond theme we never had.

Absolutely. Don Black's finest and most secret of moments.

Seriously? 'Tease and tantalize' and all that old nonsense? This proved to me that Black wasn't really the man for the job. 'You'll cherish the world that I create' just felt so awkward to me. I do enjoy Surrender, but TND is more interesting creatively, and I very much enjoy it despite the lyrics.

No no no!!! (We are going to have to disagree). The Crowe effort was a dull cowgirl lament of a tune that sounded like the singer's pick-up truck had broken down en route to the studio. It's whiney and clearly written by someone who doesn't know Bond at all ("Martinis, girls and guns"). A Bond song should not be on the nose like that.

SURRENDER was written as if the newspaper itself is the singer - a good tangential trait of Don Black's. THUNDERBALL is about a man obsessed with Bond from afar and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is about oral sex.

[spynovelfan]

Okay, I have now listened to the whole official version of the song, as played on BBC Radio One.

I really like the swampy bravado of it. It's got silly, very over-the-top lyrics that sound more like they're from an Austin Powers or Spy Hard-style parody than from a Bond film proper, but there is some disarming substance to them, and the title - awful as it sounded - does make a kind of sense with Craig's portrayal of the character and what we saw in Casino Royale. I like the double vocal effect, and I like the edginess of some of it - I enjoyed that spurting frayed non-guitar solo.

The thing that I didn't like at all was the drop-ins of little trills that recall 'Bond themes' very heavy-handedly. The song itself is fine - stick to it! I hate all that pandering to 'sounding like Bond'. It's the aural equivalent of a piece of fan fiction that has James Bond, with a cruel smile and a comma of black hair, wearing a midnight blue, Brioni one-button, single breasted wool barathea tuxedo with peaked silk grosgrain lapels that perfectly conceals his Walther PPK, ordering a vodka martini - shaken not stirred - while flirting in a casino with a woman called Jessica Lovescock. While humming an old Ink Spots tune. It's like an old Casio keyboard where instead of pressing a button that gives you a naff 'hip-hop' style 'Yo!', you get a bombastic Bond riff, or tinkly Bassey-theme-ish piano, or horn sound. Terrible.

The rest of the song is fine. I just wish they'd get rid of this sort of thing. That's what I liked about Chris Cornell's song, minus a couple of dodgy moments: it was a Bond song, but not extremely predictably and obviously trying to be that. It fitted the spirit of the new direction: no Moneypenny or Q if they're not necessary. No horns if you don't need them. You can be Bond without the obvious. This so nearly did that, but someone - White, I suppose - has gone over it all and sprinkled 'Bond' stuff over it. Only it's not Bond stuff, it's Jessica Lovescock video-game soundtrack Casio keyboard MIDI file by-numbers Bond stuff that the song does not need.

[Zorin Industries]

"Beg to differ"...? I actually agree with most of what you say. Title songs and title sequences are passe. Heck, even having any nod to a title caption is de rigeur. Though that doesn't mean they are obselete altogether - as ROCKNROLLA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SPIDER MAN testify.

So... they're not passé . Loads of films have them. Some do, some don't- it doesn't mean that either are passé.

Personally I find TND to be a more interesting and original song than Surrender.

Personally, I find the opposite to be true. I find the TND song rather dreary, whereas I believe "Surrender" is the best Bond theme we never had.

Absolutely. Don Black's finest and most secret of moments.

Seriously?

Seriously.

Deadly serious.

Okay, I have now listened to the whole official version of the song, as played on BBC Radio One.

I really like the swampy bravado of it. It's got silly, very over-the-top lyrics that sound more like they're from an Austin Power or Spy Hard-style parody than from a Bond film proper, but there is some disarming substance to them, and the title - awful as it sounded - does make a kind of sense with Craig's portrayal of the character and what we saw in Casino Royale. I like the double vocal effect, and I like the edginess of some of it - I enjoyed that spurting frayed non-guitar solo.

The thing that I didn't like at all was the drop-ins of little trills that recall 'Bond themes' very heavy-handedly. The song itself is fine - stick to it! I hate all that pandering to 'sounding like Bond'. It's the aural equivalent of a piece of fan fiction that has James Bond, with a cruel smile and a comma of black hair, ordering a vodka martini shaken not stirred while flirting in a casino with a woman called Jessica Lovescock. It's like an old Casio keyboard where instea dof pressing a button that gives you a 'hip-hop' style 'Yo!', you get a bombastic Bond riff, or tinkly Bassey-ish piano, or horn sound. Terrible.

The rest of the song is fine. I just wish they'd get rid of this sort of thing. That's what I liked about Chris Cornell's song, minus a couple of dodgy bits: it's a Bond song, but not extremely predictably and obviously trying to be that. It fits the spirit of the films now: no Moneypenny or Q if they're not necessary. No horns if you don't need them. You can be Bond without the obvious. This so nearly did that, but someone - White, I suppose - has gone over it all and sprinkled 'Bond' stuff over it. Only it's not Bond stuff, it's video-game Casio by-numbers Bond stuff that the song does not need.

Oddly, I thought the Coke cut of the song sounded very EA Games (which represent the soiled toilet paper of Bond composing to me - horrible, horrible music that some seem to really like, horse for courses obviously), but the final radio edit is a really solid tune. And let's see it in the context of the film and its new style titles. It could work well with floating bodies underwater and 007s scrambling for oxygen.

[marktmurphy]

No no no!!! (We are going to have to disagree). The Crowe effort was a dull cowgirl lament of a tune that sounded like the singer's pick-up truck had broken down en route to the studio. It's whiney and clearly written by someone who doesn't know Bond at all ("Martinis, girls and guns"). A Bond song should not be on the nose like that.

Yeah, the lyrics are a little crappy in places, but the tune is at least something a little different- still Bond-y- but not just another Goldfinger which is all Surrender aims to be.
I like Surrender but I can't really respect someone creative who just tries to copy rather than be original.

SURRENDER was written as if the newspaper itself is the singer - a good tangential trait of Don Black's. THUNDERBALL is about a man obsessed with Bond from afar and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is about oral sex.

Yeah I get that, it's just that the words he chose are really naff.

[Jim]

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is about oral sex.

Is it?

What a sheltered life I've led.

[Zorin Industries]

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is about oral sex.

Is it?

What a sheltered life I've led.

Don Black's gone on record (or a telly documentary if that counts?!) to say that the song was indeed about a love nosh.

"Touch it, stroke it and undress it..."

[Jim]

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is about oral sex.

Is it?

What a sheltered life I've led.

Don Black's gone on record (or a telly documentary if that counts?!) to say that the song was indeed about a love nosh.

"Touch it, stroke it and undress it..."

I thought that referred to a satsuma. And I shall go on thinking that, young man.

Love nosh indeed.

[marktmurphy]

I reckon you'd cut your lips, though.

[spynovelfan]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

[Santa]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

And I believe it should have kept this title.

[marktmurphy]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

'I'll tantalise your brains out' was one of the lyrics, I imagine.

[Zorin Industries]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

Is that the 6 or the 12 inch?

[Santa]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

I think you'll find many women prefer the pearl earrings to the necklace.

[Zorin Industries]

I believe the song was provisionally titled All Girls Want A Pearl Necklace All The Time, You Big Dirty Boy.

I think you'll find many women prefer the pearl earrings to the necklace.

Yes, but that requires a much better aim of the old trigger finger...whether it's for her majesty or not.

[Joyce Carrington]

*listens again*

Wait...

Another one with the golden tongue/tone poisoning your fantasy

?

Ah, who cares.

[Navy007Fan]

Okay, after a bit of detective work (and a little help from my friends ) I finally found it and gave it a listen. I like it. It's not earth shattering, but I like it. I had the same feeling about YKMN when it first came out, and I'm sure that after I see the whole package (i.e. the song with the title sequence) I'll grow to like AWTD as much as I now love YKMN (I hope).

[SecretAgentFan]

At least no one can say that EON played it safe with this song.

[dee-bee-five]

Having heard it more fully, I find it... interesting. My expectations weren't exactly high and on that level the song is, admittedly, a pleasant surprise. But, for me, it has no "wow" factor. But it's perfectly adequate and isn't going to ruin the film, so I daresay it's no better or worse than any Bond theme since A View To A Kill.