The Best of Bond Capitol James Bond Now The James Bond Collection Silva America Die Another Day Warner Casino Royale Varese Records Casino Royale DVD MGM An Electronica Tribute to James Bond Cleopatra Bond Beat & Bass Cleopatra   Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	Austin Powers, Derek Flint, John Shaft, Matt Helm, Ethan Hunt, and countless other spies all bow their heads in reverence to the one, the original… Bond. The history books tell us that James Bond was born when Ian Fleming placed his fingers on the keys of his typewriter in the early 1950s at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. But from a musical standpoint, Bond wasn't born until 1962, at the opening of Dr. No, when Monty Norman's now-legendary James Bond Theme played under a series of moving, flashing, colorful dots. That theme is perhaps the most recognized two minutes in the history of film music. It instantly calls to mind not just a character but an entire world of girls, gadgets, guns, thrills, double entendres and more. Today, with 20 official movies (Die Another Day is the newest; check your local newspaper) and two unofficial ones (1967's Casino Royale and 1983's Never Say Never Again), the James Bond movies are the most successful film franchise the world has ever known. Some of the films have been dark, serious spy stories, others silly self-parodies, but there's always the style, the fun and the music that has for three generations (and counting) defined the world's sexiest, suavest, coolest secret agent. After the instrumental-only opener for Dr. No in 1963, Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli (his ancestors brought the vegetable here from Italy and that's why it's called what it's called) saw that Bond movies needed to open in a somewhat more intriguing way than their first effort. So starting with From Russia with Love, two new elements were added to the films: elaborate title sequences and theme songs. Many fans look forward to the Bond title sequences more than they do the actual films -- and sometimes they're more fun. Often highly-suggestive, borderline-pornographic mini-movies (created over the years by Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn and Daniel Kleinman), they feature nude girls' silhouettes in sometimes compromising positions involving guns, diamonds, water and other imagery from the films. Sometimes Bond himself is featured, and on one occasion the singer of the film's theme song was featured (Sheena Easton in For Your Eyes Only). The songs became as important to the series as these sequences did -- and in fact have proven to be among the most durable. Not only did they bring a musical voice to the films, they also provided a marketable hook -- something that could be played on the radio (to advertise the film not-so-subtly) and bring more ticket buyers to the theaters. More music than you can shake a Walther PPK at. That same marketing ethic is at work in four new CDs: The Best of Bond…James Bond, a new compilation of all the Bond theme songs, from Dr. No through The World Is Not Enough; James Bond Now, in which guitarist Vic Flick revisits some of the songs he played on in the 60s and 70s; The James Bond Collection, a four-CD set of re-recordings of some of the Bond scores; and the official soundtrack from Die Another Day, featuring the new theme song by none other than Madonna. Speaking of Madonna, she's just the latest in a long line of Bond singers. Matt Munro, a Sinatra-soundalike, sang From Russia with Love. Shirley Bassey nailed Goldfinger. Other artists who lent their voices to 007 are Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Paul McCartney and Wings, Lulu, Carly Simon, Sheena Easton, Rita Coolidge, Duran Duran, a-Ha, Gladys Knight, Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow and Garbage. In 1969, Louis Armstrong sang "We Have All the Time in the World," a song used in the body of the film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. (The film didn't have a title song, just a sterling John Barry instrumental.) Poetically, it was Armstrong's final recording, shortly before his death. All these -- and a couple of surprises -- are on the new Best of Bond CD. They've appeared before, of course, on the soundtrack CDs and in a few previous compilations, but it's somehow always a good time to hear all the songs together. I find it amazing that their quality has remained (for the most part) high, and that they all retain the same, signature Bond sound. John Barry's license to trill. Much of the credit for that sound must go to John Barry, the man behind the music of Bond. He started with the series as the arranger of the original Bond Theme. Monty Norman supplied the notes, but Barry supplied the attitude, making those notes sing in a way that no one else has been able to replicate or even approach, with Vic Flick providing the signature guitar playing. I asked Flick recently if, when the Bond theme was recorded, the musicians felt it was as hot as we do today. "When we recorded the title," he said, "there was a certain something about the overall sound that seemed exciting. Plus the idea of a spy film and it might be a series was interesting. As it was one of many recordings I was involved with at the time I didn't think it would last for 40 years and still be going strong. "I think the energy that the film recording had was very evident and attracted attention. The repetitiveness of the melody helped ingrain it into people's minds -- plus the sparkling guitar sound!" Barry was rewarded with scoring assignments on many of the films: From Russia with Love in 1963, Goldfinger in 64, Thunderball in 65, You Only Live Twice in 67, On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 69, Diamonds Are Forever in 71, The Man with the Golden Gun in 74, Moonraker in 79, Octopussy in 83, and A View to a Kill in 85. His sound gave Bond a bed, if you will -- a musical bed -- that brought his world to life in a way that all the stunning sets and set-pieces could not ever hope to achieve on their own. Barry created the whole swinging 60s spy sound, and every spy who's followed has paid homage to his groundbreaking work. Bond might have been legendary without Barry, but not nearly as much fun. As for the films Barry didn't score, the first of those was Live and Let Die. George Martin, the famed Beatles producer, composed a score that's a terrific blend of the Barry mystique with a definite 1972 sensibility. The movie was sort of Bond-Meets-Shaft (himself a Black Bond), and so was the music. After Martin came Marvin Hamlisch (The Spy Who Loved Me), Bill Conti (For Your Eyes Only), Michael Kamen (Licence to Kill), Eric Serra (Goldeneye), and current Bond composer David Arnold (hand-picked by John Barry, according to legend), who scored the most recent films, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day. Each has brought something new to Bond's world while keeping the basic voice established by Barry some 30 years ago. When Michel Legrand scored the unofficial film Never Say Never Again in 1983, he went another way. While Octopussy, released the same year, was one of Roger Moore's least-thrilling entries, Never saw the return of Sean Connery. The film itself was a remake of Thunderball and co-starred Klaus Maria Brandauer as Largo and Kim Basinger as Domino. Legrand's score, unfortunately, sounds more like Legrand than Bond, with soft, sophisticated melodies and forced chase music. Bummer. The painful triumph that is Casino Royale. Casino Royale is a different story. The film is hated to such a degree that it's truly loved. David Niven played Bond, Woody Allen his nephew Jimmy and Orson Welles the baccarat-playing villain Le Chiffre. A no-holds-barred sendup of the series, Casino Royale had five directors, numerous screenwriters, dozens of Bond girls (including Ursula Andress, the original Bond girl from Dr. No), and scores of 007s. The music was composed by Burt Bacharach, and it's the only spy music that comes close to being as good as Barry's. It's a truly legendary score, with an amazing title instrumental performed by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, a song ("The Look of Love") performed by Dusty Springfield, and music that's suave, debonair and dead-center Bond. The CD has been reissued, and the original LP is highly sought-after for the quality of its recording. The film's recent release on DVD is certainly something to be celebrated, and MGM, while not going full-out, has provided a package that's very much worth having. The film looks beautiful, the menus are lots of fun and there's even a brief interview about the making of the film with one of its directors, Val Guest. If you've never seen it, you must. Every scene is a set-piece played for laughs. There's Niven trying to figure out a way to be Bond. Deborah Kerr as a spy trying to snare Bond in a trap. Bond's daughter Mata, played by Joanna Pettet. Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat expert who's drafted by MI6 to impersonate Bond and beat LeChiffre at his own game. There's Woody Allen, making his first forays into the persona that we have come to know so well. There's even John Huston in a red wig, playing Bond's boss M. It's madness through and through, but what divine madness! Vic's self-in-Flick-ted wound. Vic Flick, whose incredible talents on the guitar helped make the Bond theme so unforgettable, has gone back to the drawing board, as it were, to see what he might do to augment a few of the original songs in the Bond oeuvre. The result, James Bond Now, is a mixed bag. While I was curious about what Flick would do with the songs, the end result is more along the lines of what he did to them. I think the problem stems not from Flick himself, but from the team he assembled to provide a musical backdrop. What wants desperately to sound like a big orchestra that supports the irony and intricacy of his guitar work is really just a collection of synthesized arrangements that lack any real depth or urgency -- two elements of the Bond sound that I think are critical. Unfortunately, the same is true of his treatment of a few of the Bond songs, including "Goldfinger," "Live and Let Die," "Diamonds Are Forever," "For Your Eyes Only," "From Russia with Love" and "Nobody Does It Better" from The Spy Who Loved Me. Elektronika won't live forever. Another move that left me scratching my head was one label's effort to try and bring Bond into the electronica age. Two CDs -- Bond Beat & Bass and An Elektronika Tribute to James Bond -- offer arrangements and performances that are just embarrassing. Whatever coolness Bond music had, it's lost on these CDs. Half the time, the only clue to the song they've used (butchered) is the listing on the jewelcase. Mostly, all of this is just a collection of samples, electronic blips and driving rhythms that could be tributes to just about anyone or anything. But Bond? No. To paraphrase a famous moment in Goldfinger: Bond asks, "Do you expect me to talk?" And Goldfinger says, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to listen to these CDs." Bond…boxed. On the other hand, The James Bond Collection is a mostly terrific grab-bag of some of the best Bond music. With an admitted slant toward the work of John Barry -- the set's conductor, Nic Raine, is a frequent Barry collaborator -- the four CDs include tracks from the first 19 Bond films -- that is, from Dr. No through The World is Not Enough. Much of this collection is culled from two separate CDs issued by Silva Screen records previously, but there's enough new material here to warrant a new listen. I find that rerecordings very often lack the crisp urgency of the original recordings done for the films themselves. I also find that they depend solely on the music as written, not as it was performed, with last-minute note changes that can happen in the studio. However, most of the tracks here are wonderfully close to the originals. You might wonder why that matters; that is, if these are new recordings, why should they sound like the old ones? To me, collections like this are excuses to feel the thrill of Bond again, with music reinterpreted but with the signature sound firmly in place. The sections devoted to From Russia with Love, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever are the highlights. Where this collection falters is in its treatment of the more recent scores; it sounds sometimes as if Raine lost interest in work that didn't originate with Barry. No matter. If you like Bond music, this is great stuff -- and there are even several cases where cues here do not appear on the original soundtrack CDs. An extra bonus for completists. It's time to Die Another Day. The first track on the new film's soundtrack CD is, of course, the theme song sung by Madonna. I've been listening to the track for a few weeks, and even if you ignore the fact that it's just an ugly song, and that Madonna herself sounds harsh in it, the biggest problem is that it just doesn't sound like James Bond. Bond songs, no matter what else they are, are classy. They're sultry, even when they rock. Die Another Day, on the other hand, is just a Madonna song -- and not a good one -- with Bond its excuse for having been (and I used this term loosely) composed. There's a sort of cosmic truth that Madonna seems to have been unaware of: Just because a song opens a Bond film doesn't make it a Bond song. I've always believed that having performers like Madonna or Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra would be bad for Bond, and this song proves my theory -- because it's all but impossible for these singers to subjugate their own high-wattage personalities in favor of Bond's high-intensity persona. What one wants from this song, for Madonna to be in full ballad mode, in which her voice serves the song, is completely absent here. With this, the song is made to serve her voice -- which she's remade electronically into some strange faux performance. Worse, Madonna has written a Madonna song, apparently not even attempting to make it about Bond. Forget 007; the song's about her. Her lyrics challenge Freud to analyze this, as if she's saying: "Look at me, queen of the pop star women, actually singing for James Bond. What does that say about me?" I think it says less about Madonna than it does about the Bond producers' desire to do something special for Bond's 40th anniversary and 20th film. They had the right idea, but the execution's off. David Arnold, usually an A-list composer, falls short of the mark, as well. Back in the day, when John Barry would have a hand in the song, its main theme would provide the throughline of the score. That always gave the film a musical spine that made sense, a thematic glue. Here, that glue isn't the theme song, but the classic James Bond Theme. While this might appear to work on paper, it doesn't work in the ear. Traditionally, the Bond Theme is saved for those signature moments in the action when our hero kicks it up a notch. The thrill of suddenly hearing the theme adds to the thrill of the moment; it puts the audience in the car, on the cliff, hanging with 007. It's sort of the ultimate cool bit. But here, the theme is used so much that it actually loses its novelty, and thus its power. It becomes, simply, music -- and really, what good is that? The Bond Theme is more than just music; it's the soul of the man and the soul of the film. Still, the soundtrack CD does offer a couple of tracks that try to save the day. The finale, the tracke called "Antonov," is an 11-minute adventure all its own. And the closing track, "Going Down Together," gives Arnold the chance to pay tribute to the 1967 film You Only Live Twice, using some of the feeling that John Barry gave that awesome score. It's a beautiful, though brief, track, just enough to bring some real humanity to all the pounding electronica. Ah, the unique joys of Bond Music. From the first strains of the Bond Theme in 1962 to the somewhat strained overuse of it in 2002, the music has defined not just 007, but a whole generation. It also defines, quite clearly, what spy movies should sound like. And it's given endless numbers of boys (and maybe a few girls) untold pleasurable hours in their cars, zipping around corners, through dark alleys, roaring down highways, all in pursuit of a rogue villain and his white pussycat. For just a moment, we are Bond behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, vodka martini chilling in the on-board cooler. Now, if only they put ejector seats in Hondas... | January 2003   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.   Think there's a lot Bond-related music available? Wait'll you see the books. Click here to Book Some Time with James Bond.	The songs became as important to the series as these sequences did -- and in fact have proven to be among the most durable. Not only did they bring a musical voice to the films, they also provided a marketable hook -- something that could be played on the radio (to advertise the film not-so-subtly) and bring more ticket buyers to the theaters.