The ten best Bond theme songs

John Barry has called it “million-dollar Mickey Mouse music”, but a James Bond theme on your CV is as close as pop gets to an Olympic gold medal. As Jack White and Alicia Keys prepare to add to the canon, they should be aware that when you create a bad Bond theme you are disappointing the whole world and you will never, ever, get another chance.

The best – Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, A View to a Kill – are internationalist anthems. Some themes have been more literal than others. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service may star the worst Bond, George Lazenby (who was allegedly so unpleasant that his co-star Diana Rigg chewed garlic before each kissing scene), but it has one of the best title cuts, a wordless Moog-driven monster, suitable for skiing at breakneck speed or dancing with equal abandon.

Licence to Kill, on the other hand, features a brazen, smoking barrel-blast of timpani after Gladys Knight sings “KILL!”, just in case you’d forgotten that the following movie may include strong language and scenes of a sexual nature.

My group Saint Etienne recorded an album at Tambourine studios in Malmö, Sweden, some 12 years ago. The Cardigans had created all of their albums there with the producer Tore Johansson. He let slip late in the session that the Cardigans had been asked to record the next James Bond theme but, riding high in the American chart with Lovefool at the time, hadn’t yet gone round to it. I couldn’t believe it. We had to tread on their toes as quickly and crushingly as possible, and write a Bond theme that would blow them out of the water. Or even slice them down the middle with a laser beam.

The film was Tomorrow Never Dies: we ascertained that it was about an antihero called Tomorrow who is immortal – not quite in the same league as Ian Fleming naming a villain after his least favourite architect, but we weren’t being picky. Along with our arranger Gerard Johnson we booked a day in a London studio and worked out a demo called Tomorrow Never Dies. Clearly, this entailed us avoiding most of our favourite lyrical subjects (cars with the top down, escaping the city, listening to the radio, sitting in the pub) and contemplating some less familiar to our world of pop – cars with ejector seats, escaping from megalomaniac baddies, having sex with eight women in 96 minutes.

The music came rather more easily. All three of us are John Barry fanatics and – though Monty Norman is wont to frown and remind us that he wrote the iconic signature tune – it is Barry who has set the benchmark, not just for Bond but for all spy movie soundtracks.

The classic moves that make up the James Bond noise are all Barry’s: the frisson of woodwind as Bond moves with silent stealth of a black cat in carpet slippers; the shattered glass of a brass stab; the sweep of strings as a helicopter swoops over the Alps, followed by a brief flash of garter and a wry, raised eyebrow.

Barry was 26, he says, when he got a call from Noel Rogers, “a big supporter of mine at United Artists music. He said: ‘There are these two guys called Saltzmann and Broccoli and they own the rights to the James Bond stories.’ I said: ‘I only know Bond from the Daily Mail comic strip. He said: ‘That’s all you need to know.’ They wanted a theme – two minutes long.”

Monty Norman wrote it; Barry arranged it: “I remember standing in line at Piccadilly to see Dr No. And the theme was all over it. Every time he said, ‘The name’s Bond’, it went ‘dung-dug-a-dung-dung’. They paid me £250! Noel said: ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I’ll try and get you the next Bond score – it might become a series.’ ”

There is also coyness that separates the best Bond themes from also-rans. It’s one of pop’s toughest asks, says Lulu, who gamely handled Man With the Golden Gun. “You need to have the largesse of John Barry and be true to Ian Fleming. The suggestiveness of Don Black’s lyrics still make me smile, but it can’t be plagiarism. McCartney did it, taking it out of John Barry’s hands – he worked it beautifully. It’s a big, big track. Big bangs work well! Because you want to have a little snigger, you want to go, oooh.” Roger Moore, who also knows thing or two about Bond movies, thinks that “the most successful songs, and those that are now deemed Bond classics, are invariably the ones with a narrative within the lyrics.” His favourite is Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better, “because nobody did. No, it is a terrific song as it embodies everything about Bond’s character and why he is better and more popular than other movie spies.”

Not everyone wears the Bond-theme crown with the carefree ease of the purring Miss Simon. AHa were outsiders for the role on The Living Daylights and treated it with the same cool disdain as the Cardigans. John Barry compared working with them to “playing ping-pong with four balls”. Once the theme was finished they distanced themselves from the movie though, oddly, their next single, The Blood that Moves the Body, had all the swagger and brio, the high-wire tension and taut melancholy of a classic Bond theme that The Living Daylights had lacked.

White and Keys would be smart to remember that James Bond isn’t just the world’s greatest spy, he’s also a pop phenomenon – in 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, the Goldfinger soundtrack knocked A Hard Day’s Night off the No 1 spot in the States and stayed there for four months. Anyone who agrees to sing the theme must be willing to be subsumed by Bond’s all-powerful musical clinch. Tom Jones understood this. After singing Thunderball he apparently fell to the floor with exhaustion, while Shirley Bassey’s red-blooded roar showed full commitment to the cause twice over. AHa’s icy shrug simply didn’t cut it; nor did Madonna’s overly bleepy Die Another Day – it sounds more Madonna than Bond, and that’s a nono. “I’m gonna avoid the cli-ché,” she sang, which suggests that she’d missed the point.

The bar is set so high that even themes now seen as classics were initially regarded with suspicion. Moore recalls the producer Harry Saltzman’s reaction when he first heard the demo of Live and Let Die: “Saltzman was unconvinced, and he turned to George Martin and said: ‘Ok, but who are we going to get to sing it?’ George replied that he had just listened to Paul McCartney, one of the biggest recording stars of all time.”

“Harry was just bad about everything, everybody,” Barry says. “He wasn’t the sweetest guy, put it that way.” Saltzmann also took a lot of convincing to use Goldfinger, which he hated. Michael Caine, Barry’s flatmate at the time, remembers the composer working long into the night until, over breakfast, he played the opening three notes. “It’s Moon River,” Caine said bluntly, to Barry’s chagrin. The blaring three-note brass line was swiftly added to disguise the similarity.

As for Saint Etienne’s stab at Bond immortality, our calls weren’t returned. Tomorrow Never Dies was possibly the only Bond film for which several acts were approached. A bunch of (presumably) failed Bond themes sneaked out rather apologetically over the next few months in 1999, usually as B-sides with barely rewritten, thinly disguised titles (Pulp’s Tomorrow Never Lies, Dot Allison’s Tomorrow Never Comes). No one came clean and admitted the folly of these oddly titled songs – after all, we’d all been playing our cards close to our chests, stroking the white cat on our laps, thinking how clever we were one to be step ahead of all our pop rivals; a Bond theme, that’ll show ’em!

Someone has twigged, though, and they have dubbed some of these songs over the film’s opening credits on YouTube. The winners, were this a version of The X Factor, with Oddjob replacing Simon Cowell, are the Danish group Swan Lee, whose quintessentially torch-song take on Bond has run up three times as many views as its nearest competitor. The official silver medal goes to kd lang, whose version was an early frontrunner but was eventually bumped down to the end credits by Sheryl Crow’s pleasant but rather forgettable theme (well, I would say that wouldn’t I?).

We can console ourselves with the knowledge that other names who have been rejected for the Bond seal of approval include Dionne Warwick (Thunderball), Aretha Franklin (You Only Live Twice), Alice Cooper (The Man With the Golden Gun) and Blondie (For Your Eyes Only); only Frank Sinatra has had the nerve to stare Bond down and pass up the opportunity. It’s the biggest, most dangerous game in pop. For White and Keys, immortality or immolation await.

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