Kate and I saw the new Bond flick last night (short review: nice re-launch of the franchise, Daniel Craig does a great job with the role), and as the final credits started to roll, they played that signature James Bond riff– the “dum di-di dum, da-da-da” bass line, the “da-da di dahh, di dah-daaaah” brass thing. You know the song I mean– it or something like it is in pretty much all of the movies.
It made me wonder about the guy who wrote it, though. Does he think of it as the crowning work of his career, or is it a cheap bit of hackwork that he banged out over a bottle of muscatel in 1967, because he needed the money?
I sure hope he’s happy with it. If he’s not, he must spend the couple of months around the release of a new movie in a more or less constant cringe state. Or, possibly, on top of a mountain in the Andes.
(Actually,a little Goggling finds the James Bond theme music page at Wikipedia, which gives the composer’s name as Monty Norman, and says that he’s won a couple of libel actions against people claiming that John Barry wrote the song (as opposed to orchestrating it for Dr. No. That would suggest that he’s happy with the tune, or at the very least, fond of the royalty checks.)
This is, by the way, another example of the way that Google has taken all the fun out of most pop-culture speculation.
An interesting thing I heard once was that the composer had orginally intended for it to have words, but at the last minute, their budget couldn’t afford singers, and so they went for just the instrumental version.
The music was originally written for a stage musical version of V.S. Naipaul’s A House For Mr. Biswas.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4129704.stm
It originally had more of an Indian sound. The composer tweaked it, and it became the Bond theme.