It could not have been more fitting that, when Jimmy Napes got the call about composing the next Bond song, he was airport-bound in a water taxi, making a quick getaway through the canals of Venice. “I’d been manifesting this moment for a long time,” Napes says. “To get the call when I was on a speedboat – I honestly thought someone was having me on.”
Songwriter and producer Napes didn’t need to think twice. He was riding high at the time, having just won two Grammy awards for his work with Sam Smith, still his primary collaborator. Napes agreed to work with Smith on a potential theme for the forthcoming Spectre. But as soon as he hung up the phone, he realised the scale of the challenge.
This was not just any brief. It meant mounting an attempt to join a cultural juggernaut, now spanning 27 films and 60 years and known the world over. The Spectre theme had to be as instantly, obviously 007 as "Diamonds are Forever", "Live and Let Die" or Monty Norman’s original surf-guitar theme.
At the same time it had to be modern, distinctive and original: not just resurrecting Bonds of the past, but moving him into the future. “Bond songs are a sort of genre into themselves: part film score, part pop song,” says Charlie Harding, a musicologist and co-host of the podcast Switched On Pop, which recorded a “spycraft sound” episode on Bond last year.
For all the diversity of the original songs – from the Y2K, almost cyborg Bond of Madonna’s “Die Another Day” to Tom Jones’ bombastic, symphonic “Thunderball” – there are commonalities. Harding’s analysis found that the themes were typically slower ballads, in contemporary styles but with references to the classic Bond theme and motifs. Every Daniel Craig film uses a variation on the thundering opening chords of Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” – itself based on Norman’s 1962 melody.
“Each film introduces new sounds to keep the franchise contemporary, but points to the past,” Harding says. “When Chris Cornell does it, we’re in peak 2000s rock. Billie Eilish uses the same chords but updates them with a Gen-Z melancholia.” Napes was at least not faced with a blank page. Before the phone call in Venice, he had come up with a simple piano part that had struck him at the time as recognisably Bond. “That’s what helped us to write it quickly: I already had something that felt in essence like it could be quite special for a film,” he says.
“Those incredible Bond songs that have come before – they’re obviously all very different, but there’s a theme that runs through them… When I wrote those chords, I kind of just felt that it could fit.” What became “Writing’s on the Wall”, the theme from Spectre, was written with Smith in their limited free time. (Napes decided early on to not even attempt to get the word “spectre” in the lyrics.)
“[Sam was] on tour nonstop; I remember feeling like we were under a huge amount of pressure,” he says. The first recording laid down of Smith’s vocal ended up being the one used on the record.
Napes says the melody had been inspired by Bassey’s Bond themes and the others that centre “big voices”. “Ballads really suit Sam: it gives them the space to show off and have those big, epic moments – and I think the song did the job.” Indeed, another treatment of “Writing’s on the Wall” might not have sounded out of place on Smith’s Grammy-winning album In The Lonely Hour.
What makes it above all a Bond song, not a Smith one, is the instrumentation: the brass and strings that elevate it into an event. Tony-winning arranger Simon Hale (who also worked on In The Lonely Hour) was given the recording of Smith singing to rhythmic, rolling piano. “They said, ‘What can we do to make it sound Bond?’ – and obviously the word ‘orchestra’ comes along,” he says.
That is the achievement of John Barry, the York-born composer who, from the 1960s through to his death in 2011, shaped what we think of now as the sound of spies. (Consider how readily it’s parodied.) From 1962’s Dr. No on, Barry extended Norman’s surf-guitar theme with percussion, strings and brass and jazz influences, creating a blueprint distinct enough for all subsequent Bond composers to follow.
“He went to dictate – to establish – a musical tone and language where you go: ‘That’s Bond’,” says Hale. “What you should really be saying is: ‘That’s John Barry’.” Bond is such a cultural touchstone, it has enshrined individual musicians and even sounds, such as the thundering tam-tam that heralds "Goldfinger". The blaring trumpet was the hallmark of one player, Derek Watkins, who played on every Bond film from Dr No to Skyfall until his death in 2013.
For performers and songwriters, popular and classical musicians alike, Bond represents a small, prestigious cohort including some of the best musicians alive – and the pressure to do them justice. “For the most part, it was John Barry’s musical voice coming through,” says Hale. “I think every songwriter since then is very aware of the privilege, and the honour, of carrying on in that line. Of course you will have your own style – but it’s important to be respecting that heritage.”
For Hale, tasked with fleshing out that sparse piano melody, the question was not just which instruments to use – strings, timpani, tam-tam, bass drum, low brass, French horns, trumpets – but how. Harmony in particular is integral to the 007 sound, says Hale, as established with the iconic “James Bond chord” – technically known as an EmMaj9. It creates an uneasy and unsettle-seeming sound, “giving you a whole narrative”. (Harding points out that that dissonant chord similarly features in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.)
Elsewhere, Hale made musical choices to support the lyrics, such as mirroring the reference to “a million shards of glass” with a cascade of high violins and flutes. “Essentially it’s all about storytelling… It’s not a pop song, or a dance record; it is a piece of drama,” he says. And, though much about Bond has stayed the same over the past 60 years, the stories told about him have changed, says composer David Arnold.
Arnold scored five Bond films from Tomorrow Never Dies, and co-wrote “The World is Not Enough” for Garbage and "You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell (from Casino Royale) – meaning he has had the biggest imprint on 007 since Barry. Barry’s themes were “slightly timeless”, even in their time, says Arnold, pointing to “Diamonds Are Forever”: “If you think about the contemporary music that was around in 1971, it sounds nothing like it…They kind of form their own musical ecosystem.”
Don Black, the lyricist who co-wrote the Bassey theme and two others, once said that a Bond song should be “provocative, seductive and have the whiff of the boudoir”. Prior to Daniel Craig-era Bond, Arnold says, “I think that was quite appropriate. When you listen to the lyrics of "The Man with the Golden Gun", or "Diamonds are Forever": “caress it, touch it, stroke it”...”
Most of the songs were written from the perspective of Bond’s love interest (Carly Simon’s "Nobody Does It Better"), or about the villain (Tina Turner’s “Goldeneye”). But Craig “unearthed a sincerity” in the role that had previously been missing, says Arnold – and which he wanted to reflect in his theme for Casino Royale. “I wanted it to feel like a song that Bond could have been singing: warning his enemy to get out of his way,” he says.
“That led us into a world of introspection with Bond that we had never had before: you understood something about him. With "Skyfall", "Writing’s on the Wall", “No Time to Die”, it’s like these songs went deeper and deeper into Bond’s psyche.” It speaks to the modern-day draw of 007: as much about what makes him tick as whether he can get the girl, or defeat the baddie.
There is such bottomless interest that even rejected or suspected themes make headlines – just like speculation over who will replace Craig. (Pulp and Radiohead are two well-known near-misses.) Arnold’s own “dream” theme would have been with Amy Winehouse, he says; in fact they explored the possibility for Quantum of Solace in 2008, three years before she died.
“It was clear, relatively early on, that she was just not well enough to carry on, but I think that would have been astonishing.” Arnold had been working with producer Mark Ronson, Winehouse’s longtime collaborator. “We had the skeleton of the song… We did make a start on it, and it was exciting.”
But as to who will be the next singer to give voice to Bond, Arnold isn’t inclined to speculate without seeing a script: “I’ve always looked at it as a bit like casting.” How far future films will deviate from the past – whether it’s with someone other than a straight, white man as 007, or a theme that breaks from John Barry’s tradition – remains to be seen.
Having looked back on six decades of Bond songs, Harding predicts more downtempo ballads. “I don’t see a hyperpop or breakcore Bond song in the future – but a slowed-down trap beat could work,” he says.
Napes, too, is enthusiastic to see how the musical tradition that he is proud to be part of might evolve. “It would be cool to have a rapper do it – maybe Stormzy,” he says. “Never say never, right?”
