Favorite Bond Theme Song?

[karelm 2,914]

Various lists rank the James Bond theme songs differently.  So it is up to us to decide which is the greatest of them all.

 

Various examples of different rankings:

All 24 James Bond theme songs ranked from worst to best, based on musical merit - Classic FM

Which James Bond theme song is the best Bond theme song? (msn.com)

[HunterTech 994]

I refuse to vote because Surrender wasn't allowed to be the main song in TND

[Holko 9,529]

I was thinking Surrender or Live and Let Die.

[GerateWohl 4,370]

4 hours ago, HunterTech said:

I refuse to vote because Surrender wasn't allowed to be the main song in TND

Really?

I mean, Surrender is a nice song. But "Tomorrow Never Dies" is even better. 

[Sweeping Strings 2,363]

Smallest amount I can get my list of favourites down to is 8 (Goldfinger, We Have All The Time In The World, Live And Let Die, Nobody Does It Better, A View To A Kill, The World Is Not Enough, You Know My Name, Skyfall). 

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

You forgot "Surrender", "If There Was A Man", "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?", "Where Has Everybody Gone?", "Never Say Never Again", "Casino Royale", "The Look Of Love", "The Experience Of Love ", "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ", and "Only Myself To Blame". You also forgot to specify which versions of both "Moonraker", and "Die Another Day".

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service", and "We Have All The Time In The World", are separate tracks.

[GerateWohl 4,370]

1 hour ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

You forgot "Surrender", "If There Was A Man", "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?", "Where Has Everybody Gone?", "Never Say Never Again", "Casino Royale", "The Look Of Love", "The Experience Of Love ", and "Only Myself To Blame". You also forgot to specify which versions of both "Moonraker", and "Die Another Day".

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service", and "We Have All The Time In The World", are separate tracks.

What about Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

Oops! 

Ammended.

[Nick1Ø66 4,718]

The best Bond song has the happy coincidence of appearing in the best Bond movie, and nobody has done it better before or since.

[Sweeping Strings 2,363]

Suspect the poll is meant to be for the 'main' song from each movie. Perhaps a thread title change is in order. 

[Badzeee 110]

Very difficult to choose absolute faves. It changes according to mood, but as a massive John Barry fan, I inevitably skew towards those co-written by him.

 

Of those, probably You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever are tops for me, and I do love the end titles version of Moonraker with Dame Shirley giving it some welly. 

 

Easier to choose non-Barry faves - and I'd say Nobody Does It Better is incredible and probably never bettered in terms of being both epic and celebratory. KD Lang's Surrender is the best song never used for a title sequence (and it should've been), as is Radiohead's Spectre, which is an incredible song and performance, and is the greatest of all the rejected Bond songs (what were the producers thinking?!) ... but I s'pose that's another topic, really. 

Also have a place in my heart for Garbage's The World is Not Enough. 

[Nick1Ø66 4,718]

1. Nobody Does it Better
2. For Your Eyes Only
3. Moonraker
4. Skyfall
5. Goldfinger

Honourable mention to Live and Let Die, From Russia With Love & A View to a Kill, which are all great, but I think only women should sing the Bond songs.

[Romão 2,274]

I love all the Barry songs, except Man With the Golden Gun and All Time High. I also love You Know My Name.

 

The last 4 songs, though, are all amongst my least favorite Bond songs

[Tallguy 3,401]

My top 5 or 6 Bond songs are ALL my favorite Bond songs. But I went with You Know My Name. But Thunderball, man. Also Nobody Does it Better.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

Theme song:

 

1. "The Living Daylights"

2. "Goldeneye"

3. "License To Kill"

4. "Nobody Does It Better"

5. "Another Way To Die"

 

Overall:

 

1. "The Living Daylights"

2. "Goldeneye"

3. "License To Kill"

4. "If You Asked Me To"

5. "Where Has Everybody Gone?"

[karelm 2,914]

Don't yell at me but I quite liked No Time to Die (2020) - Billie Eilish!  I don't think it ranks as highly as the vintage songs but damn it's catchy!  Perhaps my favorite of the last decade or two.  

[Tallguy 3,401]

15 hours ago, karelm said:

Don't yell at me but I quite liked No Time to Die (2020) - Billie Eilish!  I don't think it ranks as highly as the vintage songs but damn it's catchy!  Perhaps my favorite of the last decade or two.  

 

It's OK. IMHO. It suffers from doing two "downer" songs in a row. I mean, it's no weirder than Moonraker. (Imagine what people would think of Moonraker if it WASN'T Dame Bassey?)

 

Of the non-Arnold Craig songs, Skyfall really is all that. It's the powerhouse Bond Song of the age. But I'm REALLY annoyed when Writing's on the Wall gets stuck in my head.

[Badzeee 110]

15 hours ago, karelm said:

Don't yell at me but I quite liked No Time to Die (2020) - Billie Eilish!  I don't think it ranks as highly as the vintage songs but damn it's catchy!  Perhaps my favorite of the last decade or two.  

 

I liked it a lot, and it works as a slower Bond ballad. In fact, I find I like it more and more. It's not indelible yet, but I feel it will be. 

 

I didn't like the Sam Smith song much by comparison, but felt that having too fairly slow, introspective ballads in a row was a bit of a weird choice. Smith's song seems standard and a bit by-the-numbers to me, but Eilish's quirkiness comes through, which is what distinguishes it to my ears. 

 

I could talk all day about Bond songs, so I'm also going to mention You Know My Name and how it services Casino Royale so well. David Arnold was told he couldn't use the Bond theme 'til the end of the film, so YKMY becomes de facto CraigBond motif for the whole movie and it works so incredibly well. He achieves what John Barry tried to with the 007 theme as an alternative Bond theme, which, although I love, never really took hold. I always thought Arnold would bring it back, and it's a shame he didn't get a chance to score No Time To Die, as I can imagine hearing that theme reiterated would've had quite an emotional effect. Different to what Zimmer did with We Have All The Time In The World, but effective. 

 

And yes, Skyfall is magnificent. 

[GerateWohl 4,370]

Still of all the Craig Bonds "You Know My Name" is best woven into the score.

That is for me an important criterion for a good Bond Song as well. In some scores the title song just gets a short quotation, sometimes it doesn't appear in the score at all. But it's great when, like in Casino Royale, the song is really such a strong thematic part of the score. 

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

12 minutes ago, GerateWohl said:

Still of all the Craig Bonds "You Know My Name" is best woven into the score.

 

Sorry, dude, that would be "No Good About Goodbye".

[Badzeee 110]

2 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

Still of all the Craig Bonds "You Know My Name" is best woven into the score.

That is for me an important criterion for a good Bond Song ad well. In some scores the title song just get a short quotation, sometimes it doesn't appear in the score at all. But it's great when, like in Casino Royale, the song is really such a strong thematic part of the score. 

 

Yeah, it makes a big difference, I feel. I think it’s Spectre (?) in which the title song gets quoted just once by Thomas Newman, so it doesn’t feel a cohesive part of the whole. Not Sam Smith’s fault, of course. 

[GerateWohl 4,370]

1 hour ago, Badzeee said:

 

Yeah, it makes a big difference, I feel. I think it’s Spectre (?) in which the title song gets quoted just once by Thomas Newman, so it doesn’t feel a cohesive part of the whole. Not Sam Smith’s fault, of course. 

Right. Skyfall also gets quoted just once. But Thomas Newman even hardly uses the Bond theme at all. That is why I am no fan of his Bond music.

 

[Badzeee 110]

3 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

Right. Skyfall also gets quoted just once. But Thomas Newman even hardly uses the Bond theme at all. That is why I am no fan of his Bond music.

 

 

Same. There are other Thomas Newman scores I really love, but not his Bond scores. I recall getting quite excited when I heard Sam Mendes was bringing him on board. Being largely a composer for serious drama or comedies, I wondered how he'd fare with something much more action-orientated. 

 

It was disappointing. I mean, there are individual cues and bits of Skyfall I like (The Chimera, The Moors), but generally it all feels like a composer trying to find what might work and being largely resistant to or unaware of the traditions of the film series he's working on. He brought his usual textural approach, and it just didn't really work.

 

He then repurposed a lot of it for Spectre, too - Westminster Bridge is The Moors from Skyfall all over again, slightly revamped. Hey, I liked that first time around, and he spices it up with a tiny bit of squealy Bond brass, but c'mon dude, throw in some more for us ol' fans. Throw us a few bones! 

[Bofur01 245]

Is this eligible?

 

[Groovygoth666 670]

While familiar with all the Bond theme songs, Duran Durans A View To A Kill is easily my favourite. 

 

I can't even explain why. The last time I saw the film itself was in the 90s, here in the UK when the latest Bond premiered on TV the channel ITV would show each film once a week running up to the newest one and it was for the premier of Tomorrow Never Dies that I last saw all the pre Brosnan Bonds (except for The Spy Who Loved Me, that's a different story altogether) for whatever reason though this particular song has stuck with me and is one I will always happily listen to. 

[Holko 9,529]

Went through them all for a refresher. The only ones I had to skip because I couldn't stand them were Die Another Day, Another Way to Die and Writing's on the Wall. In addition to Live and Let Die and Surrender, I forgot how much I liked Nobody Does It Better, For Your Eyes Only (even if it's a little generic 80s song-ish instead of Bond Songish), License to Kill, Goldeneye and Skyfall. But if it's top 3 from the possible options, it'll be easily LALT, NDIB and... third one's less obvious. Maybe Goldeneye.

[GerateWohl 4,370]

20 hours ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

Sorry, dude, that would be "No Good About Goodbye".

I don't find much of that song in the QoS score.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

31 minutes ago, GerateWohl said:

I don't find much of that song in the QoS score.

 

It's all over the film, especially in the sequence as Bond drives the car down the hall, stops, and says: "Time to get out".

[GerateWohl 4,370]

57 minutes ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

 

It's all over the film, especially in the sequence as Bond drives the car down the hall, stops, and says: "Time to get out".

Ok. Will check it. This little unterbringen motif sounds familiar. 

[Badzeee 110]

20 hours ago, Bofur01 said:

Is this eligible?

 

 

I wish that was on the blu-ray as an "alternative soundtrack" to play with the title sequence instead of the Sam Smith effort.

 

No disrespect to Smith, who surely did his best, but this is a masterpiece, and had the producers had the guts to go with it, it would've been one of the most memorable modern Bond openings. 

[GerateWohl 4,370]

Unpopular opinion:

None of these rejected second rate Bond songs not appearing in the list on top belong to a top 3 Bond songs ever list. Nice and pleasant periferie to that musical universe. But any TOP 3 ever list is in the list above.

Unless you feel obliged to proof that you have a very special exquisite knowlegable taste in music (which would be kind of weird trying to proof this in context of one of the most popular widely successful cinematic musical franchises).

 

[Holko 9,529]

Well in Surrender's case, half the goddamn score is based on it, Tomorrow Never Dies is the one that's second rate and tacked on.

[Nick1Ø66 4,718]

Looking over the list of these songs, it's really apparent how hit-and-miss they are, and how many of them just flat out suck.

 

A few are timeless, but like the films, a lot of them are definitely products of their time. The scores generally fare better in this regard (Hamlisch's charming & memorable, but terribly dated, score notwithstanding).

[Naïve Old Fart 9,551]

48 minutes ago, Holko said:

Well in Surrender's case, half the goddamn score is based on it, Tomorrow Never Dies is the one that's second rate and tacked on.

 

"Surrender" should have been the title song, and not the one that we got. It's vastly superior. kd Lang knocks it out of the park.

[Bofur01 245]

1 hour ago, GerateWohl said:

Unpopular opinion:

None of these rejected second rate Bond songs not appearing in the list on top belong to a top 3 Bond songs ever list. Nice and pleasant periferie to that musical universe. But any TOP 3 ever list is in the list above.

Unless you feel obliged to proof that you have a very special exquisite knowlegable taste in music (which would be kind of weird trying to proof this in context of one of the most popular widely successful cinematic musical franchises).

 

88% of the list won’t be top 3 - so “being in the top 3”  can’t be a prerequisite for being on the list 

[GerateWohl 4,370]

2 minutes ago, Bofur01 said:

88% of the list won’t be top 3 - so “being in the top 3”  can’t be a prerequisite for being on the list 

Right. That's probably why nobody said so.

 

1 hour ago, Holko said:

Well in Surrender's case, half the goddamn score is based on it, Tomorrow Never Dies is the one that's second rate and tacked on.

Hm. For me Surrender tries too hard to stick to the Goldfinger formula. I prefer it, if a Bong song is first of all a song of its own in his own style and then secondly digs into Bond's musical territory. Surrender does it somehow the other way around. 

[Badzeee 110]

Somewhere, I have a bootleg of all various "rejected" Bond title songs. Some of them are really good songs in their own right, but they don't suit the film in question for various reasons and even the least invested listener can hear why.

 

That said, as with all things, it's (relatively) subjective in the end - your mileage may vary. I love the rejected Radiohead title song. Another good one is Swan Lee's Tomorrow Never Dies - far too perky for the film, but better, in my humble opinion, than the tedious Sheryl Crow track. Neither - again, in my humble opinion - can stand in the shadow of the mighty KD Lang's Surrender.