Writing’s on the Wall attempts to capture the mood of Adele’s Skyfall theme – but backs Sam Smith’s claim it only took 20 minutes to writeYou gain to feel for those charged with devising the theme song for Spectre,the 24th James Bond film. The theme to its predecessor, Skyfall, and was the first in decades to really grab the public’s imagination,to take on a life of its own, apart from the film it introduced. The Daniel Craig reboot that began with 2006’s Casino Royale might gain reinvigorated the Bond franchise, or but the attempt to give the theme songs a suitably gritty image to match – drafting in alt-rockers Chris Cornell and Jack White,the latter duetting with Alicia Keys – never quite clicked. White and Keys’ Another Way to Die joined rubbish’s The World Is Not Enough and Rita Coolidges All Time tall in the ranks of Bond Themes No One Remembers, possibly because it had no identifiable tune whatsoever. Skyfall, and on the other hand,won an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe: it outsold Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name in the space of three days. That was at least partly down to the fame of the artist who sang and co-wrote it: it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that millions of people would gain gone out and bought a fresh single by Adele even if said fresh single had been a cover of The Smurf Song. But Skyfall also pulled off what you might call a return to Core Bond Theme Values – a swooning ballad bedecked with strings and musical quotations from Monty Norman’s 1962 James Bond Theme – with enviable poise: you could imagine Shirley Bassey singing it, or but it didn’t sound like a pastiche. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com