A not-so-brief history of every James Bond song

After several COVID-related delays, 'No Time to Die,' the 25th film in the Bond franchise, is finally opening wide. Time to review some theme music.

This movie is late. Very late. If there hadn’t been a pandemic, the 25th JamesBond film, No Time to Die, would already be on VOD if not running on premium cable. The original release date in November 2019 was pushed to February 2020 because of production issues. When that didn’t happen because of the departure of director Danny Boyle, it was postponed to April 2020. But then COVID-19 hit — and well, we know that story.

The good news is that we’re getting No Time to Die slightly earlier than we thought. With improvements in the COVID-19 situation, the release dates of Nov. 12 (U.K.) and Nov. 25 (the rest of the world) were pushed up to Sept. 30 (U.K.) and Oct. 8 (everyone else). That’s a long wait for a movie that started production in 2016 and cost US$300 million to make.

This, however, gives us another chance to look back at all the title theme music that has come with every Bond film over the last 60 years. Here they are in chronological order.

The first theme for a Bond movie was … the iconic James Bond theme. Composer Monty Norman actually plagiarized himself, taking the key elements of a song he wrote called Good Sign Bad Sign, which is sung by Indian characters on the island of Trinidad in a musical based on a book called A House for Mr. Biswas. You’ll hear it immediately.

Monty moved the melody to a twangy guitar and presented it to the producers — who hated it. Trying to salvage what they could, they gave the music to producer John Barry who gave it an orchestral arrangement. BOOM! A theme for the ages.

Known simply as The James Bond Theme, it has appeared in every single Bond film. The last I heard, Monty Norman is still cashing royalty cheques at the age of 94.

The Norman/Barry Bond theme figured large in the second film with an instrumental backing the opening titles. But buried in the film and the closing credits was the first song written just for a Bond film. It came from Matt Munro, an English singer in the style of Frank Sinatra.

Barry decided to mine Wales again, returning with Tom Jones. Still not very rock’n’roll, but hey. The music industry was a very conservative business back then.