James Bond Music

So for a peek into my brain, and the fight that is trying to play music with Google & Spotify read below for what seems to have become a 500 page essay. Otherwise TL;DR I listened to some James Bond theme songs 😛

Yesterday when driving to the dentist I was thinking of some music to listen to. For some reason I thought of “Kiss” by Prince, so asked google to play it. Listened for a bit, wasn’t quite what I was in the mood for, so then I thought “didn’t Tom Jones do a cover of Kiss?” (which he did, with art of noise no less!). So I asked google to play Tom Jones (of course google first thought I wanted Dom Jones, so played got the album “Dom” by Blank & Jones. I was mad about it at the time, but I played it again while writing this to see what it was, and I’m kinda into it!).

I skipped through a bit but didn’t come across “Kiss”, and didn’t hear quite what I wanted. But that seemed to remind me of James Bond tunes, so Diamonds are Forever popped into my head. I listened to that and the song that Spotify decided to play next was Shirley Bassey’s cover of Light my Fire which is odd but kind of slaps. It then veered off in a weird direction, so then I tried to think of other Bond songs and came with Live and Let Die. Of course google played the Guns and Roses version, which is not what I wanted. I couldn’t remember who wrote it, so I said “George Harrison Live and Let Die”, which wasn’t it (I just got “playing George Harrison“). I asked who wrote it, and google was kind enough to say Paul & Linda McCartney. So I asked for “Paul McCartney Live and Let Die” and got this bizarre remix. I figured he probably did it with Wings, so asked for “Live and Let Die by Wings” and that got me to where I wanted to be.

I figured there must be a playlist of best James Bond songs, so I said “play Best of Bond” which got me an orchestral album which I’m sure is fine, but I wanted the actual songs. So I finally said “play the playlist best of bond” which got me to an apparently official Spotify Best of Bond playlist, which has some pretty good tunes on it. Of and of course bringing it all back together, Tom Jones sang the theme to Thunderball, which is on that playlist! (and I will say I was pleasantly surprised my stab in the dark resulted in a playlist that was actually decent – too many times I’ll get voice search optimized garbage when I ask for a non specific playlist)\

As a few last trivia notes that came up when I thought about some of the songs Spotify tried to autoplay after that playlist. Did you know that The Propellerheads did a remix of Goldfinger? In fact, according to wikipedia Shirley Bassey collaborated with the Propellerheads several times, the first time in 97 on the song History Repeating! I also learned the theme song for Thunderball was supposed to be “Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”, because James Barry didn’t think he could work “Thunderball” into song lyrics. Shirley Bassey recorded a song, but it was too short, so it was re-recorded with Dionne Warwick. The studio insisted “Thunderball” be in the lyrics, so they dashed off a song and had Tom Jones record it. Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was going to end up in the credits, but Shirley sued and so neither song appeared (though both did eventually show up on different versions of the LP).