Friday 24 April 2015

WE HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD by MICHAELMAS



I Was A Teenage James Bond Fan - Michael Wood April 2015


The name is Wood, Michael Wood. 002079.  I was a teenage James Bond fan.  In contrast to some of the other artists on here, I love the James Bond films.  In the same way that I can’t remember what the first single was I bought, I can’t remember the first James Bond I saw.  I do remember seeing Octopussy at the cinema on holiday in Great Yarmouth in 1983, I hope that wasn't it.  ITV first started showing the films in 1975, two years after I was born, so I probably would've seen them on some Bank Holiday Monday or other.

I first owned the films on VHS, taped off the TV with hand drawn covers and labels and would re-watch them a lot. Sometimes, I would just watch my favourite pre-title sequences in a row – my own ‘Now That’s What I Call Bond’ compilation.

Eventually, I had the official VHSs, then DVDs and now I've got the Blu-ray box set.

And yes, I was a member of the James Bond fan club.  In 1990 I went to the 25th anniversary screening of Thunderball at the BFI and I remember meeting Terence Young, the director.  In September 1990 I attended a Fan Club convention at Pinewood studios where we saw exhibitions and screenings, I met Q and the whistling lady with the butterflies from A View To A Kill.

me at Pinewood Studios 1990
1990 was also the year I started playing the guitar. Soon music, clothes, and buying records would take over. I didn't renew my 007 fan club membership and the next club I joined was the Suede (!) fan club and Blow Up at the Laurel Tree in Camden.

me and my first guitar early 90s.
I can see now that some of the films are very silly, and easy to criticise in 2015, but if I catch Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me or The Living Daylights on ITV2 on the next Bank Holiday, then I can still watch and enjoy them as I did back then.

I am covering Louis Armstrong’s ‘We Have All Time In The World’ from the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, written by John Barry with lyrics by Hal David. It’s unusual for a Bond theme as this song features during the film itself rather than in the title sequence (the opening music is a John Barry instrumental - one of his best).


WIAIWYA very kindly asked me to be involved in this project quite early on and this song wasn't taken, so I took it, just because it I thought it would suit me and the music I make.  It was only afterwards that I realised I that I’d agreed to release a cover of the one of the greatest songs and performances ever recorded, no pressure!



Friday 17 April 2015

ALL TIME HIGH by WORLD OF FOX


played, recorded and produced by World of Fox

Martinis, Girls, & Guns by Hairy Palmer


I’m feeling Italian and musical, so I’ll take on the world that way: biretta, claret, expense account. It’s such a perfect place to start. In the next room or this very one, I dropped my Rolex and it exploded. That’s me, that’s my life. I’m not the only spy out here. What does it matter to you if I poison the odd prime minister? They’ll make more. Another man as he stands right behind me looking in the mirror feels my presence in the crowd. I’m going to close my body now before he strikes like thunderball. I’ve seen diamonds cut through harder men. Hold one up and then caress it, then return it to the glove compartment of my hydroponic Lotus. There’s some kind of magic inside me issued by Q Branch, but you’ll never have my heart as it technically belongs to Her Majesty’s government. That fatal kiss is all you need. I’ve seen places, faces, and smiled for a moment; you’ve seen my smile in a thousand dreams. The wild, abandoned side of me has left his gold paint in Miami, but my lies can’t disguise what you fear. Love is a stranger who beckons you on. In the blink of an eye, I’ll be there too. With the cares of the world behind us, I’ll file my report in the morning. Hey, driver, where we going?

Friday 10 April 2015

JAMES BOND THEME by THE WEISSTRONAUTS



Pete Weiss: guitars
Nathan Logus: drums
Kenny Lafler: guitars
Kevin Quinn: bass

Recorded by PW at Armory Sound, Somerville MA
Mixed by PW at Verdant Studio, Athens VT

www.weisstronauts.com

50 Years of James Bond: The Movie:

Approximately five minutes from each of the 22 Eon produced James Bond films have been cut together, in order and in sequence, beginning with the first five minutes of DR. NO (1962) followed by minutes 5-10 of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), minutes 10-15 of GOLDFINGER (1964), minutes 15-20 of THUNDERBALL (1965), continuing on through each of the remaining 18 Bond features (accounting for variables in each title's running time) culminating with the final five minutes of 2008's QUANTUM OF SOLACE:

Friday 3 April 2015

GOLDENEYE by ROBERT ROTIFER


Drinking at the Duck - Robert Rotifer April 2015

I used to have a bit of a thing about James Bond, in spite of the dubious politics. I thought the whole franchise was a great technicolor excuse for wearing smart suits and shoes in difficult circumstances, and if that reminds you of a certain saying popular among a certain kind of people then you will know exactly where I'm coming from.

If it doesn't, let's just say it's a mod thing.

Beyond that I liked Desmond Dekker's “007 (Shanty Town)” and the whole idea of Jamaican Rudeboys appropriating this British imperialist super hero.

I also enjoyed the toe-curling daftness of the jokes that was amplified by the stilted delivery of the dubbed dialogue, which painfully jarred with the supposed coolness of it all (growing up in Austria, the Bond I knew spoke German, and I've only seen one or two of the films in the original version. Maybe they're all different jokes in English, that would explain a lot).

And then that 1990s post-ironic thing happened, and all of a sudden James Bond wasn't the stuff of afternoon telly re-runs but a pop cultural national treasure, and I gradually fell out of love with it all.

With the exception of Lazenby, of course. Everyone loves the Lazenby one, rightly so.

During my time in London I lived quite close to 2 Willow Road, the modernist abode of Ernö Goldfinger, Hungarian immigrant, champagne socialist and architect of Trellick and Balfron Towers whose work inspired the reactionary Ian Fleming to name one of his most famous villains. Ironically, we have come to associate Fleming's creation with the modernist design of his villains' lairs when he himself much preferred the original old Hampstead cottages that had been torn down in favour of Goldfinger's row of buildings at Willow Road.

In 2004 I moved from London to Canterbury, gradually exploring the countryside around the town, when I had another unexpected run-in with the world of Bond/Fleming. There's a place just a ten minutes drive away from my home, improbably called Pett Bottom (people who have actually read Fleming's books will recognise this as the place where little boy Bond lived with his aunt). There's a pub at the end of that village called The Duck Inn (also mentioned by Fleming), and according to a blue plaque on its walls, that's where the old bigot, who owned quite a pile in nearby Bekesbourne, used to hang out while writing “You Only Live Twice”, before succumbing to his second heart attack in a Canterbury hotel and dying in Kent & Canterbury Hospital in 1964 at the age of 56.


“He drank a lot here, I guess”, said the landlady when I went to visit the place yesterday. “Apparently, he was quite a drinker. If you had those Martinis that are described in the books, you'd be either impotent or on the floor. To be honest, I didn't know much about Fleming until we took over the place eighteen months ago.” Recently, a German film crew came round to film for a documentary about Fleming and Bond. “They asked if he was much like around here. I just told them that no one had had a bad word to say about him.”
I told the landlady that I'd been to the pub before under the former owners, and I remember there being more Bond-related stuff on the walls (I seem to remember some framed information about “Moonraker” on the toilets. Something to do with Bond taking just twenty minutes from the Old Dover Road in Canterbury down to Dover. That particular, though possibly misremembered, boast stuck because on a good day that's exactly how long it takes me to the ferry port as well, without breaking the speed limit. I suppose they hadn't built the dual carriageway yet in Bond's day).

Right now all I could see was the plaque outside, and what might have been a picture of Count Louis Zborowski's Chitty Bang Bang, which was the inspiration for Fleming's “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (see what he did there?). There was also a rather nice artistic woodcut print of Ian Fleming with a gun.
The landlady at the Duck said that she had made the effort to read “You Only Live Twice”, and that it had been “very hard work indeed. a) because it's unbelievably sexist...” And b)? “Because it's just... badly written. It's the E.L. James of its time.”

The lunch was amazing, by the way. You can see photos of some of the dishes, the pub and the surrounding landscape on their website: http://www.theduckpettbottom.com

Speaking of websites, you would expect some Bond geeks to have already explored the Kent connections, and indeed they have, exhaustively so: http://www.007magazine.co.uk/fleming/kentish01.htm
007magazine even mentions my favourite Bond factoid, that the National Express bus route between London and the coast at Deal, passing through Canterbury and Dover on the way is the 007: “Surely no coincidence.” Indeed.

But this blog is supposed to be about the “A Girl and a Gun” covers compilation and my contribution to it, and of course, the music of Bond is a whole different kettle of fish, what with John Barry's genius inventing an instantly recognisable sonic world of suaveness and loucheness and elegance in menace.

It is testament to Barry's originality that none of the later Bond songs has ever dared to entirely ditch the formula of his grandly orchestrated chromatic theme, but with the passing of the decades the trademark musical tropes have worn thinner and thinner, with so much clutter added to disguise the decline.
To that effect, “Goldeneye”, the 1995 song I've been chosen to cover, isn't exactly a stone-cold classic. You can tell that by how there are no chord sheets for it on the internet. Not that we need those, of course!
Anyway, it seems it was written for Tina Turner by Bono and the Edge, and from what I can make out they've taken the generic Bond chord sequence and tacked on two similar bits in what seems like arbitrarily different keys, presumably to achieve a sort of anti-musical disjointed feel.

Poor Tina Turner, who famously said the she didn't hear a tune in “River Deep Mountain High”, what must she have thought of this? How could she say “Rubbish!” to U2 in their 1995 pomp?

I do realise that I've painted myself into a bit of a corner here: Whatever I say next (I've polished a turd/I've found its hidden beauty/It's grown on me, but only in my own version) will end up sounding horribly arrogant. But if I didn't feel I could improve on this particular original there really would be no point in doing it at all. And in the end it's a much more thankful task to cover a song nobody seems to be particularly fond of.
So let's just say I transposed the thing, added some harmonies and sonically tried to move it into some sort of perpetual sixties world which all the best Bond songs should inhabit anyway. Only mine is a bit Shabby Road. Hope you like it.