More John Barry means more James Bond, and his film score for the fourth in the spy franchise, Thunderball (1965). This was the Bond movie with the jet pack and much parodied 'pool of sharks'. Musically, it's got that unmistakeable blend of menace, jazz and big band orchestration that so evokes the time and place of early Bond... Apparently, after hitting - and sustaining - the last big, ballsy note at the end of the theme song (featured below), Tom Jones fainted in the recording booth!
"It was a combination of the time (the early '60s), a collision of musical cultures (the end of the big-band era, the beginnings of rock) and the offbeat qualities of Ian Fleming's creation that led to Barry's unique mix of jazz, rock, pop and traditional orchestral writing.
"John is part of the original DNA of the Bond film franchise," says Barbara Broccoli, producer of the Bond films since 1995 and daughter of original Bond producer Albert R. (Cubby) Broccoli. "The sound he created was unique, and ultimately very important to the whole cinematic history of Bond."
Broccoli says Bond is a very solitary character. "He has a lot of internal emotions that he doesn't verbalize, so the music really provides the inner life of the character. One of the extraordinary things that John created was this unsettling sense of tension, then pounding away with excitement through the action sequences. His music works on so many different levels, with so much texture, so many colors, that it's a very complex sound."
Barry, back in the 1960s, referred to his Bond scores as "million-dollar Mickey Mouse music," meaning that it followed the action but boasted a sophisticated sound. Looking back today, he explains, "I didn't just go with the action, I would try to figure out what the emotion was behind it. What the audience gets -- although not consciously, in terms of music -- is the emotion of the scene."
While he agrees that the spy sound he launched is a one-of-a-kind mixture of jazz, pop and classical, Barry admits that it was something of an accident. "I just found myself doing it," he explains. "I looked at it and said, 'that works.' That became the Bond style. That's why there's a similarity in all the Bond songs. It's not the melody, it's an attitude."
from variety.com
Street Chase
Underwater Mayhem/Death of Largo/End Titles
Thunderball Main Title, lyrics by Don Black, performed by Tom Jones
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