The Bond love continues! And as promised (or threatened), I want to talk about some of the songs that were rejected as potential Bond themes. This doesn’t necessarily include some of the songs that maybe should’ve been rejected because, as Commander Light pointed out, the Jack White/Alicia Keyes song in the new film is fucking horrible. Or, maybe it’s fitting in that as I was being forced to listen to it, I was pondering new ways to die, and all of them were far more satisfactory than that ear rape. But without further adieu…

I’ll start with Tomorrow Never Dies, going in reverse order here, which, if you’ll remember, was the second film with Brosnan in the role and his absolute worst and an especially low entry in the series. Yes, it was worse than Die Another Day. I know that seems like it’d be an impossible task, but yeah… a lot of the good will built up with Goldeneye was pissed on good and hard with this remarkably mediocre film.

The title is pretty stupid, but was originally titled Tomorrow Never Lies, and so here you can find the proposed theme song “Tomorrow Never Lies” by Pulp. , and when the song was rejected for the film, it ended up as a b-side of their “Help The Aged” single. Amazingly, there was apparently 12 different submissions for the theme song of this movie, including Swan Lee (who’s version I really like), Moby (ehhh, he had grown quite popular at the time, but his song was just a remix of the classic Bond theme),  and Saint Etienne, who is a band I really like, though I’m not sure how I feel about theirs’ as the theme song, even though it’s a fantastic song, and eventually landed on their Built On Sand album.

If you remember, Sheryl Crow ended up doing the official theme song and it’s… such a forgettable piece, it’s amazing. The song used over the end credits, “Surrender” by K. D. Lang, was the one that David Arnold, the film’s music producer (who’s been with all the Bond films from Tomorrow Never Dies through Quantum Of Solace), wanted to use. You can even hear quite a few cues to “Surrender” throughout the film. Here’s the video to that song with it placed over the opening credits sequence:

I’m not a huge K. D. Lang fan, but that’s not too bad, right? I really should take this opportunity to thank a user on youtube who goes by the handle of LuiECuomo for throwing a lot of these videos together, putting the rejected songs on the credits sequences for the films they would’ve gone with. Most of these songs I knew about, either through my eye for trivia lore or my research, but he’s opened my eyes to a few.

Our next film is Goldeneye, Brosnan’s first in the role (though he should’ve had it in The Living Daylights, but that’s a story for another time), and was Bond’s return to the big screen after a six year absence. The theme, if you’ll remember is simply entited “Goldeneye” and was performed by Tina Turner and written by U2′s Bono and The Edge (their band mates Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. would go on to do the revamp of the Mission Impossible theme in the big screen version of the show the following year), but one of the submissions for the theme song was actually, I shit you not, by Ace Of Base:

That song, once rejected, had it’s title changed from “The Goldeneye” to “The Juvenile” and ended up on their Da Capo album. Prior to them, Scottish band Wet Wet Wet, who had their biggest hit with a cover of the Trogg’s “Love Is All Around” were hired to do the theme song and what they may’ve sounded like, I have no idea.

The most realistic and down to Earth of the Roger Moore films, For Your Eyes Only, which has quite a few similarities with Quantum Of Solace, had a simply fantastic theme song performed by Sheena Easton, who not only performed the song, but performed it during the opening credits, which at the time was totally unheard of (and she was sadly one upped later by Madonna in Die Another Day). Here’s an alternate version of the Sheena Easton song, and here is original artist approached by the producers to do the song, Blondie:

Once rejected that song, which is not bad but just not nearly as good as the Easton track, ended up on the album The Hunter. Someday, I tell you, I want to date a girl named Sheena Easton. And if she could look like 1970s Debbie Harry, well… that would just be heaven.

Moore’s second turn in the role, The Man With The Golden Gun, is not a bad movie, but just a weird one. It’s got it’s fun moments, and it’s certainly bizarre moments, and it’s got that little guy from Fantasy Island in there too. And it’s got Britt Ekland, one of my favorite Bond girls. The theme for that movie was performed by a Scottish singer named Lulu, but only after they dropped the originally proposed theme song by Alice Cooper. Yeah, you read that right. Anyways, the song then ended up on Cooper’s Muscle Of Love album and rather then embedding it for you, I choose to instead give you a picture of Britt Ekland:

Britt helped make The Wicker Man (the original, of course, because you never ever EVAR need to see the 2006 remake with Nic Cage) so, so wonderful. That film also starred Christopher Lee, who plays the title character in The Man With The Golden Gun. Also, Britt dated Rod Stewart for a while and… well, the less about that, the better.

From there, we go to the film that followed Goldfinger, a Connery film called Thunderball. This is a movie that, more so possibly than even Goldfinger really highlighted all the classic things that make up what we think of as a Bond film: The action, the adventure, the intrigue, the exotic locales, the girls, the gadgets, the classy suave-ness, the one liners, the overwhelming sexism, and Connery’s own special brand of misogyny. It’s criminally underrated (even with me) despite the legal problems it would later cause the series (that’s for another time), and has some real misfires of scenes, but for the most part, is mega gold. And it contains my absolute favorite Bond girl, but that too may have to be a story for another time…

The theme song is by Tom Jones and while I should probably hate it, I just don’t. It’s ridiculous, but it absolutely works, but it wasn’t the first choice for the film. I’ll quote Wikipedia verbatim on this one:

The original main title theme to Thunderball was entitled “Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” which was written by John Barry and Leslie Bricusse. The title was taken from an Italian journalist who in 1962 dubbed agent 007 as Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Barry had thought he couldn’t write a song about a vague “Thunderball” term or the story of the film, so his song was a description of the character of James Bond.

Going with what works, the song was written and Shirley Bassey was brought in to originally record it since she had absolutely knocked it out of the park on the theme to the previous film, so it seemed like a slam dunk. But the producers got worried about repeating themselves, to they brought in a pre-Psychic Friends Network Dionne Warwick to rerecord the song. This is the Warwick version of the song, and this is the Shirley Bassey version:

I absolutely love the fullness to her voice, the way she can sustain those notes for an eternity, and just bring the song to life. Awesome. Oh, and in addition to the three artists that I mentioned doing performances for this movie, I should also add in that Johnny Cash submitted a song called “Thunderball” for the film which obviously wasn’t used and is just fascinating to know exists.

At this point in time, I feel it’s totally necessary to mention once again that the Jack White/Alicia Keyes song from Quantum Of Solace should be on this list just because of how terrible it is. So terrible, in fact, that it makes that painful Chris Cornell song from Casino Royale look better by comparison. Amazing, that. But before the call went out to White and Alicia Keyes to shit out a song (I like Alicia Keyes and have to assume that her doing the song by herself would even be a thousand times better), there was a lot of speculation that Amy Winehouse would do the song with Mark Ronson producing. That eventually fell through due to Winehouse’s drug and legal problems and total inability to find her own quantum of solace, so in conclusion, I leave you with one last picture of the gorgeous Britt Ekland…

…and that Winehouse/Ronson song, entitled “Love Is A Losing Game,” played over the main title credits of Diamonds Are Forever. Enjoy it and I’ll probably see you tomorrow with one last Bond-centric post (the last for a while, I promise). Here’s Pete Doherty‘s crack buddy: