“I write songs about myself, how can I make a ‘Bond’ song?” was Adele’s response when the Skyfall producers asked her to write the theme song to the 23rd film in the James Bond series. Director Sam Mendes didn’t see the problem and advised her: “Just write a personal song! Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ was a love song.”
Although that’s true, the composers of Simon’s 1977 hit (Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager) did slip the film title — The Spy Who Loved Me— into the lyrics. According to Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, Adele went one further and insisted on reading the entire script for Skyfall before writing a word of her song.
At the time, Adele was riding high on the success of her second, confessional album. 21 was the world’s bestselling album in 2011 and 2012, credited with revitalising the entire music industry. Paul Epworth had co-written and produced 21’s mighty lead single, “Rolling in the Deep”, and Adele later praised her fellow Londoner for pushing her vocal range and confidence. It made him the natural choice as a collaborator on something as bombastic as a Bond theme and he immediately set about studying the songs’ musical formula.
Bond’s tone had been set by Monty Norman, who wrote the original theme tune for the first film, Dr No, in 1962. Norman (born in 1928) lifted the opening guitar part — “Dum di-di dum dum” — from a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign” he had written for a musical version of VS Naipaul’s novel, A House for Mr Biswas. Composer John Barry then gave the tune a jazzy arrangement, adding a devil-may-care sophistication to the mood with stalker’s strings and blasts of high-octane brass. The tradition of individual “Bond songs” began when Matt Monro crooned through the credits of “From Russia with Love” (1963) and became essential after Shirley Bassey provided the unbeatable “Goldfinger” in 1964, the songs’ releases adding to the groundswell of publicity around the films.
Before writing “Skyfall”, Epworth watched the first 13 Bond films and broke down the elements of the best Bond songs — including Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971) and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” (1973), written by Paul McCartney. He had a eureka moment when he identified “a minor ninth as the harmonic code”. Known by musicologists as the “big daddy” of the three “prime dissonances”, the minor ninth is a compound musical interval spanning 13 semitones (one semitone above an octave) and is often used to add tension to music.
To create the melody for the commissioned “dramatic ballad”, Epworth repeatedly escalated and released that tension to echo the film’s themes of “death and rebirth”. On the chorus, the pitch soars exhilaratingly upward as Adele sings of falling downward. Meanwhile the Norman/Barry Bond theme is worked into a linking passage between the chorus and the second verse. (Likewise, on Billie Eilish’s smouldering new “No Time to Die”, The Smiths’ former guitarist Johnny Marr plays the final “spy chord”.)
Epworth feared Adele would find the music too dark, but she loved it. He said she wrote a first draft of the verse and chorus within 10 minutes of meeting him at the studio: “She had the lyrics ready in her head when she drove over. It was the most absurd thing. She’s fast, but it was really quite phenomenal.” Interviewed on BBC Radio 6 Music, he said the pair wanted the romance of the lyrics to reflect Bond’s relationship with his country and MI6. His internal conflict is evident in lines such as: “You may have my number, you can take my name/ But you’ll never have my heart.”
Adele had always admired vintage singers, and singing over a track that begins with a solo piano and swells to include a 77-piece orchestra (complete with gong), Adele channelled the fierce vocal ballast of Sixties Bassey. She also said that her first pregnancy deepened her voice. According to research published by the University of Sussex in 2018, women’s voices drop by an average of two notes when they are pregnant, because extra fluid volume near the vocal cords causes them to vibrate at a slower than normal rate.
The film’s star, Daniel Craig, says he cried when he first heard the song. “From the opening bars, I knew immediately,” he said. “Then the voice kicked in and it was exactly what I’d wanted from the beginning. It just got better and better because it fitted the movie. In fact the more of the movie we made, the more it fitted.”
Released two weeks before the film, on October 5 2012, “Skyfall” rocketed to number one in 11 countries. The following February it became the first Bond tune to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Adele lifted the first Oscar for a Bond film in 47 years and performed it live for the first time at the ceremony. As she stepped off the stage, the 24-year-old new mother kicked off her Louboutin platform shoes. Motioning towards her tight, sparkling dress, she said: “I’d pick them up but I can’t bend over.”
What is the best Bond song? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Columbia; Success; XL; EMI; Parlophone; Universal
Picture credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images