Josh Reviews The Sound of 007

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Bond film series, The Sound of 007 is a new documentary available on Amazon Prime video that looks back at the incredible, iconic music of the series.  The documentary, directed by Mat Whitecross, is a delightfully entertaining salute to the Bond movie franchise and to the many talented artists and musicians who have contributed to it over the years.

I am a huge Bond fan, and I found this documentary to be tremendous fun to watch, from start to finish.  I wish it was twice as long!

This is a very in-depth documentary with a robust trove of interviews and footage from across the decades of the Bond series.  Pretty much every artist you’d hope to hear from is included in the documentary, either in new interview footage or archival clips.  The film tracks the history of the Bond musical franchise, exploring both the scores of the Bond films as well as the array of different Bond songs that have opened (and occasionally closed) the films.

The film is somewhat chronological, tracking the Bond franchise’s musical progression from 1962’s Dr. No all the way up through 2021’s No Time to Die.  But it’s also playfully edited in an almost stream-of-conscious way, so the film is constantly bopping around; we can hear from artists involved with the franchise decades ago and then artists involved in the recent Daniel Craig era films.  This keeps the film alive and interesting.

(If I have one complaint, it’s that with so much incredible music to cover and so many amazing artists who we could hear from, I think the doc errs on the side of spending a little too much time with Billie Eilish and the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die.  I can understand why they wanted to give extra attention to the most recent Bond film — if I was cynical, I might view the entire existence of this documentary as basically just an ad for that film — but as someone who liked but didn’t love both the film and the song No Time to Die, I think there were precious minutes that might have been better spent elsewhere.  But this is a minor complaint.)

As a hard-core Bond fan, I know a lot of the stories about the Bond scores and songs.  And yet I was continually thrilled, watching this film, to encounter fantastic new stories and footage that I’d never heard or seen before.  For me, highlights include:

• Getting to hear John Barry discus how the song Diamonds are Forever is really all about what he calls “the male organ”.
• Getting to see clips from Bono and U2’s original demo track for GoldenEye (which was eventually sung — brilliantly so — by Tina Turner).
• Getting to see footage of the recording of David Arnold’s re-orchestration of the Bond theme that was used for the Casino Royale end-credits (and eventually reused by several of the subsequent Daniel Craig Bond films, most notably the end of Skyfall).
• A very funny quick clip in which Lulu (who sung The Man with the Golden Gun) sings the main chorus of Live and Let Die, gloriously rocking out to that Paul McCartney song.
• John Taylor of Duran Duran (who wrote and sung A View to a Kill, which is a crazy song but one which I still love dearly) calling Bond musical maestro John Barry a dick.

For all the Bond fans out there, this fun documentary is a must-watch.  Click here and check it out on Amazon Prime video.

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