It’s sung by Sam Smith – like Adele – a British vocalist who’s stormed America with an album mired in heartbreak.
You can’t really blame all concerned for attempting to replicate it with Writing’s on the Wall.
But Skyfall also pulled off what you might call a return to Core Bond Theme Values – a swooning ballad bedecked with strings and musical quotations from Monty Norman’s 1962 James Bond Theme – with enviable poise: you could imagine Shirley Bassey singing it, but it didn’t sound like a pastiche. That was at least partly down to the fame of the artist who sang and co-wrote it: it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that millions of people would have gone out and bought a new single by Adele even if said new single had been a cover of The Smurf Song. Skyfall, on the other hand, won an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe: it outsold Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name in the space of three days. White and Keys’ Another Way to Die joined Garbage’s The World Is Not Enough and Rita Coolidge’s All Time High in the ranks of Bond Themes No One Remembers, possibly because it had no identifiable tune whatsoever. The Daniel Craig reboot that began with 2006’s Casino Royale might have reinvigorated the Bond franchise, but the attempt to give the theme songs a suitably gritty image to match – drafting in alt-rockers Chris Cornell and Jack White, the latter duetting with Alicia Keys – never quite clicked. The theme to its predecessor, Skyfall, was the first in decades to really grab the public’s imagination, to take on a life of its own, apart from the film it introduced. Y ou have to feel for those charged with devising the theme song for Spectre, the 24th James Bond film.
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