When Daniel Craig’s favourite band almost recorded his ‘James Bond’ theme
If you’re a fan of James Bond movies and Radiohead, like, oh, I don’t know, 90 per cent of the world’s adult population, then you would think getting the Oxfordshire band to score a 007 movie would be a complete no-brainer, and would instantly result in the best Bond theme of all time.
That’s what Daniel Craig definitely thought, but it didn’t go to plan, to put it mildly.
Back in 2015, the journey toward exactly that happening was gathering pace, as Sam Mendes, the director of the next Bond movie, Spectre, was a fan of Thom Yorke’s band, as was the super spy himself, Daniel Craig, who actually names them as his favourite group of all time.
Radiohead were duly invited to submit a song to be used over the iconic intro that always serves as the opening credits, usually with silhouetted ladies jumping around the place and swinging on gun barrels.
So the band proudly set to work on music they thought would be fitting for the movie, with one excited punter even putting £15,000 down on them having a number one hit with whatever they came up with. What they originally submitted was ‘Man of War’, a song that had been around since the mid-1990s, around the time of The Bends, and eventually ended up on the expanded version of OK Computer.
Radiohead thought of it as something of an homage to Bond themes, and so it made sense to put it forward. But because it wasn’t an original composition specifically for the film, it would have been ineligible for an Oscar, so another one had to be done. This time they wrote ‘Spectre’, but astonishingly it got rejected, leaving the band, who had stopped recording their new album in order to do the song, furious.
Yorke said at the time: “That was just politics as far as I can work out. Who knows what was going on there?” while their producer Nigel Godrich said it was “a waste of time”.
In the documentary The Sound of 007, Craig, who is such a big fan that he interviewed Yorke for a magazine piece in Interview back in 2013 before the furore, spoke about the song ‘Spectre’ and said: “I loved it. I still love it. I still play it because I love Radiohead so much.”
In the end the theme song for the movie went to Sam Smith who recorded ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ but it didn’t quite get the reception the movie makers would have hoped for, the piece getting negatively compared to Adele’s previous effort for Skyfall and even to the Radiohead composition.
But Craig didn’t seem too upset by the process, saying: “Even the fact that we had a conversation with Radiohead for me was like a dream come true.”
As for Yorke, he would still play the song live on the Moon Shaped Pool tour, announcing the song as Spectre but reminding the audience “not to get it confused with the James Bond film” with a wry grin.
While producers are currently hunting around for a new Bond to replace Craig after he handed in his Walter PPK in No Time to Die back in 2021, the actor is celebrating 20 years since he first took the role, beginning with Casino Royale.
He remains very busy, and is about to be seen in the third Knives Out movie, called Wake up Dead Man as part of an ensemble cast including Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner and Mila Kunis. He’s also busy filming the big-budget new Narnia movie directed by Greta Gerwig which is due in cinemas in 2026.
