The story of Tom Jones and the lost ‘James Bond’ theme song
While the iconic theme songs from each James Bond movie are always hugely memorable parts of the franchise and major talking points in their own right, the story behind the song is not often as dramatic as the movies themselves. However, there was high tension, drama, and danger behind the song for the 1965 Sean Connery effort, Thunderball.
Penned initially as ‘Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’ by John Barry and Leslie Bricusse, the song was first slated to be sung by Shirley Bassey, and the title was borrowed from the name an Italian journalist had given to James Bond in 1962.
After her incredible vocal performance on the previous year’s Goldfinger, Bassey was back to lend her huge voice to the new song, but when studio executives raised their concerns about the track’s length and ordered a re-record, she was not available. Instead, Dionne Warwick was recruited to fill in and recorded her own version of the song. But once again, the executives had some concerns. Worried that the track didn’t contain the film’s title ‘Thunderball’ anywhere in the lyrics, the suits from United Artists pushed to move the track from the promised opening credit slot into the less desirable closing credits sequence.
With Warwick’s recording set to feature in the movie, Bassey sued the production, resulting in neither recording being used in the movie nor its soundtrack. The material wouldn’t get a public release until 1992, when the recordings appeared on a limited edition release of the James Bond 30th Anniversary Collection album.
With little time and an iconic-song-shaped hole in the movie, John Barry now teamed up with songwriter Don Black and hastily penned a new song called ‘Thunderball’. If there had already seemed like enough drama in the song’s making, it wasn’t quite over just yet.
In a bid to change position once more, Tom Jones was brought in to sing on the new version, which has a massive arrangement with shrieking brass in the background throughout and with some of the cinematic themes coming through from the score. To get a feel for how to sing it, Jones asked John Barry what the song was about. “I don’t know, just go in the studio and sing your heart out like Shirley Bassey did,” came the reply.
Aiming to recapture some of the Bassey magic from a year prior, Jones explained in an interview with NPR in 2003 that he was under the impression that the studio wanted “a male version of ‘Goldfinger’” from the new recording.
And even despite his incredible voice and revered vocal range and control, Jones still struggled with the crescendo, saying that “at the end, there’s a high note and the arrangement goes on for quite a while so he [John Barry] said ‘try and hold the note for as long as possible’, so I did, and I closed my eyes, and I held the note for so long that when I opened my eyes the room was spinning”.
Other accounts of the recording session have Jones holding the note so long that he fainted in the recording booth, while others say he had to be taken to hospital after sustaining the note for too long.
One final twist in the tale of ‘Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’ and the Thunderball soundtrack is that a far more surprising singer submitted a song to be used as the theme. Johnny Cash wrote a song named after the film, which described the plot of the picture. While it was ultimately rejected outright by the studio, his cinematic country recording gives a glimpse into an alternate reality where James Bond trades in his trademark Aston Martin for a wild Mustang and gets shaken up in his stirrups in the Old West.
