A weird question has been tickling my brain for several days:
What Beatles song (unmodified) would make the best James Bond opening titles theme song?
Having now thought about it a bit, I present my list:
- A Hard Day’s Night – That opening guitar chord! The song has an appropriately upbeat tempo and the lyrics are actually a pretty good fit for some Bond action followed by falling into the arms of a Bond girl.
- Back in the U.S.S.R. – A sequel to From Russia, With Love, naturally. Jetsetting, dealing with Russkies, a thumping theme song. It’s almost perfect.
- Come Together – Surreal lyrics, but you can kind of make them feel like they apply to Bond if you just go with the flow – kind of like some of the real theme songs actually. Interesting instrumentation. I could see this over some old style silhouette credit sequences.
- Revolution (Past Masters version, not the White Album) – Bond-esque guitar riffs, thumping drums, and lyrics about destruction and changing the world. Bond fights Red China and Chairman Mao in the 1970s.
- I am the Walrus – Weirdness, with harsh Lennon vocals that could really make a punch in those opening credits. Bonus points if you can tie any of the lyrics to the plot of the movie.
- Happiness is a Warm Gun – I mean, it’s virtually like this was written for Bond. It has the feel of a modern Daniel Craig era theme song, it’s about warm guns. You just need the film to have a Mother Superior villain bent on world domination.
- Tomorrow Never Knows – A bit out of left field, but the different eastern instrumentation could fit a Bond film set in India. Lyrics are a decent match with just a bit of squinting. And the title is only one word different from a real Bond movie.
- And Your Bird Can Sing – Mostly I put this here because it’s one of my favourite Beatles songs. I think it could work.
As a bonus, you could think of the song title as the title of the Bond movie.
Today I had 5 ethics classes. Including the first older kids class on Uncertainty. Sample questions:
Have you ever had to make a decision but you didn’t have all the information you needed to decide? How did you decide what to do? Do you think uncertainty is an everyday experience, or something that we have only to deal with rarely? How should we deal with uncertain situations? How can scientists best communicate uncertainty about a result to the public? (e.g. we’re 70% sure this chemical causes cancer, weather/storm forecasts, etc.) How does this uncertainty happen in legal cases, when the laws are written down? Is it inevitable that there will be uncertainty in a system of laws and rules, even though we try to write everything down clearly? Is uncertainty important or useful in some situations? (I was thinking sports, games, movies.)
For lunch after the first two I took Scully out for fish & chips. We sat in a waterside park down by a ferry wharf, where there were some workers on a barge doing something to the wharf. I assume some sort of routine maintenance.
New content today:
Hmm, I have to think about the Beatles Bond question. I guess the closest we got in a real Bond movie was the title song “Live and Let Die” from Paul and Linda McCartney and Wings. Which is of course not the Beatles but at least from a former Beatles member. One of my favorite Bond soundtracks. Which is your favorite?
Oh, so many good ones to choose from. I’m always partial to Thunderball and the first use of John Barry’s “007” theme. And the instrumental theme of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And the Pretenders songs in The Living Daylights, but then The Pretenders have always been one of my favourite bands.