![]() It’s the one where Christopher Walken plays a Nazi genetic experiment, an ubermesch supervillain with a scheme to destroy Silicon Valley. 1985’s A View To A Kill is nobody’s favorite Bond movie. Roger Moore was my first James Bond, and I have a particular affection for the guy’s eyebrow-arching smugness, but he was about ready to be done with the series. Now: This was not a particularly great time for the Bond series. That went well, and Duran Duran got an offer to do the next James Bond theme. Broccoli took the bait, and he set up a meeting between Taylor and Bond-movie composer John Barry. Taylor was a Bond superfan who’d bought himself an Aston Martin as soon as he made enough money, and he was drunk enough to ask Broccoli when he’d get someone decent to do a theme song. Andrews introduced Taylor to Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, producer of the Bond movies. According to Duran Duran lore, John Taylor was at a post-Wimbledon party with his girlfriend Janine Andrews, an actress who’d had a small role in 1983’s Octopussy. The members of Duran Duran were pretty fractured, but they had an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. It’s a 6.) At the same time, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, and Roger Taylor formed the artsier Arcadia, who managed a single top-10 hit of their own. Rex’s “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” peaked at #9. ![]() The Power Station made a sort of clattering, funk-indebted hard rock, and they landed two singles in the top 10. John Taylor and Andy Taylor started the Power Station with singer Robert Palmer (who will eventually appear in this column) and Chic drummer Tony Thompson. (It’s a 7.) And then came the side projects.īy early 1985, Duran Duran essentially split into two different factions, and each of them went off and made albums on their own. They’d already scored a run of top-10 singles, and they finally got to #1 with the big and overstated dance-pop track “ The Reflex.” After that came the 1984 live album Arena and the tacked-on studio single “ The Wild Boys,” which peaked at #2. ![]() A year earlier, Duran Duran had solidified their status as the biggest band of the MTV synthpop wave. “A View To A Kill,” Duran Duran’s second and final #1 single, was a sort of unofficial reunion record, and it was also an unintended breakup record. Instead, Duran Duran’s “A View To A Kill” is very much a product of its time - a coked-out, ultra-synthetic big-’80s pop confection that probably tells us more about the cultural climate of the late Cold War than any of the period’s actual Bond movies even tried to convey. Unlike those songs, though, this particular Bond theme doesn’t really build on that classic Bond archetype. Like “Live And Let Die” and “Nobody Does It Better,” the only Bond theme ever to hit #1 comes from the franchise’s often-derided Roger Moore era. You could say the same of the two Bond themes that peaked at #2: Paul McCartney & Wings’ “ Live And Let Die,” from 1973, and Carly Simon’s “ Nobody Does It Better,” from 1977. It’s a grand, operatic torch song with a few musical nods toward the sound of the moment. It’s a 9.) “Goldfinger” essentially set the standard for Bond themes. The Bond themes don’t always do well on the charts, but seven of them have made the top 10 - including Shirley Bassey’s “ Goldfinger,” the general-consensus best opening theme in Bond-franchise history. ![]() But the No Time To Die theme song, from future Number Ones subject Billie Eilish, is already out in the world.) Only one of those 25 theme songs has ever made it to #1. ( No Time To Die, the latest Bond film, was the first big movie to have its release delayed by the pandemic. To date, there have been 24 movies in the Bond franchise, and there have been 25 opening-title themes. It’s how every James Bond movie has to start. Some popular-in-the-moment singer howls vaguely impenetrable pseudo-poetry. Stylized cartoon guns fire bullets in extreme slow-motion. Silhouettes of women appear and shed clothes. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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