Customer Reviews

The Best of Bond: James Bond

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As always, any collection of the ACTUAL performances of the James Bond film title songs from the films' opening title sequences is always an incredible package. However, I think the major problem with this and the past few collections is that the track order is not by chronological order. Instead, someone in the marketing department probably got the bright idea to master the tracks in order of sales/radio performance. I suppose this is an attempt to entice the people who read the track listing in the store with such a short attention span that won't allow them to read past the third or fourth song title. The order is the same as the last CD, with "Goldeneye" and "Tomorrow Never Dies" thrown on at the end, almost as if an afterthought. Although one can program the CD to play in the order one wishes, and since this IS a historical documentation, my singular opinion is that the tracks should play in chronological order. The music styles are scrambled in this order, instead of flowing through a natural progression of time and change in popular musical influence. It would be nice to just throw it in the CD player and play without HAVING to program the chronological order. Otherwise, this is an EXCELLENT compilation. "MOONRAKER" is still my favorite of all Bond themes (and one the best songs I think I have EVER heard). This is an essential CD for ALL music- and Bond lovers.

Of course any CD collection of 007 songs and or scores by the original artists is always a great buy. But with this cd i just can't get enough of. it all starts out with the Dr. No theme from Monty Norman. For people who are not able to remember the original Norman score. They can hear there favorite tracks. Adn who isn't ready for A-ha's great The Living Daylights or the saultry Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger. My personal favorite tracks are For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, Goldfinger, Goldeneye, A View To A Kill and The Spy Who loved me.Even hear the really funky but catchy sond The Man With The Golden Gun by Lu-lu it is kinda cheesy but in a fun sort of way. All of it is great but all i had wished that they had all of the tracks in order by the films. So in conclusion if you are a Bond fan and who isn't! Go out and buy this CD if you haven't already. When you pop this CD into the player don't be surprised if yuou start singing Goldfinger. Even Tomorrow never dies is on this which i am glad but what they need to make this better is The World Is Not Enough.

Bond...James Bond 007

"The Best Of Bond" collects all of the Bond songs, mostly good, some bad. Of the 19 songs on the CD, only 3 are unbearable("All Time High", "License to Kill" and "For Your Eyes Only"). The rest are truly golden and one can imagine Goldfinger trying to get his greedy little hands on this CD! The best of the bunch is hard to narrow down. Everyone knows Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" is a classic(rightly so) but "Moonraker" is just as good, if not as quite as bombastic as her other ones. There is that familiar Bond theme from "Dr. No" as well as Nancy Sinatra's hypotnic "You Only Live Twice". I'm glad they included the two main tracks from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service": the opening music (a groovy mix of 60's acid rock and classical Bond score) and Louis Armstrong's beautiful, bittersweet "We Have All The Time In The World". "Live and Let Die" has always stood on its two feet, whether as a Bond song or as a rock/pop song as well as Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better". Honorable mentions include Duran Duran's "A View To a Kill", Matt Monro's "From Russia With Love" and Lulu's trippy(and goofy) "The Man With The Golden Gun". Overall, this is a fantastic CD, not just for Bond fans but for people who enjoy good music.

The theme songs, along with the always imaginative opening sequences that accompany them, have been an essential part of the cultural icon that is 007 for the past four decades, and often help distinguish between otherwise barely distinguishable movies. This CD is the most extensive collection of Bond themes currently available, covering every movie from Dr. No (1963) to Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), i.e. 35 years of Bond, which means the only ones missing are Garbage's forgettable 'The World is Not Enough' and Madonna's awful 'Die Another Day', for the lack of which it is none the poorer.

This anthology of Bond themes features some of the leading recording artists of the last four decades, from Shirley Bassey to Tom Jones to Duran Duran to Sheryl Crowe; and even if many of the tracks here sound remarkably dated, they still serve as a fascinating history of a unique phenomenon in 20th century music. Most of the tracks here, though, are wonderful pieces of music in their own right, some powerful and effective, others simply smelling of sweet nostalgia. The songs are all bombastic, melodramatic, full of the kind of blistering wall-of-sound orchestrations and emotional vocals that are an inseparable part of Bond's universe of martinis, girls and guns; but each artist put into it something of their own, be it Bassey's jazzy and seductive 'Goldfinger', Nancy Sinatra's sweet 'You Only Live Twice', Duran Duran's new-wave 'A View to a Kill' or Tina Turner's soulful 'Golden Eye' (composed, in fact, by U2's Bono and The Edge); and they give a fantastic account of how much Bond - and more than that, music and culture as a whole - changed over the last forty years.

Other than Bassey's entries - 'Diamonds Are Forever', 'Moonraker' and 'Goldfinger' - probably the single best known Bond theme and a prototype to the others - and the ones already mentioned above, standout tracks include Tom Jones's blistering, Las Vegas 'Thunderball'; Paul McCartney's 'Live and Let Die', one of the most powerful and darkest of Bond themes, and also one of Paul's best songs; Lulu's energetic and powerful 'The Man With the Golden Gun'; and also Louis Armstrong's 'We Have All the Time in the World', a nearly forgotten gem, one of the best of the Bond songs, which was unfortunately featured in the worst, least successful of Bond films, 'In Her Majesty's Secret Service'. Also among the best tracks in the collection are the ones from the first two Pierce Brosnan films, Turner's 'Golden Eye' and Sheryl Crowe's 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. The latter is in fact one of the best and best-produced of all the Bond themes, a perfect image of Bond's grace, style and strength, and is also a high point in the singer's celebrated career.

The Bond themes are a fascinating cultural phenomenon and the anthology CD is a great one to own. This is the best one around, and it's only one CD unlike some others that stretch out to two with some unnecessary remixes and such to get a few more bucks out of you, so it's your best bet. Well recommended.

Admittedly, we are not the biggest James Bond movie buffs--but oh how we like Bond movie music. The reason we even looked at this soundtrack was due to the 3 cuts by Shirley Bassey; "Goldfinger", "Moonraker", and "Diamonds Are Forever". She is a favorite performer of ours, especially in concert. When we saw the other 16 tracks, we were blown away. We had forgotten all the good music behind a clever secret agent's lifestyle.

From new wave, pop, rock, soul to Euro-continental, this CD delivers a flavorful mix of well arranged and orchestrated theme songs. Sheryl Crow's "Tomorrow Never Dies", Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better", Tina Turner's "Goldeneye", Sheena Easton's "For Your Eyes Only"....and there are more than just the ladies here, "View To A Kill" by Duran Duran, "Thunderball" by Tom Jones, and even Satchmo's "We Have All The Time In The World".

So, make yourselves a Martini--stirred not shaken (or is it the other way around?) and truly enjoy a superb soundtrack compilation.

I have come to the realization that, for me, a Bond film is only as good as its opening sequence and theme. The best Bonds have a "song" that is pleasing to all the senses. This complilation features all the themes with the exception of the most recent one, a marvelous composition recorded and performed by Garbage from "The World is Not Enough," a most impressive addition worth inclusion.

The pinacle song from "Goldfinger," sung by the unparralled Shirley Bassey is here. Nancy Sinatra showed that she could do more than "wear boots" when she contributed to "You Only Live Twice." "The Spy Who Loved Me" featured one of the 70's best songs in Carly Simon's "Nobody Does it Better." The 80's Bond films are highlighed by Sheena Easton and her sexy "For Your Eyes Only." And the 90's saw the use of two soul-stirring performances of Bond themes in Gladys Knight's "License to Kill" and Tina Turner's "Goldeneye. My only regret is that Patti Labelle's "If I Only Knew," heard over the closing credits of "License" was omitted. For the uninitiated, it puts a different turn on a song popularized by Celine Dion.

Although these cuts are my personal favorites, all of the tracks are ear candy!

If I can find anything to complain about, it would be the omission of the theme to The World is Not Enough, but this is a remarkable collection. While Shirley Bassey's classic Goldfinger, Tom Jones' Thunderball and John Barry's theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service have long been enshrined in the movie music hall of fame, it is a pleasant surprise to hear how Sheryl Crow, Duran Duran and others have contributed to the Bond canon. Maybe it's because the movies were a lot of fun, but even a-Ha (I don't own ANY of their music) and Duran Duran are good on this outing. This is a kind of mini-history of 20th century music from 1960 onward -- fascinating and entertaining. The sequence is pointless, though -- A View to a Kill and For Your Eyes Only came much later than Thunderball, for example. Oh well, I suppose we can program CD players.

Recommended, especially if you don't want to buy a stack of soundtrack albums.

This is one of the greatest soundtracks I have ever heard. Even though it's missing "The Exprience of Love" from the Goldeneye end credits and "Where Has Everybody Gone?" from The Living Daylights, this a very wonderful CD with alot of great songs from Shirley Bassey's 3 all-time classics, (Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, and Moonraker.), to the timeless James Bond theme, to the beautiful score of John Barry to Sheena Easton's academy award-winning performance of the tittle song For Your Eye's Only. Plus performances from other great artists like Carly Simon, Duran Duran, A-HA and many more. I recommend this CD to any die-hard 007 fan.

Well, I finally got around to buying one of those Bond compilations, and this one is pretty satisfying. It's got stuff from all of the UA Bond films, and surprisingly, the songs that once seemed forgettable or even downright awful fit in nicely here. After hearing Tom Jones' hilarious "Thunderball," who isn't ready for a-ha's "Living Daylights," or Shirley Bassies' goofy but pretty "Moonraker"? The best stuff here is of course John Barry's songs and music from the 60's heyday of 007, including two great pieces from the lesser seen, but superior George Lazenby movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." You also get those great cheesy AM classics from the Roger Moore epoch, as well as some pretty good songs from the newer movies. It's balanced, it's cool, and with retro being so hip these days, you can stop feeling bad about singing along to "Goldfinger." "He's the man, the man with the Midas touch," indeed.

With the exception of the principal song from "The World is Not Enough," this compilation contains (for better or worse) all the themes form the James Bond movies. A postmodern pastiche of styles constitutes the Bond themes, which works to the advantage of some themes, and to the disadvantage of others.

Some Bond themes are dreadfully conceived or forgettable, whether trying desperately to be "hip" or putting on the airs of syrupy love songs. (This affliction seems to occur frequently during the Roger Moore years.) Strangely enough, Nic Raine's orchestral revisions of the Bond themes on another compilation (recorded with the Prague Philharmonic) are sometimes superior to the originals, particularly for the later movies.

Fortunately, this compilation contains the classics, including the original "Bond theme" itself (which subsequent versions have since superceded in brassiness). Who can forget the swagger of "Goldfinger," the undeniable classic of all Bond film themes; or the campily overblown "Thunderball;" or the darkly "Teutonic" theme from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service;" or the iridescent decadence of "Diamonds are Forever;" or even the cheesy Kung-Fu disco sound of "The Man with the Golden Gun?" (I defy anyone not to guess correctly the time era, or even the year, of that one.)

Personally speaking, a few alternative choices for the representative themes from each film would have been in order for this compilation. Rather than Matt Monro's crooning of "From Russia with Love," the more evocative orchestral theme would have been a much better choice. (Come to think of it, why didn't they get Lotte Lenya herself, who played the film's curt and vile Colonel Klebb, to sing the theme? Too early in the series for self-conscious irony, I guess.) As for "Tomorrow Never Dies," k.d. lang's postmodern "Surrender" sounds more aptly Bondian than Sheryl Crow's torch song opener. "Surrender" has all the trappings of the "Bond sound" with its daemonic trumpet wails and high-camp echoes of "Goldfinger" and "Thunderball," and should have made an appearance in this collection. (I had to buy the complete soundtrack for just that song, although it has other good stuff on it.)

Whatever one's taste in Bond music, this compilation provides great accompaniment for driving, especially on long trips. You can imagine yourself as the charming yet brutal Bond of Sean Connery, or the patrician and insouciant Bond of Pierce Brosnan. And whenever you see some jerk indulging in road rage, you can just imagine reaching towards what looks like an ordinary armrest, and pushing that "little red button..."