James Bond has been played by man actors, with that, many artists have been able to make music for the films in which feature Bond. You can most likely name a few songs that really stick out to you, and maybe you can even name the artists, but there have been some musicians that flew under the radar with making music for the 007 films.
A documentary recently was released on the above topic which features multiple artists. Jack White humbly appears in the documentary to discuss his duet with Alicia Keys for the song “Another Way to Die,” which featured in nobody’s favorite Daniel Craig movie, Quantum of Solace. And even if it’s not the best Bond song ever, White reveals that he was able to slip in an utterly unorthodox guitar solo because the song was done on such short notice, which meant, according to White it let him put things in the song “they would never have approved of had they had a year to think about it.” White also notes that Prince told him that he loved “Another Way to Die,” telling saying that he felt the song was “real strong.”
There is also a part in the documentary where it glances over rock stars and bands who almost did a James Bond theme song, but for whatever reason, never did. Two artists were Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra.
The documentary does illuminate the full story of both of Radiohead’s attempts at doing the theme song for the 2015 film Spectre. There’s also a somewhat hilarious and raw demo version of the song “GoldenEye,” written by Bono and the Edge, hastily recorded by U2, and then sent to Tina Turner. In the doc, Turner amusingly says “Bono sent me the worst demo,” and she’s not wrong. Still, it’s pretty awesome and more than a little subversive to see and hear U2 singing “GoldenEye.”
