For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 4

In 1964, little-known actor Michael Caine was being evicted — again — and needed a place to stay — again. His friend Sean Connery, starting out in similar circumstances, had reached the pinnacle of the acting world as James Bond. But here Caine was, unable to pay the rent.

In desperation, he temporarily moved in with his pal John Barry, the music composer for the Bond series. Barry was a regular patron of London’s tony clubs and discotheques, and so Caine fully expected to have some good times while staying over as a guest. What he got instead was being kept up night after night by a strange tune Barry was tinkering with: two blaring notes in the key of F major, followed by a trailing melody in D flat, repeated over and over like a villainous echo:

[youtube uGfvvLCXW0k — click here to watch in full-screen]

Decades later, music critic Terry Walstrom would marvel at how this famous introduction “arrests the attention and stuns the ear,” with the unorthodox key transition being akin to “opening a carton of fat-free milk and pouring out a glass of vodka. Entirely without precedent.”

Unknowingly just a few months away from his own stardom courtesy of 1964’s Zulu (another film scored by Barry), Michael Caine lay in the dark listening to the haunting melody of “Goldfinger,” little guessing that the song would one day be judged one of the finest of the last fifty years, with its young composer becoming the greatest British purveyor of movie music in the twentieth century.

John Barry Prendergast was the great-grandson of famous bare-knuckled boxing champ Jack Sullivan, but no hint of “the sweet science” filtered down through the family tree to him. Born in 1933, his father owned a chain of cinemas and his mother was a concert pianist. Barry took piano lessons from the age of nine (with one teacher whacking his fingers with a ruler whenever he missed a key), and fell in love with movies while working in the projection booths of his Dad’s theaters. Soon he had every intention of becoming a classically trained film composer.

Then, as Barry tells it, “When I was fifteen, I met totally different music. My brother was crazy about swing: Goodman, Ellington, Herman, the Dorseys, Harry James and the rest. I was horrified. Then, secretly fascinated. Then openly fascinated.” Against all common sense given his film aspirations, Barry found himself forgoing his piano studies to learn the trumpet, while devouring every jazz record he could find. “I was a big, big fan of Stan Kenton’s,” he says.

I wanted to listen to the early Kenton stuff — that brass sound was predominant, both the high brass (they said he had five trumpets, five trombones) and also the low brass sound, a rich, low sound. I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque, sharp attack; extreme ranges, top Cs and beyond, and on the low end you’d go right down to the low Fs and below, so you’d have a wall of sound. The typical thing, that Bond thing, is very much this brass sound.

[youtube _v5qHQVuwjE — click here to watch in full-screen]

Managing military bands during his compulsory national service convinced Barry that bandleader was the greatest job in the world. Problem was, the big swing bands were on their way out — too big, too expensive, too old-style. They were being replaced by rock ‘n’ roll groups featuring a smaller mix of brass, percussion, and newfangled instruments like electric guitars.

Barry took advantage of this changing of the guard by recruiting some ex-Army buddies and local musicians into a new group he called The John Barry Seven. Instead of Benny Goodman it was Bill Haley who inspired these kids. Decked out in matching light-grey suits and sporting practiced dance steps to go along with the music, they soon were a regular feature in British music halls and on TV.

[youtube CRU3PJY3tqE — click here to watch in full-screen]

In 1957, the respected UK pop-music newspaper Record Mirror said that the John Barry Seven were “mainly on a rock kick, but if you can stand that, then the act is excellent. They are faultlessly turned out, perform with slickness, precision and abandon. An act produced with professional thoroughness, an object lesson to the youngsters in the business.” Barry and his band toured with Paul Anka, jump-started the career of British teen idol Adam Faith, and played in the first Royal Variety Show in 1960. Perhaps the high point of that early period was Faith’s 1959 breakthrough hit, “What Do You Want?”

[youtube sgeFRgQpT8Y — click here to watch in full-screen]

As the Fifties gave way to the swinging Sixties, Barry began scoring films as a side-gig. His first was 1960’s hilariously bad contribution to the teen-rebellion genre, Beat Girl. But even as he wrote music for a schlocky picture with lines like “My mother was a stripper. . . I wanna be a stripper too!”, he was still pining to graduate to his first love: serious composition for cinema. “You knew he had another agenda,” Adam Faith later remembered about his early collaborations with Barry. “He used pop music as a platform — a jumping off platform. Almost from the first day that I met him, John’s ambition went beyond making a few pop records.”

Barry began recording orchestral demos for his budding film-scoring career, and his arrangements became progressively grander in scale. One Friday in June 1962 he got a call from Noel Rogers, the head of music publishing at United Artists in London. There was a movie rushing into theaters, a picture based on the famous James Bond books, and the producers weren’t happy with the main theme. Would Barry consider reworking the existing melody into something hotter and hipper?

The composer knew vaguely of James Bond but had never read a single line of Ian Fleming’s prose, nor did the producers have time to let him screen a rough cut of the picture. It was a rush job: he was offered two-hundred pounds, given the basic melody as written by Dr. No composer Monty Norman, and ordered to turn in an updated arrangement of the main theme by the following Wednesday. Knowing only that the Bond series featured spies, gunplay and girls, Barry decided to use Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and Nelson Riddle’s “Untouchables” theme as primary models for his own effort. “It was very Dizzy Gillespie,” Barry said later in an interview. “The bridge of the James Bond theme — it’s totally be-bop. It was this crazy mixture of stuff. . . really a ragbag of ideas.”

Gathering together the current incarnation of his John Barry Seven, he padded them out with additional players until he had a streamlined, lean-and-mean “orchestra.” There were nine pieces of brass (five saxes, plus trumpets and trombones), a bit of percussion for rhythm, and no strings at all aside from the ones attached to the sinister, growling electric guitar of Vic Flick, a young impresario who had joined the Seven in 1959. It was Flick who suggested creating “a more ominous feel” by playing his bit an octave lower, starting on the sixth string rather than the fourth. “We tried it,” says Flick, “and it turned out to be very effective.” Have a listen and judge for yourself:

[youtube ye8KvYKn9-0 — click here to watch in full-screen]

The film’s producers liked the theme so much that they added it not only to the main titles, but to a number of other scenes in Dr. No as well. When released as a single later that year, “The James Bond Theme” became a huge hit on the radio, cementing the character of James Bond in the popular culture. “The Bond Sound is made up of two different elements,” Barry says, “the pop guitar sound plus influences from people like Bill Russo and Stan Kenton. The pop side made it very accessible, and the jazz side gave it a size and feel that was different. Fred Astaire said, ‘Make it big, give it style, and give it class,’ and that’s the bible on which I worked.”

Right on the heels of Dr. No‘s success came the first Bond sequel, From Russia, With Love. Previously limited to rearranging Dr. No‘s title track, Barry was hired this time to score the entire film, with one crucial exception: the movie’s theme song, written by Lionel Bart and crooned by Matt Munro. For a second time, therefore, he found himself in the somewhat unenviable position of giving someone else’s preexisting melody his own jazzy, brassy “Bond Sound.”

But once again, the producers liked what he turned in so much that they made the decision to track one of Barry’s instrumentals over the opening credits, relegating the vocalized version of the theme to the end of the film:

[youtube CrOiyuxrnDE — click here to watch in full-screen]

Barry also used From Russia, With Love to introduce an all-new, multi-purpose Bond action theme called simply “007.” It proved popular with fans, and ultimately was used again and again throughout the series:

[youtube V-5f8IWXCTI — click here to watch in full-screen]

It wasn’t until Goldfinger in 1964 that Barry was entrusted with penning his first Bond theme song, complete with lyrics and a vocalist of his choosing, and he was determined to make the most of it. One of his favorite Sixties haunts, The Pickwick Club, was owned by the lyricist Leslie Bricusse. Barry asked him and fellow song-smith Anthony Newly to provide lyrics for the tune, but when they first heard it they were astounded by how unconventional it was. “What the hell do I do with it?” Newly asked.

“It’s ‘Mack the Knife,'” Barry replied. “A song about a villain.”

That was the key, and from there Bricusse and Newly were able to find words that lived up to the brazen, audacious, subtly creepy melody:

Goldfinger!

He’s the man.

The man with the Midas touch.

A spider’s touch. . . .

Such. . .

a cold finger.

Beckons you

to enter his web of sin.

But don’t. . . go. . . in. . . .

Tony Newly, an accomplished singer in his own right, recorded a version of “Goldfinger” that ultimately went unused in the film, but which focuses the mind on the exquisite silkiness of the lyrics, freed as they are here from the wailing brass of the “James Bond sound”:

[youtube Tm49WkfAL-Y — click here to watch in full-screen]

Once the music was on paper, and while Bricusse and Newly were still penning the words, Barry went on a hunt for a singer capable of doing justice to the sheer outlandishness of the piece. He settled on a beautiful, full-throated pop diva of mixed African/English heritage named Shirley Bassey, who heralded from Wales. As soon as she swung by the studio and listened to Barry’s haunting melodies, she was entranced. “Just hearing the opening bars convinced me that this was no ordinary song,” Bassey later gushed, “and I told him ‘I don’t care what the lyrics are like — I’ll do it!'”

Bassey’s incomparable voice was the final necessary ingredient in the potent “Goldfinger” musical brew. “She just whammed it out with so much conviction,” Barry later marveled. “[Her voice] was feminine but she had a metallic quality in her voice. An absolute metallic edge. So the whole thing worked. It wouldn’t had been what it was had Shirley not sang it.” At one concert with Barry in 1964, Bassey hit a high note so powerfully that, as she tells it, “my dress strap broke and out popped my left boob! I didn’t miss a beat as I kept my hand there and. . . finished the song still holding on.”

Small wonder she’s never been invited to sing at the Super Bowl. . . .

While the movie was growing into a cultural phenomenon, the soundtrack album for Goldfinger went on a rampage of its own, knocking The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night out of the top spot of the US charts, and ultimately hanging around on the list for seventy weeks. Two million copies were sold in just the first six months, and the title song became a #1 hit as far away as Japan. “The end result worked just perfectly,” says the composer with pride.

John Barry’s involvement with James Bond stretched over a quarter-century, until by 1987’s The Living Daylights he felt he had “exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.” Goldfinger remains his favorite Bond score, a magic convergence of talent and execution that comes along maybe once or twice in a lifetime.

By no means is Barry only known for Bond. He has won five Academy Awards during his long career, bringing his stately, elegant, and lush compositions to bear on films as varied as Born Free (1967), The Lion in Winter (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), King Kong (1976), The Deep (1977), Bruce Lee’s Game of Death (1978), Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), Somewhere in Time (1980), Body Heat (1981), Out of Africa (1986), and his magnificent crowning achievement, Dances with Wolves (1991). But it’s the pulsing, soaring, jazz-and-brass Bond efforts for which he’ll be remembered best. And among that group of scores, Goldfinger reigns supreme.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the amazing production design of Goldfinger, and the endlessly inventive man who dreamt up the larger-than-life look of Bond’s world.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3