“There have been many rejected themes over the years by many notable artists,” writes James Bond Radio’s Jack Lugo. After the band recorded the song, the film’s production team rejected it as too melancholy for the title sequence - perhaps inevitably, in retrospect, given how Radiohead’s songs lend themselves to the construction of a “gloom index” - and opted instead for a higher-flown (and ultimately Oscar-winning) number sung by Sam Smith. Or rather, the video shows how Radiohead’s “Spectre” might have appeared in the 24th Bond picture. You can hear Radiohead’s theme song as it appears in the opening of 2015’s Spectre (a reference, every Bond fan knows, to the global crime syndicate SPECTRE, or Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) in the video above. Three Bond pictures later, the producers must have realized that a haunted secret needs a haunted theme song, and so commissioned a piece of the ghostly yet hugely popular, at once cool and uncool work of Radiohead. As soon as he made his debut as Bond in 2006’s Casino Royal e, an adaptation of Fleming’ first novel, Craig immediately earned the distinction of the most troubled Bond yet. Scheduled for release this fall, the 25th Bond film No Time to Die features a theme song by the teenage singer Billie Eilish, whose dark-pop style may neatly suit the return performance by Daniel Craig. But despite all the changes of the leading man and the shifts in audience expectations over the decades, one of the franchise’s tasks has remained constant: to exude this Bondian uncool cool, whose distinctive tone must be set with just the right theme song. Thanks to the long-running Bond film series’ efforts to gradually increase the character’s complexity, the Bond who first appears in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale may at first look simple, even cartoonish to readers of the 21st century. Though hardly a setter of youthful trends, he has always embodied masculine competence and unflappability of a relatively timeless and quintessentially British kind. Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR - code name 007 - is both cool and uncool.
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