• AllMyVinyl #28
• Band: Various, but marketed under “James Bond”
• Album Title: The Best Of Bond…James Bond
• Release Date: 28 Feb 2020
• Date purchased: 21 Aug 2021
• Location purchased: Amazon
• Color of vinyl: Black
• Number of discs: 3
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

I’ve been a James Bond for for a really long time.  The first Bond film I ever saw in theatres was Octopussy in the summer of 1983, and I’ve seen every single one on opening day since then.  I know the films well, know the music well.  It’s the music I wanted to touch on briefly here.

The entire run of James Bond themes cover a huge range of musical styles given the films have been going for 60 years and there’s 25 official (27 total) movies.   In fact this vareity has been point of discussion between my wife and I. I’ll get into a song like Adele or Sam Smith’s theme (or even something like Rita Coolidge’s), and my wife will ask why I’m listening to that.  The answer is the same – James Bond.  That thing opens to the door to some musical styles I’d normally never listen to.  In fact, of all the theme songs out there, there’s only one I consider unlistenable.  That’s Gladys Night’s “License to Kill” – even Madonna’s theme I like a little.

For an exceptionally long time I’ve had an iTunes playlist with all the theme songs on it, and an old friend of mine from my game industry days would tease me that I’m listening to my Bond playlist again.  Of the 25 most played songs from my entire iTunes library, about 1/3 of them are Bond theme songs.  It’s for this reason when I got back into vinyl in 2020, I thought about looking for a Bond collection.  At that time, there was nothing new, just older stuff, but in the summer of 2021, I was told about this – it’s the latest repackage of the Bond theme collection – this time tied to the release of the (as of this writing) most recent 007 film, “No Time to Die”.  When it was first announced there was a limited edition package with gold vinyl, but that was LONG sold out by the time I found it, so black vinyl it was for me.  It’s a triple disc set too.  Nothing fancy in the packaging, just large enough to hold three discs, with some basic 007 artwork design.  As I said, the package was nothing special, but I was after this for the tunes on vinyl.

It covers all the primary Bond theme songs from 1962’s Doctor No through 2021’s “No Time to Die”, with one lone exception. They also included the song “We Have  All the Time in the World” originally from the 1969 movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, but I presume that was included because it also featured in No Time to Die as well.

Now I’m not going to write about the individual songs here, because in 2022, I spent a bunch of time on the Bond themes elsewhere on my personal blog.  I went through all 27 of them – including the two unofficial ones (1967’s Casino Royale & 1983’s Never Say Never Again). It was painstaking, but I managed to rank them all from 27 to 1.  And it wasn’t just a list, I wrote about all of them in some degree.  I also included various alternate versions of some and rejected themes (like Alice Cooper’s version of “Man with the Golden Gun” and U2’s demo of Goldeneye – stuff like that).  So if you want to read more from me on the various Bond themes, definitely check out this link on my personal blog.  You’ll probably disagree with a few things I said, but there’s some things on that page that I’ve been told some people never knew about.

Additionally, I went on Youtube and created a playlist of all the theme songs on here with accompanying music videos – if there was one. You can see that on the “Complete Album On Youtube” link above.