• Bond Back in Action 2

• John Barry, Marvin Hamlisch & Bill Conti
• City of Prague Philharmonic
• Conducted by Nic Raine
• Silva Screen
• 2000

After their successful and extremely good Bond Back in Action, Silva are back with Bond and another selection of cues mainly from the Roger Moore years. Unfortunately, the quality of the films and the scores was never quite the same as the early Connery and Barry efforts, but this album side steps most of the weaknesses and highlights the better parts of the various scores.

I've never been terribly keen on Barry's The Man with the Golden Gun; it has a song I can barely recall (sung adequately by Lulu) and the film itself is often cited as one of the worst in the series. The selections here aren't bad, with Barry given the chance to introduce some ethnic instrumentals for the exotic Oriental locations. The challenge of inventing new variations on a formula no doubt helped by the musical leverage of the locations. Mr Southall (Movie Wave man) once described Marvin Hamlisch's The Spy Who Loved Me as having one of the best theme songs, but one of the worst scores he'd ever heard period. Evidently, Silva were reasonably prudent with their choices here and chose two tracks which come out reasonably well. Having said that, the producer's note in the booklet explains that Nic Raine was asked to adapt the material for the orchestra and while I've not heard the originals, the arrangement presumably makes Hamlisch's music sound better than it originally did.

Despite an Oscar nomination for the song (something Barry never received, rather surprisingly), the producers evidently didn't much care for Marvin Hamlisch and Barry was brought back for Moonraker. Barry's jazzy style turned more symphonic at this juncture and as a result the score features music written in broader strokes, best summarised with his chorus backed Flight into Space. In fact, it is one of the few times when his Bond style and his well known romantic style have overlapped, but the progression of Barry's style outside Bond had started to catch up and replace the contemporary 60's sound he originally conceived. According to the notes, Barry recommended Bill Conti when he was unavailable to pen For Your Eyes Only. While many people are fairly unexcited by Conti's disco score, many of the purely orchestral cues are actually rather good. The title song is particularly good and given a decent orchestral treatment here, although the playing is quite as focused as it might be.

Octopussy is blessed with one of John Barry's most memorable ballads. He evidently steered away from the striking Bond song sound he engineered after the success of Conti and Hamlisch's more subdued, but memorable efforts. All Time High receives a gentle orchestral performance to begin the suite, but moves into more typical surging Bond action and suspense during the latter stages. To date, A View to a Kill, co-written with and performed by Duran-Duran has been the most successful Bond song although I've always found it to be one of the least memorable. Not sure what I'm missing, but Barry's orchestral suggestions of the chorus melody work very well interwoven with the score itself and when played against Barry's interesting electric guitar counterpoint.

The Living Daylights is probably my favourite Bond score with Barry writing in a contemporary style for probably the first time in a couple of decades. His synth backing worked very well indeed with his usual orchestral style and the whole thing comes across as one of the best conceived and most satisfying Bond scores ever. It is certainly one of the most thematically rich with the A-Ha song (which I rather like, even though Barry wasn't happy with the collaboration) together with two songs with the Pretenders (with whom Barry got along very well) and a few other ideas and it fills out extremely well. Mention Goldeneye to any film music fan and they'll try changing the subject. Eric Serra's effort was not only pretty disappointing as a score per-se, but an even worse Bond score. The cue here is not actually by Serra as his tank chase cue was replaced with arrangements of the Bond theme by John Altman. While better than Serra's music, it's still a slightly insipid cue to what was an excitingly staged sequence.

While missing out efforts by George Martin (his none too exciting Live and Let Die and in an idiom deemed difficult to update successfully) and Michael Kamen (his solid, if nothing special License to Kill where cues were apparently too long to include) this compilation offers a decent selection of tracks from a period when Bond wasn't quite so successful. As I said, many of the scores weren't all that hot, but Silva manage to make all of them seem worth picking up, even if some (the non Barry ones in other words) aren't all that great in full length proportions. The playing is mainly solid, if not as good as the original album. The liner notes detailing the highs and lows of the films and scores make for an interesting read. A decent companion album that was probably never going to be as good as the original due to the material, but worth having for Bond buffs.

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