Research on China’s Counterterrorism: A Relatively Biased Approach

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

83 Between fi nishing You Only Live Twice in mid-1967 and starting On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in August 1969, Barry’s fame and respect within the show-business community had grown even greater. He had written a single-movement guitar concerto for Bryan Forbes’s heist fi lm Deadfall; scored Richard Lester’s ultra-hip Julie Christie drama Petulia; received the advertis-ing world’s highest honor, the Clio, for his two-minute Eastern Airlines com-mercial “Second Summer”; and won a third Academy Award for his stunning choral-and-orchestral score for the 12th-century English historical drama The Lion in Winter. He also began work on a musical of The Great Gatsby that bandleader Artie Shaw hoped to mount on Broadway, launched a company to begin producing fi lms of his own, and served as “musical supervisor” as well as composer on the acclaimed John Schlesinger fi lm Midnight Cowboy.

But his loyalty to the Bond producers, who had done so much to launch him on this path, was unwavering. And, in return, he was given a completely free hand with the music of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which would lead to radical choices about the sound of the score, the nature of the song and the surprising vocalist he would choose to sing it.

Tracy and Bond (Diana Rigg, George Lazenby) at their wedding in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

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“Even if things didn’t work out with Lazenby,” director Hunt said many years later, “I knew that come what may, John Barry would deliver the goods.

’Cause otherwise, if he didn’t, I told him I would kill him!” Barry agreed that the score was even more critical than usual because of the new leading man—

“to make the audience forget that they don’t have Sean,” as he later said.

“What I did was to overemphasize everything that I’d done in the fi rst few movies, just go over the top to try and make the soundtrack strong. To do Bond-ian beyond BondBond-ian.”

While the fi lm was in production in early 1969, Lazenby suggested to the producers that they consider the hot new jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat &

Tears for a song. Apparently no one took him seriously.

Also not taken seriously was the idea of a song called “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” “A title song should have the title of the fi lm,” said Hunt,

“that’s the benefi t of it. But you can hardly have an ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ song; it would have to be some sort of march, and I wasn’t really keen on that idea.” Barry agreed that it wouldn’t work “unless we’re going to do it like Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Lyricist Leslie Bricusse claimed, years later, to have written “a good lyric called ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ and it really was the title of the song, it wasn’t just a line like ‘the spy who loved me’ [in “Nobody Does It Better”];

I wrote a song based on the idea of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. One of the things that appeals to me in bizarre titles is making them work.” (In later years, Barry professed to be unaware of it.)

So Barry got the go-ahead to write an instrumental piece over the main-title sequence for the fi rst time in a Bond fi lm since Dr. No, and to write a song, based on a different melody, for use elsewhere in the picture. For his main theme, Barry followed Hunt’s notion of a march (this was, after all, for

“Her Majesty’s Secret Service”) but the most contemporary march imagin-able, with a Moog synthesizer, electric bass and tambourine providing a fast-moving rhythmic fi gure beneath a heroic, fanfare-like melody for brass (which, on its second verse, added plunger mutes for that classic Bond sound).

Barry’s choice of Moog synthesizer was an especially daring one. The mod-ular synthesizer—developed by New York electronic-music pioneer Robert A.

Moog—used oscillators, keyboards, fi lters and modulators to generate unusual musical sounds. In 1967 and 1968 it became popular with rock musicians (including George Harrison and the Doors), but the enormous commercial success of the album Switched-on Bach made it famous. Switched-on Bach, a collection of classical pieces performed entirely on the Moog, became the biggest-selling classical record of its time and even reached, in April 1969, the top 10 of Billboard’s pop charts.

Barry had experimented with the Moog on two earlier fi lms, both notewor-thy: for a deep bass sound in the main title of The Lion in Winter (1968) and as musical spice for a light moment in Midnight Cowboy (early 1969). In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, however, Moog sounds are incorporated through-out the score. The fi lm’s release in December 1969 marked the fi rst time any

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

85 major studio fi lm had featured the synthesizer so prominently, and at the same time fully integrated within the traditional orchestra. It wasn’t just trendy; it was a groundbreaking application of electronic music that would presage de-cades of synthesizer use by fi lm composers everywhere.

Recording engineer and record producer Phil Ramone had collaborated with Barry on Midnight Cowboy earlier in the year; together they assembled the landmark pop-rock soundtrack, and Ramone engineered the recording of Barry’s score (which would win a Grammy for Best Instrumental Theme) in New York.

“John gave me my fi rst credit as a producer,” Ramone noted, referring to the fi lm scores he produced for Barry, including On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser-vice, Monte Walsh, Walkabout and The Last Valley. In the case of the Bond fi lm, Barry alerted Ramone that he intended to use the Moog extensively—

and that he wanted the synths to play “live” with the orchestra, not overdub later, which is how most Moog sounds were handled at the time.

Ramone, sensing that the synthesizer could potentially transform the music business, had already trained with Robert Moog and others who understood the technical complexities of the machine. But synthesizers in that era were not polyphonic—they could play only one tone at a time. When Barry told him of his ideas for the Bond fi lm, Ramone recalled: “I called Robert and said,

‘This is what I’ve got to do. How do I do it all live?’ Most people overdubbed everything. Robert gave me the clue: he said to get three keyboards and three sets of oscillators, which is how you make the sounds. It was hard to keep them in tune. You needed three keyboards so that you could actually have the full range of an 88-note keyboard.”

Barry brought Ramone to London and gave him three weeks—before re-cording was to begin—to experiment with the Moog, discover its sonic pos-sibilities, and fi gure out how to program them so that they could be played live with the orchestra. “I literally programmed all of the things that I felt would work, from the score as he was writing. I wrote down everything that I was trying, every sound that was different or unusual. John was as curious as I was.”

When recording began in late September 1969 at CTS, John Richards again served as mixing engineer but Ramone was in charge of the synthesiz-ers. “We had double or triple keyboards, doubling each set of sounds,” Ra-mone said. “I could switch keyboards while a cue was going on, and inside the cue might be two different sounds. It was crude, but you could switch. The keyboard players played right along with the orchestra.”

Editor John Glen recalled being at the sessions: “John [Barry] was always keen to introduce new sounds in the music. He came up with this Moog syn-thesizer, which had this resonant bass that made the whole room tremble. It was quite unique at the time, very much a new toy. Later on it became gener-ally used, but old John was the pioneer.”

Added Ramone: “Bond fi lms always sounded incredible in the theater. I think that was due to John’s beautiful spread in writing, plus the engineers he

Trade advertisement promoting the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service song and score for Oscar consideration in December 1969 (courtesy of The Film Music Society)

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

87 had over there. He loved the orchestra to be large and slow underneath a high-speed chase. And, so typical of John, those soaring melodies.”

There was plenty of action requiring music, particularly during the ski chase sequences fi lmed in Switzerland, and the main theme would serve those scenes well. But the love story, too, would require a theme, and that, Barry decided, would be the place for a song. It would be based on a key line that is spoken by Bond three times in Fleming’s book—in fact, it’s the last line he says in the aftermath of his wife’s murder: “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

In Maibaum’s fi lm script, it’s altered slightly to read, “We have all the time in the world.” It would become one of the most memorable and important songs in the history of the Bond franchise.

Hal David was in London in August and September 1969 as the early-October West End opening of his stage musical Promises, Promises neared.

Barry and David met and, David later recalled, “became great friends imme-diately. We did a lot of pub-hopping, which was our wont in those days. I think I knew every pub on a main street or a mews in the middle of London.”

David signed on to write the words for two songs in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: “We Have All the Time in the World” and a Christmas song that would be needed as source music. As usual with the composer, in the case of the love song, the tune came fi rst. The melody was classic Barry: something wistful, something hopeful, a touch of melancholy—just right for two dam-aged souls fi nding each other, seeking a promising future but aware of the wreckage of their past lives. It was a love song for adults who are past starry-eyed notions of romance (written by a composer who was about to embark on his third marriage).

David took his initial cue from Fleming and expanded from there: “time enough for life to unfold / all the precious things love has in store . . . every step of the way will fi nd us / with the cares of the world far behind us. . . .”

S C O R E H I G H L I G H T S

From the start of the gun-barrel sequence of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, moviegoers were re-minded that this was James Bond, and also told at the same time—via the sounds of the Moog synthe-sizer replacing the old guitar on the “James Bond Theme”—that this was very much today’s James Bond. This is echoed almost immediately (just over a minute into the fi lm) by the use of the Bond theme, with Moog, as Tracy speeds past Bond in a hurry to get to the beach. This music, along with the action music to follow, is called “This Never Happened to the Other Feller” on the LP.

Underscoring Maurice Binder’s main-title visuals (almost 7 minutes into the fi lm) is Barry’s title theme.

Befi tting Fleming’s phrase “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” he wrote a march—but a very modern one,

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John Barry and vocalist Louis Armstrong at the October 1969 recording session for “We Have All the Time in the World” (photo by Jack Bradley, courtesy of The Film Music Society)

with Moog chords, electric bass and tambourine beating out a contemporary rhythm while the brass offers a fanfare that will serve as the key music for the later action sequences. Binder’s titles are clever, starting with an hourglass (representing the pas-sage of time) that becomes a coat of arms (relating to the plot device of Bond impersonating a gene-alogist) containing the Union Jack, a crown and the inevitable silhouettes of naked girls. The clock arms swing around and the “sands” of the hourglass de-pict scenes from the fi ve previous Bond fi lms. Sur-prisingly, however, this theme will not reappear for almost an hour and a half.

“We Have All the Time in the World” is really the main theme of the fi lm. Most often played for Tracy, sometimes for Bond, it is fi rst heard (17 minutes in) on fl ute, then strings, as Tracy appears in Bond’s

hotel room; then (20 minutes in) in a lighthearted martial form as he’s abducted by the men of Tracy’s father Draco, head of one of Europe’s biggest crimi-nal syndicates. “We Have . . .” returns in a beautiful, all-strings arrangement (23 minutes) as Draco ex-plains Tracy’s troubled past and then, in even slower form (28 minutes) as Bond resigns from the service.

(Then, as he packs up his desk, themes from Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball briefl y play;

as the janitor outside Draco’s offi ce was whistling the Goldfi nger theme a few minutes earlier, that’s music from four of the fi ve previous Bonds heard in the sixth.)

Louis Armstrong sings “We Have All the Time in the World” as Bond and Tracy embrace (35 minutes in) and a two-minute montage of their love affair (riding horseback, walking through statued gardens,

(SCORE HIGHLIGHTS, CONT.)

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

89 And in a stroke of genius, Barry thought of Louis Armstrong as a possible vocalist. He had always been fond of “September Song,” the Kurt Weill–

Maxwell Anderson tune from Knickerbocker Holiday that actor Walter Huston had turned into an unlikely hit in 1939, “where, as an older character, he sang about his life in a kind of refl ective vein. I always thought that very poignant.

I started thinking, who had the kind of personality that could carry that off?

What about Louis Armstrong?” The New Orleans jazzman had performed at Barry’s father’s theater in York back in the mid-1930s, and Barry still had photographs of the occasion. Both Broccoli and Hunt agreed, despite the fact that the choice was purely an artistic one and decidedly uncommercial.

Barry recorded more than 80 minutes of music over fi ve days, spread out from September 23 to October 18, 1969, at CTS in Bayswater. Ultimately about 75 minutes would be used in the fi nal version of the fi lm.

In the meantime, Louis Armstrong agreed to record “We Have All the Time in the World.” Armstrong, then 69, had been in ill health for much of the previous year, in and out of hospitals and unable to perform. But he liked the demo he had heard and, on Thursday, October 23, appeared at New York’s legendary A&R Studios at 799 Seventh Avenue, where Barry would conduct an American orchestra for the fi rst time in music for a James Bond fi lm.

“Louis was a guy that I idolized,” Ramone said. “He was not in great shape by then. He certainly knew the song, which I wasn’t expecting; I expected him to ad lib a lot. But that gentility was what I noticed immediately—the charm, the warmth, and the ‘hello, guys,’ talking to the band.”

Barry conducted, Ramone engineered and Hal David was present. “He was so frail,” David recalled, “and I thought, my goodness, can he do it? But I remember the thrill I felt the moment that fi rst line came out. It was so won-derful. He was so human, and so humble. He did two or three takes and that

shopping, running on the beach) plays out. Soon Bond is using high-tech methods to crack a safe in Switzerland (38 minutes), and Barry scores the next four minutes with a slowly building, Moog-accented, basses-and-timpani piece (“Gumbold’s Safe” on the expanded 2003 CD) that, when strings and brass are fi nally added, ratchets up the tension to an al-most unbearable degree.

Barry plays the gorgeous scenery for the fi rst time (50 minutes in) as Bond travels via helicopter across the Alps (“Journey to Blofeld’s Hideaway,” truncated on the LP but complete on the expanded CD). And he adds a new voice when Bond encounters the bevy of women (57 minutes) at the “allergy research”

clinic run by Blofeld: sexy saxophone and fl utes. The lighter, even comic, tone returns for each of Bond’s romantic adventures, almost like a siren call.

His tryst with Ruby (1 hour, 8 minutes) is accom-panied by a new theme, a lyrical interlude for fl ute and strings that Barry later turned into an instru-mental theme called “Who Will Buy My Yesterdays”

and included on his 1970 Columbia album, Ready When You Are, J.B., interestingly without any men-tion of its origins in the Bond fi lm. The Bond-Ruby romance is interrupted by Blofeld’s hypnosis treat-ment (1 hour, 10 minutes), which is dominated by the pings and bongs of the Moog synthesizer, heard again (1 hour, 26 minutes) as the girls undergo their fi nal hypnosis.

Barry’s title tune returns for the fi rst time since the opening credits (1 hour, 33 minutes) for Bond’s nighttime escape from Piz Gloria, skiing down the mountain and immediately pursued by Blofeld’s min-ions. “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” becomes

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was it. He asked us if it was all right!” Said the composer, reminiscing in 1978: “Louis Armstrong was the sweetest man alive, but having been laid up for over a year, he had no energy left. And still he summoned the energy to do our song. At the end of the recording session, he came up to me and said,

‘Thank you for this job.’ He was such a marvelous man. He died soon after that.”

In fact, he died about a year and half later, in July 1971. Armstrong’s bi-ographer later wrote that “the extra rawness and fragility of his health made him connect even deeper with the song’s emotions. Armstrong was truly in his September years, just thankful to be alive, and the joy and love in his voice is contagious throughout the performance.” Armstrong did not play his trumpet—

that’s a studio musician’s fl ugelhorn on the track—although he did play on

“Pretty Little Missy,” the B-side tune that was recorded that same afternoon at A&R.

David’s other contribution to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the song

“Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” Much of the fi lm takes place in snowy Switzerland in December, so a Christmas song seemed natural for “source music” that would be heard emanating from the speakers at the train station and elsewhere in the town below Blofeld’s Piz Gloria hideaway.

According to David, Barry departed from his usual practice and set the lyricist’s holiday poem about Christmas trees, Santa’s travels and Christmas cards to music. “I think it’s the only time, with John, that I wrote the lyric fi rst,” he said. Barry imagined it sung by a favorite past collaborator, Danish

According to David, Barry departed from his usual practice and set the lyricist’s holiday poem about Christmas trees, Santa’s travels and Christmas cards to music. “I think it’s the only time, with John, that I wrote the lyric fi rst,” he said. Barry imagined it sung by a favorite past collaborator, Danish