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in a more-or-less traditional movie songwriting form: music that related to the fi lm and lyrics that could be easily understood and were (for the most part) specifi c to the story. As a result of the cultural shifts of the previous 20 years, all that would change with A View to a Kill.

Duran Duran was one of the hottest bands of the early 1980s: fi ve hand- some, twentysomething Englishmen whose looks made them as famous as the catchy, dance-oriented synth-pop they were playing. In just three years they had had 12 top-40 hits in England, notably “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” “Is There Something I Should Know” and “The Refl ex”; in the United States, eight of their singles had hit the top 20 and their videos were among the most popular on MTV.

“I had met Cubby Broccoli at a party in London,” Duran Duran bassist John Taylor recalled in 2005. He brashly asked when Bond might have “a decent theme song again.” A lunch meeting with Barry followed (“John Taylor knew everything imaginable about every Bond movie,” the composer said), and the group was offered the opportunity to record the next Bond song. “I went back to the studio where we were recording ‘Wild Boys,’” Taylor said in 1985. “I said, ‘Hey guys, we’re doing the James Bond theme.’ Boom, that was it. Then we just had to write it.”

The title was to have been From a View to a Kill, after Fleming’s 1959 short story, but it was shortened to A View to a Kill before shooting began in August 1984. And even though the members of Duran Duran weren’t thrilled about the title, they were excited about writing a Bond theme. By February, word was out that they were working on the song; Eon formally announced their signing on March 15.

Who wrote what has long been in dispute. Vocalist Simon Le Bon, in 1985, suggested that it began with keyboardist Nick Rhodes at the piano: “We were working for about a week before we really came up with the basic theme for the song. . . . We just happened across that, Nick and I did. We were at the piano, he was playing chords, and I just sang ‘meeting you with a view to a kill,’ and suddenly, ah, yes!” Guitarist Andy Taylor later attributed the begin- nings to John Taylor, and then Le Bon working with Barry on that opening line: “[Drummer] Roger Taylor and I then developed a hybrid drum/electro sound that sounded great, and Simon added the chorus.”

Le Bon’s version: “[Barry] didn’t really come with any of the basic musical ideas. He heard what we had done and knocked it into shape. And that’s why it happened so quickly, because he was able to separate the good ideas from the bad ones. He has a great way of working brilliant chord arrangements. He was working with us as virtually a sixth member of the group, not really get- ting on our backs at all.”

Barry later said he spent two weeks with the band in rehearsal rooms as- sembling the song piece by piece. “It was a totally alien way of working from the way I’d worked all my life,” Barry said. “But I think we came up with a very strong song.” Complicating matters was the fact that the stresses within the group were taking their toll. “It was a hard record to make,” Rhodes said

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in 1986. “There was a lot of tension in the studio.” Twenty years later, Rhodes added some perspective: “You’ve got fi ve people in a band who pretty much thought they were James Bond. We weren’t actually together in the studio that much, and there was a rift developing. I imagine it was quite diffi cult for John Barry. There were arguments about which bit was better than another bit, and we weren’t really talking a lot at that time. We split into factions. Despite all the niggling little things going on personally between us, when we played ‘A View to a Kill’ together as a song for the fi rst time, we knew that we’d nailed something again,” Rhodes added. “And then we’d sort of unplug and go back to being miserable to each other.”

Production was far more complicated than on any previous Bond song. The band recorded at Maison Rouge Studios in West London, with dance-music producer Bernard Edwards at the helm; Jason Corsaro then mixed it at New York’s Power Station, and Barry, back in London, added orchestra on top of the band’s track.

The lyrics made little sense, but various phrases seemed to hint at the world of espionage: “face to face in secret places . . . that fatal kiss is all we need . . . between the shades, assassination standing still. . . .”

That Duran Duran would also make a music video was never in question. On completion of the song, they approached former 10cc rockers Kevin God- ley and Lol Creme, who shot the group’s racy “Girls on Film” video as well as one for the Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” “We thought it would be fun to work on a piece for a Bond fi lm,” Creme said in 1985. “The trick was to get across the ideas for the song and do a promo for the movie at the same time. We saw the fi lm early and decided the Eiffel Tower chase would be a good focus for the video.” Their big hurdle: “We didn’t like the song at fi rst. It seemed silly.”

Noted John Taylor, at the London premiere: “People associate us with very heavy conceptual videos, so it seemed nice to do a spoof this time around. We’re kind of playing secret agents.”

As with the much simpler video for “All Time High,” the “View to a Kill” video (shot in early April) incorporated extensive clips from the fi lm itself (and even opened with the traditional gun-barrel logo) while casting the Duran Duran boys as spies stationed strategically around and atop the Paris land- mark. This was a far more lavish affair, incorporating special video effects (airborne video cameras, presumably shooting those “views to a kill”) and members of the band variously taking photographs, shooting people, or blow- ing things up. At the end, a pretty fan approaches the beret-wearing Le Bon, who turns to the camera and identifi es himself as “Bon . . . Simon Le Bon.”

Barry’s collaboration with Duran Duran on the title song led to the composer being able to incorporate it into several moments in his dramatic underscore. He worked through March 1985 and began recording on April 1. And al- though he personally orchestrated all of the early Bond fi lms himself, the pressure of shorter time schedules on American fi lms in the late 1970s had

Duran Duran on location at the Eiffel Tower; advertising fl yer that appeared in British cinemas during the summer of 1985 (courtesy Cinema Retro magazine)

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caused him to begin using orchestrators to assist in the time-consuming job of writing down literally every note played by every section in the orchestra.

Nic Raine orchestrated both A View to a Kill and The Living Daylights for Barry. “He was in a little mews house, not far from Hyde Park Corner,” Raine recalled. “He’d hand me some sketches and say, ‘Just make it loud, there’s a lot of shooting going on.’ He took it for granted that I’d do what I had to do. He didn’t need to talk to me in any great detail about it.”

Barry’s sketches were suffi ciently detailed, Raine said, that “there was nothing creatively for me to do. [He would write] two lines for woodwinds— seldom fi lled unless there was an alto fl ute solo or something—two for brass, two for strings and one for percussion. Essentially, it was all there apart from fi lling out the woodwinds, and maybe adding octaves or extra harmonies.”

The composing and orchestrating took about four weeks, he recalled; the orchestra totaled about 70 players and they recorded at The Music Centre in Wembley, although with a new engineer, Dick Lewzey, because veteran Bond music mixer John Richards had moved to America. Unlike most composers, Raine said, “John wrote in fi lm order, and he always recorded in fi lm order. He thought it made sense, for all those attending the sessions from the pro- duction side, so they could feel the score grow and develop.”

In each three-hour recording session, Barry would strive to record seven or eight minutes of music; with two sessions a day, an entire score was usually recorded in four or fi ve days, Raine said (for A View to a Kill, April 1–4). “John was always very leisurely about recording. He would always come back [into the mixing booth, where Raine, Lewzey, and often Broccoli and director John Glen were listening] for playbacks. He’d listen to every take that was worth listening to, once with just orchestra and then once with dialogue. He was meticulous from that point of view.”

Every day’s work could be exhausting, however. Veteran ethnic-instrument player John Leach stayed late one evening to record the koto music for the

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

After the practical necessity of frequent references to the “James Bond Theme” in Octopussy (nine, according to the offi cial studio cue sheet)—because of the competition of a Sean Connery Bond movie in the marketplace at nearly the same time—it’s in- teresting to note that, apart from the standard gun- barrel opening, the “Bond Theme” appears only once in the score for A View to a Kill.

Barry had plenty of musical material, beginning with the theme, which recurs frequently, most often in a lyrical fashion for love scenes; he contributes a majestic new theme for Zorin’s grand plan, and a brass-and-percussion motif (with the surprising ad- dition of wailing electric guitar) for the many action scenes.

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hot-tub scenes between Bond and Russian agent Pola Ivanova. “John was in a soundproofed room, and we told him to just start playing,” Raine recalled. Leach began to improvise on the Japanese instrument. “We were knackered and dazed from the day’s recording. Effectively, we just fell asleep while he was playing. And after about 20 minutes this little voice came over the intercom: ‘Have you got enough now?’” (The fi lm needed only about a minute and a half.)

The use of “Japanese music” in that scene is one of a handful of instances actually specifi ed in the script. A View to a Kill deals with the mad industrial-

John Barry working on the score for A View to a Kill in 1985 (courtesy of The Film Music Society)

After the traditional “Bond Theme,” accompany- ing the gun-barrel logo, Bond’s discovery of a body in the Siberian ice and his ambush by Soviet troops (called “Snow Job” on the LP) introduces Barry’s action theme, which many observers have com- pared to the ski-action music in On Her Majesty’s

Secret Service, although there is something appro-

priately lighter about the tone of this one, perhaps befi tting Roger Moore’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the role. The jokey addition of “California Girls” to a supposedly snow-surfi ng Bond is a disastrous choice, interrupting and destroying the suspense of the scene. The British submarine scene, with its breathy-voiced blonde pilot (5 minutes into the fi lm), offers the fi rst use of “View” as a love theme, com- plete with sexy saxophone.

The Duran Duran song (6 minutes) is accompa- nied by Maurice Binder’s amusing black-light titles (including a literal “dance into the fi re,” as Binder’s naked girls gyrate amid fl ames). Barry’s brief tran- sition to Paris (15 minutes) bears a decided resem- blance to the theme from his then-recent score for

Until September, a love story set in the City of

Lights. May Day’s escape, her shocking leap off the Eiffel Tower and Bond’s taxicab pursuit (18 minutes, “May Day Jumps” on the LP) marks the sole use of the “Bond Theme” within the score. The wedding music ensemble on the boat sailing along the Seine (20 minutes) plays a Dixieland version of “View,” one of Barry’s more amusing musical asides.

Stacey’s arrival at Zorin’s chateau (28 minutes) is greeted with a curious alto saxophone solo; the

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ist Zorin (Christopher Walken), who plots to corner the microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley; his lieutenant is a skydiving, kickboxing fi end named May Day (Grace Jones) and he is, briefl y, assisted by a geologist named Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts). The script specifi es that the strolling musi- cians at Zorin’s lavish chateau reception “wear powdered wigs and 17th- century livery” while they play classical music (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, in a licensed performance by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert). And Pola’s love of Tchaikovsky, as mentioned in the script, is illustrated with excerpts fro m music-library performances of both Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake.

Unmentioned in the script, and thus a choice that must have been made during post-production, was the widely criticized use of the Beach Boys’ 1965 surf-music hit “California Girls” (actually a cover version by Gidea Park) while Bond is escaping Soviet killers in Siberia on skis during the pre-title sequence. Barry didn’t like it: “Where you had a good action sequence it was like throwing a lame joke into the middle of something that was really work- ing. Those things, I never agree with.”

For the fi rst time, a Bond movie premiered outside the U.K. As a way of thanking the city of San Francisco for its cooperation (a third of the fi lm was shot there, its climax taking place over the Golden Gate Bridge), A View to a

Kill received a splashy, star-studded premiere on May 22, 1985. But it was

the appearance of Duran Duran’s John Taylor and Andy Taylor that drew the biggest roar from the crowd, leaving the San Francisco Chronicle to headline its coverage “Rockers Outdraw 007.”

The same thing happened in London on June 12. “Screaming pop fans brought chaos to the royal premiere,” reported the Daily Mail. “A crowd of around 4,000, mostly teenage girls, packed the streets in and around London’s Leicester Square hoping for a glimpse of Duran Duran. The group arrived in

party features strolling musicians playing Vivaldi (29 minutes). Bond introduces himself to Stacey (34 minutes, “Bond Meets Stacey” on the LP) to the strains of “View,” a warm arrangement with a beau- tiful fl ute solo by Susan Milan, one of England’s fi n- est classical fl utists. Bond and Tibbett investigate Zorin’s hidden horse-doping lab (37 minutes, “Peg- asus’ Stable” on the LP) to a suspenseful fl ute-and- strings passage. “View” reappears as a love theme for Bond and May Day (43 minutes) but in a decid- edly different form, with a tenor sax and then a trumpet signifying a more aggressive bed partner.

Bond and Zorin go riding while Tibbett is killed in the car wash, to a suspense cue dominated by timpani, strings and muted brass (47 minutes, “Tib- bett Gets Washed Out”). There is no score for the steeplechase scene until the very end, when Bond

discovers Tibbett dead. When May Day pushes their Rolls-Royce into a lake (53 minutes, “Bond Escapes Roller” on the LP), Barry uses repeating fl utes with muted brass for Bond’s survival underwater.

Barry introduces his Silicon Valley fanfare when Zorin reveals his plan (56 minutes) and then fl ies his blimp over the Golden Gate Bridge (58 minutes). Bond investigates Zorin’s oil pumping station (1 hour, 2 minutes, “Bond Underwater” on the LP) to some of the score’s most dramatic music yet. Bond meets old Soviet lover Pola Ivanova and they retreat to- gether, winding up in a hot tub (1 hour, 7 minutes) to John Leach’s improvised koto music.

Barry employs his action theme, incorporating an interesting variation on the Bond theme, for Bond’s battle with Zorin’s thugs at Stacey’s house (1 hour, 15 minutes), and then he returns to a soft string

James Bond pursuing May Day on the Eiffel Tower

version of “View” for Bond and Stacey’s shared bottle of wine, again with an exquisite Susan Milan fl ute solo (1 hour, 19 minutes, “Wine with Stacey” on the LP).

A surprising 10 minutes goes by with no under- score; the murder of Stacey’s boss Howe and Bond and Stacey’s travails in the burning elevator shaft go without music. Only when they appear on the roof of San Francisco City Hall does music resume, and it’s a heroic version of “View to a Kill” for horns and percussion (1 hour, 32 minutes). Much of the wild fi re-truck chase is underscored with Barry’s action theme (1 hour, 35 minutes, “He’s Dangerous” on the LP).

Nearly a third of the 58 total minutes of original score is contained in the mine and climactic blimp

scenes. Stacey and Bond deduce Zorin’s plan to strings and fl ute (1 hour, 44 minutes, “Destroy Sili- con Valley” on the LP). And although the mine- fl ooding sequence is mostly without music, the in- fl ation and launch of Zorin’s airship—intercut with Bond and May Day swimming through the mine— gets a dramatic, powerful orchestral musical treat- ment (1 hour, 53 minutes, “Airship to Silicon Valley” on the LP). A more suspenseful treatment of the same theme is used for Bond’s attempt to stop the earthquake-inducing bomb and May Day’s heroic sacrifi ce (1 hour, 56 minutes, “May Day Bombs Out” on the LP).

Barry returns to a brass-and-strings “View” for 007 hanging onto a rope below the Zorin blimp (2  hours, 1 minute), but the battle between Bond

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and Zorin atop the Golden Gate Bridge while Stacey hangs on for dear life (2 hours, 3 minutes, “Golden Gate Fight”) gets the most thrilling treatment of the action theme in the entire score (although in the fi lm the cue is slightly truncated). “View” returns in its

love-theme guise (2 hours, 7 minutes) for Q’s snoop- ing on Bond and Stacey, just before the end credits and a reprise of the Duran Duran song (2 hours, 8 minutes).

limousines to a crescendo of screams. . . .” Photographs of the rockers greet- ing Princess Diana appeared in the next day’s papers (she was said to have called Duran Duran her favorite band).

The title song received its share of brickbats from the critics: “Low marks for Duran Duran’s limp-disco title tune,” sniffed the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not really a song at all, it’s the soundtrack for a rock video,” contended the Los

Angeles Herald-Examiner. “Opening credit sequence in MTV style is down-

right bizarre, and title song by Duran Duran will certainly not go down as one of the classic Bond tunes,” insisted Variety. Reviewing the soundtrack album,

Billboard offered a rare positive note: “Barry offers dependably stylish cues,

but it’s Duran Duran’s main title song, a well-crafted if typical techno-pop piece, that will likely offer the main lure.”

Duran Duran’s music video helped to propel the song to the top of the charts, the fi rst time ever for a Bond theme. It landed on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart on May 18, and on July 13 it reached number 1—the very day Duran Duran performed the song as part of the Live Aid fundraising concerts