For some fantastic spy guitar, I’d recommend Goldfinger: The Big Sound of Billy Strange, his Guitar & Orchestra (though not a spy theme, his version of Riz Ortolani’s “More” on this album is among my favorite instrumentals ever) and Secret Agent File, which is a remastered version + additional tracks by another artist of his 60s work of the same title.

Strange, in addition to arranging and playing on the Sinatra single version of “You Only Live Twice,” also did his own version, for Secret Agent File. Give it a listen:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKfb1Q0qEus

Condolences for Billy’s family can be left on the message board where he graciously shared time with his fans, friends and family.

Man From UNCLE 1966 NBC Promo

I Spy NBC 1966 Poster

Get Smart 1966 NBC Poster

These posters were part of a lot sold in May of this year. The UNCLE poster is by an artist named Allison (from the signature), and went for $84. The I Spy poster is by Gustav Rehberger, and went for $179. The Get Smart is by Mad Magazine veteran Jack Davis and went for $120. Originally, these were sold by NBC for just a few bucks, apparently. The best source I’ve seen on the posters is at the I Spy forum, where Tatia writes: “The eleven promotional posters produced to be given to NBC’s major affiliates as decorations for parties celebrating their 1966 season premieres were Bonanza, Daniel Boone, Flipper, Get Smart, Hey Landlord, I Spy, The Monkees, Star Trek, T.H.E. Cat, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. NBC did offer the Bonanza, Get Smart and I Spy for sale for a very limited time afterwards.”

Check out Heritage Auctions yourself for a bevy of past collectibles.

Art by Eduardo Barreto

News broke today that veteran comic artist Eduardo Barreto has passed away, a disappointment to anyone who ever encountered his work on books like The Shadow Strikes, Batman: Scar of the Bat, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Danger, or in the funny pages when he was the artist on Judge Parker.

For fellow COBRA Christopher Mills, this is an especially personal loss, as Barreto was a collaborator on several comics projects, including a revival of Secret Agent X-9 that will now sadly never be. Mills has shared the sample art from the pitch, and even spy fiction fans who weren’t familiar with Barreto’s work will mourn his loss after taking a look at it.

Tonight, I was shopping and on one of the in-store monitors, there was a video from a performance at Albert Hall by a singer who my wife first encountered a number of years ago via MySpace of all places, and who has since taken the world by apparent storm. Her name is Adele, and like a number of chanteuses of the past few years, she sings soulfully, recalling the rich heritage of British voices like Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Cillia Black and others. The video I saw tonight looked and sounded like the closest thing to a Bond theme try-out that one can have without being in the same room as someone named Broccoli:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri7-vnrJD3k

At this point in her career, they’d have to beg her, as opposed to the other way ’round. And all of this because she posted music on MySpace!

In the meantime, amateur productions have already started to pop up on YouTube. Here are some of the better attempts:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5VwoOUUETI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkT_WPUVz6E

This one by the band The Amateurs actually features a Bondesque video. I think it was recorded previously, and it’s title/description has been renamed to cash in on Skyfall. In any case, it’s pretty good:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU5M8hC_TvE

I leave it to you, Mister 8 readers, who would you like to hear sing the awkwardly forced line containing the film title, ala, “My nose was runny / You thought it funny / I worried you would leave me all alone / I drank some Nytol / We watched the sky fall / When I woke up in the morning, you were gone / SKY….FALLLLLLL!”?

Our fellow COBRAS at Her Majesty’s Secret Servant have just released the latest issue of their quality web magazine! Here’s the description from a post describing the release:

We have some old friends returning and some new ones joining us for the first time. Our good pal Deborah Lipp checks in with two fascinating articles; one about Live and Let Die‘s monkeying around with tarot cards, the other about recurring themes of voyeurism and concealment in You Only Live Twice. Ron Feyereisen returns with a contrarian view of the ongoing Daniel Craig “reboot” tenure; suffice it to say that he’s not a satisfied customer. Speaking of reboots, regular contributor Derek Austin Johnson casts his gimlet eye on the latest 007 literary adventure, Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche (the James Bond watches man, Dell Deaton, offers a rebuttal). On the subject of the latest Bond novel, we’re rerunning Mark Henderson’s excellent interview (first published last April here on the blog,) with the author. We’re excited to welcome Stuart Basinger (that’s “Dr. Shatterhand” to you civilians) to the fold with his imaginary interview with former CIA director (and friend of Ian Fleming) Allan Dulles. James Bond is discussed. Ian Fleming Foundation member Colin Clark regales us with the story of the discovery and acquisition of Franz Sanchez’ escape plane — the Cessna we saw Timothy Dalton’s 007 lasso in Licence to Kill. And our stalwart senior editor Bill Koenig unearths the amazing story of what 1979′s Moonraker could have been like, if only Eon’s budget had matched the screenplay’s requirements. Bill’s story also covers script-to-screen changes in Diamonds Are Forever and Tomorrow Never Dies.

Read the latest issue of HMSS here!

Roy Budd

Holy Moses! Two posts in one week! Before we get started, let me congratulate Tanner of Double O Section on celebrating his fifth anniversary as a blogger! Double O Section continues to be a fantastic source of spy fiction news, reviews, and observation, and I’m sure it will be well into the future.

Today’s guitar tablature is from what I think might be the best realistic spy television show ever made, The Sandbaggers, composed by Roy Budd.

e|----0---0---0------|
B|------3---1---0-1--|
G|--2----------------|
D|-------------------|
A|-------------------|
E|-------------------|

[See the full tablature]

In a show that features little other incidental music, Budd’s theme stands out. Budd was a British jazz musician perhaps best known for his amazing soundtrack for the original Get Carter. His theme for Sandbaggers features a repeating rhythm pattern played on the cimbalom, the Hungarian instrument popularized as part of the spy sound by John Barry. Like the show itself, the theme does not satisfactorily resolve at the end.

Instead of going on about Budd and his work here, I’ll direct you to the excellent Sandbaggers fan site, Ops Room, where Paul Lagasse has a descriptive write-up of Budd and his work on the theme. In it, he asks Budd expert Doug Payne to describe the music, without Payne having seen the show. Payne writes:

The percussion symbolizes what I would consider a very militaristic cadence, matching the Cold War overtones in the show. A small string section carries the melody and, to my ears, suggests the adventure of the show. Budd sticks to the lower end of the scale, which suggests to me the slow tension of the protagonists’ effort(s) and ends it with a harp and a glissando that sort of symbolizes, at least to me, something suddenly ‘getting caught.’

As Legasse notes, the images the music evokes are a testament to Budd’s abilities as a composer.

As far as I know, the Sandbaggers theme was never officially released as a single. Much more on Roy Budd can be found at the website of Doug Payne.

Edward Woodward - This Man Alone

Why, hello there. Let’s try to have more than three posts this year, shall we?

e|--------------------|
B|--------------------|
G|--------------------|
D|--------------------|
A|-----6--5--3-5-3-5--|
E|--3-----------------|

[See full tablature]

I’ve been busy, as you may have guessed from my absence here. Since last we spoke, I’ve cleared all but the writing-the-dissertation hurdle of becoming Dr. 8, and have brought into this world, with the help of my lovely wife, a very handsome son.

I still find time to think about espionage fiction, though most of my energy has been spent in consuming, and little in deep contemplation or analysis. I’ve seen some dandy films this year for the first time–The Executioner, and The Deadly Affair–and I’ve watched some crackerjack television too. One of the shows I’ve started watching for the first time is Callan, currently being put out on DVD by Network in the UK, and Acorn in the US.

As I tend to do, I picked up a guitar and twiddled around until I’d figured out most of the theme. But the track fades out rather quickly, and I wanted to figure out how to play the rest of the song as well. My searches for full versions of the Callan theme were unsuccessful at first, because it took a few queries to discover that the Callan theme is actually a piece of De Wolfe library music written by Jack Trombey called “Girl in the Dark.”

De Wolfe is a service that provides licensed music in every imaginable genre for use…well, by anyone who needs music and can pay the fee. Their music has been heard in countless television shows, films and advertisements. Jack Trombey was the pseudonym of composer Jan Stoeckart, who is best known for composing the Simon Park Orchestra hit “Eye Level,” the theme song to the British detective show Van Der Valk, and for tracks contributed to the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The history of the song’s composition can be found in the documents of a landmark court case, brought by a music license company called Mood Music against De Wolfe, which claimed that “Girl in the Dark” was actually a song called “Sogno Nostalgico” written by Armando Sciascia in 1963. In a document declining an appeal to dismiss certain evidence by De Wolfe, we learn that, “‘Girl in the Dark’ had been composed by one Jan Stoeckart (known as J. Trombey) in the first half of 1960, was thereafter submitted by him to a television company as a possible theme for a new television series in tape form, and that lyrics for the work were composed in the Dutch language.”

According to a Nov. 15, 1975, article in Billboard Magazine, the court battle had raged for seven years before De Wolfe settled, giving royalties and rights to Mood Music, but admitting no wrongdoing. So perhaps I should hedge my bets and credit Trombey/Sciascia on this one. In any case, the track below comes from a 10″ record collection of Trombey’s De Wolfe work. I couldn’t find a version of “Sogno Nostagico.”

Callan himself, Edward Woodward, later recorded a version of the song with lyrics, called “This Man Alone,” on an album of the same title (which also featured covers of numerous songs reflecting loneliness, including a pretty good version of White Plains’ “Today I Killed A Man I Didn’t Know).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o48KToek-bk

LYRICS:

He’s alone, a man apart

Bitter hurt deep in his heart

Does he have a hard of stone,

This man?

This man alone

No one knows what’s in his soul

No one knows where lies his goal

Has he something to atone,

This man?

This man alone

What secret does he harbor?

What guilt? Or is it fear?

What makes him seem so frightened?

To let a man, a woman, near?

Can he dream? Can he still yearn?

Can the flame of love still burn?

Can it melt a heart of stone,

Can he no longer be

A man alone?

British author Len Deighton.

In a major coup for his blog and website The Deighton Dossier, Rob Mallows recently had lunch with the author himself! Deighton agreed to do some follow-up interview questions following a technical snafu, and Rob has shared his answers at the site.

This is a fantastic interview as well! Here’s a brief taste of what Rob has in store for you:

DD: Michael Caine’s role as Harry Palmer has become visually synonymous with the ‘unnamed spy’, such that it’s now very difficult to read the books without imagining his visage and especially the horn-rimmed glasses. What do you think Michael brought to the role that added to our understanding of your character from the first four books (his cockney accent for one thing, I imagine)? Did you know Michael before the role, and did he subsequently become a friend?

LD: I knew Michael before he made Ipcress File. Peter Evans, a mutual friend, introduced us and I found Michael an unassuming and entertaining friend. He was of course a tremendous asset; he developed the characterization and was largely responsible for the success of the film.

When Ipcress went into pre-production we conspired to persuade Harry Saltzman, its producer, to let Michael wear spectacles on the screen. Michael and I both wore glasses and so did Harry Palmer in my book. Harry Saltzman was opposed to this. One evening, when Harry and his delightful wife Jaquie entertained me and Michael to dinner in their Mayfair home, we brought it up again. Harry sighed. ‘No, no, no. What film star have you ever seen wearing glasses?’ he asked rhetorically. But wives are apt to answer rhetorical questions and Harry’s wife said: ‘Cary, darling. Cary Grant looks lovely in glasses.’ This was one of the very few times that I saw Harry at loss for words. ‘Very well,’ he said eventually. I looked at Michael. Michael looked down at his plate. We had won.