While not a movie about secret agents, 1959’s Beat Girlis an important film in the history of the spy genre because of its composer, John Barry. Barry was then the leader of the John Barry Seven, a group put together in reaction to the growing popularity of early rock n’ roll. As Barry told Royal S. Brown in the latter’s Overtones and Undertones:
…So I formed what became The John Barry Seven, which in its final form had an alto sax, two guitars, bass guitar, piano, drums, and me on trumpet. We were all either classically or jazz trained, but we were desperate to start a professional life in music, and so we started off by just mimicking people like Bill Haley. We bought ourselves three or four amplifiers, and I think I bought the first bass guitar in England, a Hoffman, made in Germany. And so we were a seven-piece group that made more noise than anybody! (p. 325)
Barry hooked up with a young singer named Adam Faith, who scored a role in Beat Girl, the story of a young woman hanging out in dance halls and strip clubs, using her stepmother’s sordid past to break up her father’s marriage. Barry’s connections with Faith led him to being hired as the film’s composer. Again, from the interview with Brown:
The producer asked me whether I would consider writing the music, not knowing that that’s exactly what I wanted to do! It was all twangy guitars and saxes, a cross between rock-and-roll and jazz. I used my group and augmented it to about sixteen, seventeen musicians. But there were two or three moments in the movie where I could show off that I probably had an understanding of dramatic music. (p. 326)
Barry’s theme from Beat Girl was later played during the infamous lawsuit against the Sunday Times by Monty Norman, who claimed authorship of the James Bond Theme. Regardless of the outcome of that lawsuit, one can’t deny the influence that Barry had on the James Bond franchise, and the genre of spy music in general. One can hear the future of secret agent themes in this 1958 composition.
Here are the opening credits to Beat Girl, featuring Barry’s theme. Note a very young Oliver Reed flopping around in his plaid shirt and nodding his scary noggin to the rhythm:
Within the spy music canon, there are few festive Christmas carols. Singing about the ho-ho-ho-iest of holidays doesn’t usually fit in with a job that involves all sorts of things that put you on the naughty list.
A D A
e|--------------------------|
B|-----5----5--/7-5---------|
G|--/6---6------------4-/6--|
D|--------------0---7-------|
A|---0-------------------0--|
E|--------------------------|
But in the spirit of the season, and thanks to Petter Bengtsson, we’re pleased to bring you the chords to the Barry/David composition, “Do You Know How Christmas Trees are Grown?” that was featured during the ice skating scene where Tracy saves Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The song was sung by Danish singer Nina, aka Nina Van Pallandt, and a chorus of children.
See the song in action in the following YouTube video, which pairs the song with the trailer for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. To play along with the video, skip to the bottom of the tab where we’ve transposed Otis’ transcription to the original key.
There are probably hundreds of tablature versions of the James Bond theme on the internet. So why bother putting up a new one? There are two reasons:
Because many, if not most, of the tabs aren’t even close to sounding like the Bond theme, or only feature little bits, or get wrong the EmM79 (thanks to Spy-Fi for the correct name! see comments below) chord at the end. This one at least sounds mostly right.
And because, though it’s overplayed, overexposed, and perhaps overhyped, it was the original. Through all the imitators, the James Bond Theme remains one of the best, most memorable pieces of film music ever.
For detailed information on the lawsuit over who actually created the song, check out the John Barry Resource.
I’ve been searching high and low, and it seems that while information about the film scores of John Barry, who also wrote the music for some series about a spy named James something or other, is abundant, much of the history of his work for television, including today’s spotlighted theme, has been lost to the ages.
Am Am9 Em Em9
e|---5----7----7----7---|
B|---5----5----8----7---|
G|---5----5----9----9---|
D|---7----7----9----9---|
A|---7----7----7----7---|
E|---5----5-------------|
The Persuaders wasn’t really a spy show. It’s more of a buddy adventurers show, starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis as a pair of playboys who help people in trouble. Still, the Barry connection, plus the supreme awesomeness that is this theme made it irresistible for me (with the help of Simon Rigot) to tab out. The theme was featured in what has to be one of the greatest opening sequences of all time:
One of the few bits I could find on the theme comes from this unsourced section of Barry’s Wikipedia entry:
One of Barry’s best known compositions is the theme for the 1971 TV series The Persuaders!, also known as “The Unlucky Heroes”, in which Tony Curtis and Roger Moore were paired as rich playboys solving crimes. The score for the series was composed by Ken Thorne.The theme went on to be a hit single in some European Countries and has been re-released on collections of 1970s disco hits. The instrumental recording features Moog synthesisers.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the Persuaders a disco theme. It’s got more in common with Roy Budd’s later theme for The Sandbaggers, and Barry’s own theme for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, than anything Gloria Gaynor ever did. Still, the track was definitely a product of its time, and was marketed as a single through this strange performance by Pan’s People on Top of the Pops:
Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.
The Ipcress File Soundtrack
John Barry’s theme for The IPCRESS File has an interesting place in the genealogy of the thriller score, both built on the work of the past, and, as with his scores for the 007 movies, influencing the future.
According to Barry in Kristopher Spencer’s Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979, Barry’s score was influenced by Anton Karas’ zither work in one of the earliest espionage classics, Carol Reed’s The Third Man:
Like Bond, Palmer had the benefit of spying to a John Barry score. Along with The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The IPCRESS File represents Barry’s only significant non-Bond spy scoring. The composer made a distinct effort to differentiate the Palmer sound through mood and, most noticeably, instrumentation. Barry avoids the bombast of a typical Bond score by using smaller scale orchestration featuring vibes, piano, guitar, and most notably, a cimbalom (a melancholy-sounding stringed instrument traditionally played by Hungarian Jews or gypsies).
“The IPCRESS File was like my homage to The Third Man,” Barry recounted. “I knew that was how I wanted to do it from the start, but obviously I wasn’t going to use a zither.” (Pan Macmillan, p. 170)
Some of IPCRESS‘ quieter passages that rely on trombone, French horn and the piano’s lower register would not sound out of place on Thunderball, but the general absence of shock and awe rhapsodies helps differentiate IPCRESS from the Bond scores. In fact, some of the jazzier sections wouldn’t sound out of place on one of the crime jazz scores of the ’50s. And, years later, some of the murkier cues turned up on the exemplary trip-hop compilation Coffee Table Music. Among that album’s contributors was Grantby, a British production duo named for the villain in The IPCRESS File. The score is the most memorable of the three Palmer soundtracks.
Rumor has it that producer Saltzman wanted to separate the composer from his volatile director, Sidney J. Furie, but that the two met in secret and Barry hummed the score he’d so far completed. In Royal S. Brown’s Overtones and Undertones, Barry says that his music was inspired by the different take on the thriller that Furie was making:
All the Bond scenes were all loud noises and up close. But in The IPCRESS File, Sidney Furie did this lovely fight scene outside of the Albert Hall, where they’re in the distance, on the top of the steps, and I have that arpeggio music going against it, and it was wonderful. Because you saw these two stupid men. It made you realize how stupid physical violence is. It had such a different effect, and I think a very penetrating effect, from what violence in the movies is all about.
Barry’s IPCRESS theme didn’t only have an effect on film score composers, but on contemporary electronic musicians, who often sample the cimbalom riff. For instance, the spytronica band Portishead use Barry’s work as the starting point for their song / short film To Kill a Dead Man:
The original release of The IPCRESS File on Decca Records featured an essay on Barry’s role in creating the spy music genre:
With the growing popularity of the “spy” novel, depicting the world of intrigue and violence of the secret agent, a new sound was born in contemporary music. One of the leading and most successful exponents of this new sound is John Barry, a 31-year-old composer of prolific output, who has soared to the pinnacle of his profession through his brilliant and imaginative writing for television and films.
His most recent achievement was his score for “Goldfinger,” the third in the James Bond 007 series starring Sean Connery still breaking box office records wherever it is played. This exciting and provocative score with its plentitude of inventive ideas was perfectly related to every mood and aspect of the film. The music, like the picture, was an immediate success, and the sound track album attained the number one position in the national best selling LP charts.
John Barry’s score for The Ipcress File will surely achieve the same kind of success.
Unlike the Bond films, The Ipcress File is not set against some exotic background with glamorous women and preposterous villains. This is the story of an anti-hero, played out against everyday settings in London, where a secret agent seems only unusual by the ordinariness of his protagonists.
It is the story of kidnapped scientists, of brain washing, and of the suspect undercover men of great power who will stop at virtually nothing to accomplish their diabolical deeds. The music of John Barry helps to create moods that are as exciting as they are unusual for this film. His effects are striking, urgent, compulsive, sinister--and even haunting--and are achieved through the use of a harp, flutes and the unusual Hungarian instrument called the cymbalum.
One of the reasons for the success of John Barry is that he makes the unusual acceptable. His compositions, particularly those for “Goldfinger” and The Ipcress File, and television shows (like “The Human Jungle,” a highly popular and successful series) introduce us to sounds that seem almost esoteric, yet they are never less than contemporary.
John Barry is a composer who is very much a part of the everyday scene, yet a man who is constantly moving ahead in his work. He is as experimental as he is practical and precise, and his music is as expressive and economical as it is rich in text and mood. Not so many years ago John Barry was playing with a beat group in London’s reknowned Soho, but since then his progression has been almost meteoric. He became widely known with his own group, The John Barry Seven, which did the exciting and colorful backings for the hit records of Adam Faith. From that period in his career he has never looked back, and few composers are more in demand for television and motion picture scoring than he.
“The Ipcress File” is the latest brilliant composition from this inventive and imaginative talent; and shortly John Barry will be in Hollywood to write the music for yet another major production. Here is a young man who has already achieved fantastic success in the world of music and who is destined for even greater success in the future: JOHN BARRY!
And here, in case you’d like to play along at home, is John Barry’s theme from The IPCRESS File:
I’d planned to have a recording of my own, demonstrating the correctness of my tablature, but unfortunately, my recording computer died shortly into my first draft. Here’s 33 seconds of a loosely edited guitar version of The IPCRESS File, played by yours truly:
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While the rest of the score to From Russia With Love was composed by John Barry, who’d previously done some work on the James Bond theme in Dr. No, the theme song was written by Lionel Bart.
Barry tells Royal S. Brown in the latter’s Overtones and Undertones that, “Lionel Bart wrote the main song because, although I had written some instrumental stuff, and although I’d written one or two small songs, I had never had a big, hit song. Lionel Bart was coming in off Oliver!, and he was the hottest song writer in England. I did not write a note of the song ‘From Russia With Love.’ I orchestrated it and did it for the movie.”
For the vocals, the Bond producers turned to “the singing bus conductor,” Matt Monro. A Youtube user named LuiECuomo has kindly swapped out the instrumental version from the opening credits for Monro’s version:
The Bond theme formula was not yet in full effect, though the bare bones can be heard here in Barry’s orchestration, and the single did not fare well on the charts. Jeffrey Paul Smith writes in his “The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music”:
In March 1964, UA released the soundtrack album for From Russia With Love on their subsidiary record lable to coincide with the film’s April release. Improving on the performance of its predecessor, Russia reached number 28 on Variety’s album charts and remained there for over four months. More importantly, though, the title tune quickly became Unart Music’s most recorded song. Within a month of the film’s release, Bart’s tune was featured in eighteen different single versions, both vocal and instrumental, and also turned up as a track on numerous albums. The heavy activity on the Russia music was driving UA’s music publishing operations to a peak level and racking up considerable licensing fees in the process.
From Russia With Love Single
None of these singles, however, was able to crack Billboard’s “Hot 100.” To some extent, the single’s poor performance was likely due to the weak placement of Monro’s vocal version within the film. It is heard only twice, first as a snatch of radio music during Bond’s picnic with Sylvia Trench, and then later in a more complete version over the end credits. Neither of these instances does a particularly good job of selling the song or reinforcing the film’s dramatic material. In the former, the excerpt is so short that it can be easily missed; in the latter, it is easily ignored.
The tablature provided today is not a full arrangement, but chords with tablature for the vocal melody. I wrote it years ago, when I was attempting to put together a spy-surf band, called The Yuri Gagarins (which was to also feature my then-girlfriend, now wife, on bass). I’ve shared this little MP3 from one of our practices before, but here it is again!
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In our last tablature installment, we wrote about the Lionel Bart theme for From Russia With Love, noting that John Barry did the rest of the score, including today’s composition of focus, “007.”
…Someone connected with the production wanted [Lionel] Bart to compose the entire score, but Barry was given the go-ahead. He delivered an exciting score that cemented his place in the franchise. Most importantly, Barry wrote the action cue, “007,” which would prove very adaptable in subsequent scores as an action alternative to “The James Bond Theme”….With all due respect to Sean Connery’s animal magnetism and macho heroics in the title role, the Bond craze wouldn’t have been nearly as potent without music like “007.”
The version tabbed here was adapted from the track on the From Russia With Love soundtrack, but the alternate action theme continued to be used up through Moonraker:
A handful of other bands and musical artists have taken a shot at the song. Here are a few of my favorites:
Billy Strange:
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Ray Barretto:
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Mister 8 is a blog about secret agents, spies, international crime-fighters and other characters and tropes of spy fiction, and an occasional comic featuring the titular Mister 8 and his work for DOS. This blog is published as often as the author can muster the energy to do so, and content ranges widely from talk of TV shows and movies, to scans of out-of-print comics, to tabs and chords from the great spy themes.
We welcome any feedback, either via the comments section of each post, or through our contact page!
Field Reports
* Wes talks to G. Lazenby
Dave White presents is re-airing Wes Britton’s interview with George Lazenby on Tuesday, Jan. 5 at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, 10:30 EST @ KSAV.org and archived on Wednesday at the Dave White Presents site.
for a bit of context:
