Every James Bond Theme Song, Ranked Worst to Best

Is it possible for a number that was only the second tune in Bond history to win the best song Oscar to be the worst entry in the series? Why, yes, since you ask, it is. It’s not even that it’s a terrible piece of songcraft or production; in the context of a Sam Smith album, it might even be a starkly melodramatic highlight. But it’s a falsetto-dawdling tune that’s deeply and self-consciously in love with its own moroseness, to a level unbecoming of a Bond movie — even a Bond movie as elegiac as the Daniel Craig entries can be. Yes, Adele and Eilish also went with somber ballads for the films that bookend this one, but they didn’t start draining all the sex and danger out of those movies right at the beginning. The 007 franchise needed a sad song or two, but somebody did it better.

A license to catch 40 winks. Some of the Bond songs have super-dated ‘80s production values but are just so appealing that they stand up anyway, like “For Your Eyes Only” and “All Time High.” And then there’s this one. On paper, Knight should have been an ideal Shirley Bassey stand-in, the way Tina Turner would be a few years later. But ‘80s AC-meister Narada Michael Walden is just not the maestro you go to for a James Bond song — he’s not a John Barry, and he’s no Pip, either. The song was no embarrassment, but if you have any ADHD at all, it’s five minutes you probably spent thinking: Remind me again why licence is spelled with two C’s?

This was the last song the genius John Barry co-wrote for the series, but apparently it was no great meeting of the minds, as he didn’t take much of a shine to the “Take on Me” boys. What resulted was the most spectacular-sounding mediocre song in the Bond catalog. The orchestral arrangement is magnificent, yet there’s no personality coming from the band at the center, and the so-so hook dissipates before your very ears. If you’ve forgotten just one song in the Bond canon, chances are this is it — yet it’s still worth hearing, just to experience Barry bringing his A-game one last time.

It took Jack White to write the barely disputed black sheep of the Bond catalog. As a major fan of the man, I… don’t have much defense for it, because it’s hard to say whether a garage-rock-inflected Bond song is a worse idea in theory or execution. And as tantalizing as the idea of hearing Keys paired with White sounded when first announced, in the end, she doesn’t add much to the track except acting as a human shield for the inevitable onslaught of attacks this was destined to get. Hearing her sing the line “shoot ‘em up, bang bang” does not suggest that anyone involved approached this with an undue sense of reverence. And yet… the guitars sound great coming through a THX theater system, and the drums swing like mad, and the quotation of the Bond theme as a piano riff is clever, so…. Listen, at least no one can claim this ruined a great film.

The other nearly universally despised Bond song is certainly a product of its era — the great techno scare of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I find myself not loathing it as much as I probably should, maybe because the hook works — even if there’s not a lot else to the song but that herky-jerky hook — and because combining proto-EDM with orchestral string-section stings was a kind of intriguing combo that few followed up on. But Madonna seemed just a bit too resistant to throwing in bits of the Bond-song conventions that would have made the number a bit more palatable, and compositionally it remains the thinnest tune in the canon. Also: What’s Freud got to do with it?

You may intuit in these rankings a preference for the early stuff, but we’ll make an exception for this seminal entry, whose modest attributes tend to be overrated for reasons that have to come down mostly to nostalgia. As the first true pop song written for a Bond film, it merits credit for loosely establishing a tone that would follow in many of the tunes, setting out the spy as more of an inner romantic than his cavalier ways on screen might suggest. But really, it’s pretty colorless, pro forma pop — just the kind of tune that you’d expect to find favor a secret agent who mocked the Beatles in the following film. Monro’s vocal version was embedded within the film, while the opening credits featured an instrumental version made into a medley with two other themes. That was just as well — if this entire recording had introduced the film at the start, we might have a harder time remembering the movie as the classic it is.

Big Garbage fan here, so it’s hard to pin down exactly why this doesn’t click the way it should, especially with such a promising hook. Maybe it’s because the song is not enough to contain everything that the overly busy and compressed arrangement throws at it. Orchestration and tremolo guitar, yes — but the programmed-sounding percussion, a boon to many other Garbage songs, just sounds loud, clangy and exhausting in a milieu that demands a subtler touch. Still, you’ve got to give Shirley Manson props for being one of the few lyricists to write a song from the point of view of a Bond villain.

Crow is up in her “If It Makes You Happy” range as a vocalist, but imagining herself as a Bond girl, or maybe even fancying herself as Mrs. Bond, does not make her happy. “Darling you won / It’s no fun / Martinis, girls, and guns / It’s murder on our love affair,” she sings. The idea of Bond as an unsuitable domestic partner who must be spied upon himself is an interesting idea to pursue. But similar to the Garbage track, Crow’s song has a strong chorus melody somewhat undercut by an arrangement that favors bombast over brooding.

It’s easy to hear this song as a sort of successor to “Nobody Does It Better” and “For Your Eyes Only” in the completion of a romantic easy-listening trilogy. But this time it’s Bond mainstay John Barry saying “I can do that, too” after Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti stepped in to take his place on writing the melodies for those earlier hits in his absence. He succeeded, if not quite as wildly, as Coolidge’s song was a multi-week No. 1 hit at adult contemporary radio that didn’t fly quite as high on the pop chart. Each of these songs imagines Bond as a lady-pleaser, not a lady-killer. But because it’s Barry, there’s an intriguing hint of melancholy embedded in the sweet nothings that you didn’t get with the Carly Simon or Sheena Easton songs.

The late Soundgarden singer came up with one of the more polarizing Bond themes of the modern era. The fans of the franchise who hate it really hate it; they think it sullies what by acclamation is thought of as the best Bond film of this century. But it has its champions, and deserves them. Cornell clearly put more thought into connecting the song lyrically with the film than a majority of Bond songwriters have, as line after line makes use of gambling metaphors, all the while painting the spy as God’s lonely man in sacrificing most of what makes us human to carve out his heroic and violent path. Melodically, it’s strong, it rocks, and you know Cornell is going to sing the hell out of it. So what’s not to love? Personally, though it’s hard to argue against a Bond song that picks up the pace amid a historic sea of ballads, “You Know My Name” feels unduly rushed. It’s as if Cornell wrote the song to fit a certain length and then was told the credits sequence was a minute shorter than he thought it was. His tune might have gotten more respect than it has if it’d been produced at a more reasoned. ultimately more resonant pace.

James Bond had had a lot of rolls in the hay since meeting up with Pussy Galore in a barn in “Goldfinger,” but there was probably no Bond song more distinctly designed as a soundtrack to hay-rolling — or cozier love by the fireside — than this Easton hit. That title was ready-made to become a song in which a Bond girl describes herself in the terms of a secret dossier. Its sexy-time warmth lacks the haunting quality of the best songs from the series, but a hit is a hit.

One of the most widely derided Bond themes… and the most underrated. John Barry and Don Black, who’d together created the brilliant “Diamonds Are Forever” as their previous theme, followed it with the most ridiculous song in the entire series — but ridiculous in a kind of wonderful way. Writing in a hurry to beat a deadline, Black wrote some admittedly risible lyrics, starting with the very first line — “He has a powerful weapon…” — followed by the immortal: “Who will he bang?” A pregnant pause, and then: “We… shall… seeeeeee!” For a climax, “He’ll shoot anyone!” With what, Lulu? “With his golden guuuun!” It sounds perfectly awful, no? Actually, no. Barry’s downward spiraling chord progression make for an irresistible banger, Lulu sounds like the rock ‘n’ roll singer she never was, and the whole thing swings, in a put-on-your-go-go boots kind of way. Thoroughly camp — and, against all odds, thoroughly wonderful.

With Shirley Bassey retired from the series — not necessarily of her own volition, as the franchise continued its focus on big names and chart catnip — the problem remained that the public still wanted to hear Bassey-esque themes. Was there anyone who could similarly deliver those goods who also had a major public profile? The only surprise was that Turner hadn’t turned up in the franchise even sooner. She almost seems to be sneering her way through this suspense ballad, projecting a tough attitude that fit well with the rejiggered direction of the movies. A bigger question was whether Bono and the Edge could effectively write in the tradition of John Barry. The jury remains split on that, all these years later, but I believe they pulled it off. Maybe the only thing keeping the song from being a classic in the canon is how the chorus feels like a brilliant bridge that never quite gets to resolve and explode the way you’d hope.

All hail Adele for making Bond songs feel relevant again after years and years in which some of the most creditable stars in pop and rock turned in B-grade material when their turn came at bat. She is not one to not hit anything out of the park, and this set the template for Tragic Bond that thus far hasn’t subsequently been deviated from in the themes. It is saddled with the (only occasionally deviated from) imperative to make the film title the song title, and you’re not being completely honest with yourself if you believe that repeating the word “skyfall” throughout a song isn’t about as silly as doing it with “thunderball.” But when it’s Adele delivering the goods, just as with Tom Jones, you’re perfectly happy to kid yourself.

What a mongrel of a song: The set-up and verses are the stuff of a classic Bond suspense anthem… and then the song turns into a pure, chirpy Top 40 number for the chorus. And did it suffer for being so transparently a hybrid of ominous spy ballad and pop banger? No. Thankfully, John Barry had a happier time collaborating with Duran Duran than he later did with A-ha, and it shows.

The most unwieldy one-word title in the history of pop becomes one of the most worthy Bond songs through pure songwriting sleight-of-hand. Barry composed the music with room for an emphatic three syllables at the end and left the rest to lyricist partner Don Black, who somehow pulled off the impossible with verses that weren’t actually the stuff of mockery… making deadly James Bond himself into the song’s “thunderball,” whatever the hell that is, out of Ian Fleming context. But really, as much as Barry’s music could and did stand up on its own as recurring instrumental score as well, it’s really Tom Jones doing the heavy lifting and heavy magic here. He said the vocal booth was spinning when he opened up his eyes at the end of belting out that final nine-second note, and we’re all still dizzy from it.

Bassey’s third and last contribution to the series (not counting her legendarily unused recording of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” for “Thunderball”) didn’t reach the heights of the first two, “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” Yet it’s still one of the best, most undervalued songs the Bond franchise ever had. It’s a no-brainer that Bassey rhymes with “brassy,” but this isn’t a diva explosion like the previous efforts, which bowled you over with unremitting cynicism as well as world-class lungpower. It’s a song about dreaming of an imagined, desperately sought love that seems less likely by the day to ever arrive, and there’s no more honestly haunting song in the Bond library. Now, what it has to do with a hijacked space shuttle, neither I nor anyone else could tell you, so it is just a little hilarious when Barry and Hal David do manage to work the title word into a random verse. But not so amusing that you should stop crying.

File this one in the Dept. of Controversial Choices made good… very good. The peasants were revolting when Eilish was first announced as the woman to send Daniel Craig off: Was a then-18-year-old really the delivery system to put us in mind of a Bond who’s sailing, or bleeding, off into the sunset? Yet she and brother Finneas came up with the subtlest Bond theme in its five-decade history, but one not so subtle that Hans Zimmer didn’t have good reason to incorporate into his instrumental music again and again, so much more so than usual that the O’Connell siblings nearly deserve score co-credit. The elements of betrayal — written specifically to emotionally wrap up the 25-minute (!) pre-credits sequence — feel wisened enough in Eilish’s hushed deliver that you want to check her publicity still after the film to make sure she didn’t develop wrinkles writing the song. It’s to their credit that she and Finneas finally gave in to including echoes of the “James Bond Theme” along the way and didn’t think adding that final “spy chord” was as corny as they feared it was, because the song was gloomily strong enough not to be undercut by a bare hint of fun.

George Lazenby’s one headlining appearance in the series was accompanied by not one but two great pieces of music — Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World,” which pops up later in the film, but first, this classic John Barry piece that marked the third, final and best time a Bond film’s opening credits would be graced by an instrumental. It’s a thrilling enough piece of work that it can comfortably sit alongside “The James Bond Theme” itself as something we can and should hear in the films repeatedly, even though it’s obviously been used more sparingly. Bonus points for the blatant, trend-setting use of a Moog that somehow didn’t even spoil the symphony.

The Marvin Hamlisch/Carole Bayer Sager-penned ballad is such a core piece of the Bond music canon that it’s difficult to remember that it seemed a bit shocking at the time. Shocking not because the franchise’s producers were clearly looking at getting a pop radio smash — they’d already gone after and gotten that a few years earlier with Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” — but because, unlike the Wings song, the “Spy Who Loved Me” theme was an effusive burst of major-key cheerfulness. It fit fine with the friendlier face that Roger Moore offered the world after Sean Connery; we were all down to take that ski-jump parachute ride with Carly Simon. But it did fit in with the history of the series in at least one way: Romantic as it sounded, it winkingly suggested that, yes, James Bond is a stay-on-the-scene sex machine.

Only this week are most Bond fans learning that Armstrong’s extremely bittersweet ballad is the first vocal Bond song to be prominently used in two of the series’ films. To say more would venture into severe spoiler mode. But in its original context, occurring during a romantic montage midway through the film where James Bond gets married, it served as both a celebration of true love and an ironic premonition of its inevitable earthly end. The fact that it was the last vocal Armstrong — a truly brave and unusual pick — ever recorded adds to the poignance.

According to historian Jon Burlingame’s definitive book “The Music of James Bond,” producer Harry Saltzman, no big fan of rock music, acceded to the idea of McCartney writing a Bond song, having been convinced that this actually had some commercial potential. And then, when the ex-Beatle turned the finished tune in, Saltzman was pleased, and immediately began wondering who it should go to. “What do you think of Thelma Houston?” he asked George Martin. It was up to the producer/scorer to say that McCartney was “the ideal choice, even if he wasn’t a Black lady.” Actually, it would be great to have heard what a Black lady would have done with the dramatic rock anthem… but Thelma Houston would probably not be using the song as a climactic, laser-and-smoke-bombs-filled climax to her stadium shows well into the 21st century.

Sinatra recorded two different versions of this song, one for the film and one for a hit recording, and either will suffice in bringing the listener into the dream state suggested in John Barry and Leslie Bricusse’s exquisite song, one of the greatest of all ’60s movie ballads. For Ian Fleming, it was just a clever title for a novel, evocative of who knows what in the lively, deadly game of spy vs. spy. In the hands of Sinatra and her writers and producers, the theme became clearer: Ye must be born again… as a lucid dreamer with a rich fantasy life beyond mundane daily life. It’s on a par with “The Windmills of Your Mind,” yet another great mind game from the period.

In the canon of great instrumentals, there’s Bach, there’s Beethoven, there’s Mozart and there’s — yes — Monty Norman, just for one classic outing, with the John Barry-arranged introduction to the whole 50-year outing that would cause literal riots in cinemas if a Bond film were to begin without it. (As many reprises as possible, also, please, probably to the consternation of untold scorers over the years who knew it would overshadow their own work.) It’s like Duane Eddy meets Debussy, in some cosmic sphere we never want to leave, even if two minutes is all the heavenly time we’re granted.

It’s kind of ridiculous, if you step back and think about it — rhyming “Goldfinger” with “cold finger” and letting it stop there, because there’s nowhere to go from there except for maybe “a bold linger.” But you don’t step back and think about it because the combined power of Shirley Bassey, John Barry, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse has left you as dead in your tracks as if you’d been spray painted in your sleep. It is, dare we say, the gold standard of all movie music. Unless that would be another Bassey/Barry track, of course.

Not just one of the great Bond themes, but one of the most finely crafted pop songs ever. Shirley Bassey and the writing team of John Barry and Don Black take the basic joke of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and accentuate the material cynicism to a level that suggests the singer has transcended the need for human contact and become a goddess, at one with the mineral. But it’s still one of the sexiest songs ever written, even if she’s seemingly swearing off the need for touch altogether. Maybe that’s because Barry gave this instruction to Black: “Write it as if she’s thinking about a penis.” The Bond producers worried that it was too outrightly “dirty,” even if she was singing about something available at Tiffany’s. Cooler heads prevailed, and the team was able to actually outdo “Goldfinger,” even if it wasn’t the same kind of pop phenomenon. Black’s lyric is pure callous poetry that belies the river of underlying heartbreak that would cause a woman to give up on love and eroticize baubles. And the music — with Barry relying on an eight-note repeating theme to subliminally suggest the eight sides of a diamond — will haunt you in your dreams, even if you haven’t foresworn the touch of another. There’s always still time to join Bassey among the ascended masters of avaricious celibacy.

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Does 26 seem like it’s coming up short, given the even greater number of songs some consider part of the realm of Bond music? How about the songs that were only used for end credits sequences, like the contributions by the Pretenders, k.d. lang and Patti LaBelle in the ‘80s and ‘90s? Should we count the Oscar-nominated “The Look of Love” from the Eon-unauthorized 1967 comedy spoof “Casino Royale” — something that would surely be in the top five, if we did? Or Lani Hall crossing the Eon picket line to sing on “Never Say Never Again”? Wouldn’t it be fun to assess how famous rejected songs — Radiohead’s unused “Spectre” theme, Johnny Cash’s “Thunderball,” Alice Cooper’s “Man With the Golden Gun,” Blondie’s “For Your Eyes Only” — stack up against the official canon? And say, does Monty Norman’s “Kingston Calypso,” which oddly made up half the title sequence of “Dr. No” after the introduction of his Bond theme, count?

Although it’s fun to pursue all these tributaries, in the end, we went with the 26 songs that appear on the new 2-CD set “The Best Of Bond…James Bond,” which can be considered fairly canonical. Those other songs can all vie another day.