Thunderball O.S.T.
chrisno1
LondonPosts: 4,451MI6 Agent
I couldn't find a thread on this specific soundtrack. The search facility didn't show anything, and I'm not searching twenty pages.
Wow. I listened to this again this morning. I think it is the soundtrack I've played more often than any other and it goes a long way to explaining the success of Thunderball as a Bond film. I know the movie isn't everyone's favourite - it isn't mine, but comfortably sits in the top ten.
John Barry's work here is so classy. Compared to the previous year's Goldfinger, which was a number one hit album in the U.S., Thunderball is eons ahead in terms of the composer understanding cinematically what is required in a score. Goldfinger, for all its jauntiness, was very one note-one song, with occasional hints to Barry's jazzy past.
Not so Thunderball. It kicks off with a fantastic opening salvo of a theme song which is like being pummelled by a spear gun. I love the overblown nonsense of Don Black's lyrics, the thumping rolling intro, Tom Jones' bravura delivery which attempts to out Bassey Shirley. The Chateau Flight retains all the excitement of the PTS scene, I can almost picture it happening as I listen. Barry uses a haunting melody for Bond's investigations at The Spa, which he then reuses for many of the latter underwater scenes, creating a sense of ongoing mystery. Cafe Martinique is a lovely interlude, the casino version of Thunderball slowed down to romantic ballad pace. Fiona's death scene gives us the first hints of Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and ends on a spectacular cacophony of sound, maracas, bongos, guitars, drums, et all. Bond underwater, searching for the bomb and the Disco Volante's secrets feel tense. The revamped OO7 tune is far more brassy and bold than the From Russia With Love version. The non-vocal Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is enticing flavour of what we might have got from Dionne Warwick over the title credits.
The extras on the CD are very fine. A great gun barrel, the alarming traction table, the jokey Bond & Domino, the pinching violins as Bond infiltrates Palmyra, the low notes of Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as Bond seduces Fiona Volpe [who is seducing who, those deep sounds tell us our man is in danger, but they are also sensual, sexy tones] the infectious and quite marvellous rejig of OO7 for Street Chase - has a piece of music ever so competently conjured Bond's desperate plight and the rising suspense among the chaos of a pursuit as much as this? The slow build to another interpretation of OO7 for the sea battle climax and the crashing finale feels as if the music is enacting the Death of Largo all on its own, no picture required. Barry neatly brings us back to the gun barrel, much slowed down, for the miniature epilogue, his only use of Monty Norman's James Bond Theme before the strains of Thunderball kick in once more.
It really is a superb piece of work. While I might always defer to the more emotionally charged On Her Majesty's Secret Service in terms of overall quality, IMO this soundtrack confirms Barry's status as composer of incredible skill. His ability to 'read' a film - particularly a Bond film - and interpret what is happening visually through the music is like audio magic, he's almost adding an extra layer of tension to some scenes, of romance to others. His history as an interpretive jazz musician certainly helps in this regard, developing a feeling for a movie and its characters and presenting them to an audience without overpowering the visual narrative. It's interesting he slowed down the music for the underwater scenes, which are the movie's biggest weakness, making them correspondingly appear faster and more taut because of it. He elevates that particular section impeccably. In fact his whole contribution elevates TB to a level of success it probably doesn't deserve; his music drives the action forward faster than Terence Young's sedate direction and Lamar Boren's sea-bound flights of fancy. It is more cohesive than the slap dash editing. It offers more character than much of the script. It propels our enjoyment.
The fact sheet on my 2003 CD tells me the OST reached number 10 on the US Billboard chart, which is astonishing achievement, I feel, given the sixties pop market. The CD doesn't need a second mono recording of Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but Dionne Warwick's would have been nice. I thoroughly enjoyed this and I am certain I will enjoy it for many years and listens to come.
Comments
I completely agree. I love this soundtrack and have never tired of listening to it. Barry displays his skills superbly!
does the CD's bonus tracks contain the same material as was included on disc 2 of the 30th Anniversary Bond Themes cd? the Thunderball suite and the two vocal versions of Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?
does anybody know why the original LP left so much music out? was it just the limitations of the playing time (~20 minutes per side) or was the soundtrack album released early while the film was still being completed?
I don't have the 30th Anniversary Bond Themes CD, but I think not.
Full track listing:
Bonus tracks:
According to the notes inside: "Barry was under enormous pressure to Finish Thunderball's score, and he had only finished recording half of the music when the time came to put together the original soundtrack LP. As a result, only music form the first half of the film was heard on that album. Now for the first time Barry's score is presented in expanded form."
Caractacus, the bonus tracks were only partially included in the Anniversary 2CD as the suite. Lukas Kendall would have loved to include more but that would have required making TB a 2CD itself, which he wasn't allowed to do.
I've been catching some of the 'Moviedrome' season at the BFI Southbank recently, complete with archived, videotaped intros by Alex Cox, from the original TV 'Moviedrome' broadcasts. The last film I saw in this context was Sergio Leone's 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' (1966). I love Ennio Morricone's scores for Leone's spaghetti westerns and, after the screening, I assembled a selective mp3 playlist.
During the iconic showdown between Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, I couldn't help noticing a distinct similarity between the opening bars of Morricone's famous 'The Trio' and John Barry's brief take on the Bond theme signature riff in TB's 'Switching The Body' - the mournfully dry, reedy woodwind deconstruction of the 'surf guitar' element (coming in at 0.16 on Barry's track). In the cinema, the similarity took me out of the showdown scene for a few moments; it's amazing what just a few seconds of music can do, in film. With 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' released only a year after TB, I wonder whether one great composer had an ear for the other: both were working in highly stylised ways, albeit in different generic idioms.
Off-topic, I think the greatest Morricone tribute is this one, Apollo 440's version of the equally mournful 'The Man With The Harmonica' - a cover which was used over the end credits of (imho) the darkest episode of 'The Sopranos', 'Whoever Did This' (the one in which Tony kills Ralph Cifaretto, a Leone fan; the music and its connotations are arguably part of the episode's subtley coded suggestion of Bronsonesque vengeance - on Tony's part, even if only subconsciously motivated - for Ralph's prior, shocking murder of Tracee [not to be confused with Bond, Tracy Bond]!):
I hear the similarity, though I'd chalk it up to coincidence. Beautiful piece.
I guess you're right.
On 31 Jan 2011 Bob Stanley wrote this for the 'Guardian': "I interviewed Barry in his Cadogan Square flat around 10 years ago. His reputation was prickly and, as a hero of mine, I was more than a little apprehensive. In spite of a heavy cold and a blanket around his small, wiry frame, he was a perfect host. There was constant tea, and three hours of energetic conversation. What some took for spikiness came across to me as straight talking. There was a sense of rivalry with Ennio Morricone, his soundtrack contemporary, who was dispensed with in a sentence."
It is just a coincidence. Morricone write the score for TGTB&TU before filming began in collaboration with Leone and his storyboard artists. The idea was to influence an actor's performance with appropriate empathetic music, which they would hear in advance and sometimes during filming. Dialogue, as with most Italian westerns, was rerecorded and dubbed in post production. Morricone would probably be composing in late 1965.
Somehow I'm not surprised to read that. Both of them were indeed contemporaries and working under heavy loads, scoring many films in quick succession. What I am surprised at is Barry being happy with tea ... 😁
Well he was from Yorkshire!
There was a sense of rivalry with Ennio Morricone, his soundtrack contemporary, who was dispensed with in a sentence."
That's a bit of a shame in a way, they were both so brilliant I'd have hoped he would have admired Morricone. I feel lucky to have seen them both conduct their works in the Royal Albert Hall, at different times though obviously! 😁
Yes, that was an innovative way of working, and 'The Trio' is a great case in point. Leone's use of advance musical compositions to achieve operatic synchronicity was probably more significant in terms of his directorial choreography and his editing of the footage than for the actors' performances as such; Lee Van Cleef claimed in an interview quoted in the BFI notes for the screening that he, at least, didn't pay particular attention to the music when preparing, arguing instead for minimal dialogue and a sustained focus on his look.
On the other hand, Barry's genius was in how he could get to grips with an edited film to imbue it with mood and create sophisticated thematic manoueuvres around it. TB has a sometimes rather ragged edit but Barry works wonders with it. I suppose that when making TB some of the cast and crew will have had, by then, a general sense of Barry's 'Bond sound' in mind, on the strength of his scores for the movies that had gone before - certainly his Bond theme arrangement.
Yes. Leone's direction of Once Upon A Time In The West [my favourite western and IMO the best western ever made.... yes I know... debate away] is highly influenced by the music score, so much so you begin to wonder occasionally who was in control of the film's emotional impact: Leone or Morricone. Leone was working his actors very much to a set situation, one bound to the music. The rising choral hum that accompanies the first view of the town of Sweetwater is synchronised, as you say, to the sweeping crane shot that rises over the rooftops of the rail station giving us a heaven sent view of the landscape. Similarly, the motifs for each character directly impact on the actor's performances, so Leone allows the music and the actor's interpretation of the music to take centre stage rather than elaborately telegraphing each appearance in a manner that Tarantino might do. What Leone does so well - along with Morricone - is not to just tell the story in all its gory detail, but to TELL THE CHARACTER in minute visual and audial simplicity, preventing long-winded background information of both person and place.
I tend to agree. And the casting of Henry Fonda as a despicable villian in a western was a stroke of iconoclastic brilliance. He should have realised that it was never a good idea to traumatise Charles Bronson as a kid by making him play human scaffolding and leaving his brother on his shoulders to hang by the neck - especially while playing a harmonica! Makes Largo look lightweight...
Great film and incredible score. No question Fonda's casting as the heavy (and an incredibly despicable one at that) was pure brilliance. I have read that Leone's first choice for the role that Bronson ultimately played was Clint Eastwood but Eastwood turned him down because he didn't want to do another "Spaghetti Western". I wonder what OUATITW would have looked like with Eastwood instead of Bronson.
I guess as this thread is active, although it's been said elsewhere on the forum, it's pertinent to mention here that Thunderball is the next expanded La-La Land release:
It's great that for the CD sleeve they've gone with the jet-pack poster artwork as an alternative to the 'green' underwater battle used with previous soundtrack releases and the original album.
If you know, you know.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I know. And it's good to see that LaLaLand is enabling Bond to reclaim his own image from those 90s technoheads.
Mine arrived yesterday. The sound quality is all that could be desired, and the format (extended soundtrack; extras; original album) just right. Hearing the unreleased Barry music is very satisfying after all these years and I'll be playing it through again today.
Mine arrived today. Having listened to it all, I'll be ripping the tracks and copying most over to my personal, off-line 'Bond mix' playlist, as either substitution tracks or additional tracks. I'm doing that with each of these Limited Edition releases.
My 'Bond mix' playlist, which I curate in Musicolet, currently runs at just over 17 hours, with 373 tracks. I started work on it during the lockdowns, and have been tinkering with it since then, on and off, obviously having made big amendments since we've had the LaLand releases. I've sequenced it for neat segues, rather than in chronological film order, but I often batch tracks from the same score in mini-clusters for distribution throughout the list so that the overall listening experience doesn't become jarring. Where a LaLaLand release offers both film and OST variants of the same piece, I tend to choose one or the other, whichever I prefer, rather than both; I'm not a playlist completist! I've also blended in a few notable covers (especially Count Basie's and David Arnold's), and the best of the unused title song pitches (such as Blondie's, Alice Cooper's and [?] 'No Good About Goodbye').
My approach is to ensure that title songs, their variants, gunbarrels and, indeed, Barry are threaded all the way through the playlist. It's easy for me to sustain a strong Barry orientation across the 17 hours. This is because for non-Barry Bonds, and especially for the films after Arnold, my 'admission' of tracks from OST/ Limited Edition albums tends to be more picky/ very picky - certainly less inclusive than my Barry choices.
I wonder if other Bond music fans have customised playlists for their own listening...?
To be honest, TB isn't my favourite Barry score; parts of it are a trifle too Wagnerian for me, when heard in isolation from the film. But it's also playful, evocative of the story's marine elements, romance and intrigue, and it has many subtle nuances. When a release like LaLaLand's TB, now in hand, gifts us Barry tracks new to CD, there's a special kind of uplift.
There are gems throughout this TB release. My thought on Track 8 of Disc 2, 'Street Chase (Early Version)', for example, is that, although it's rudimentary compared with the used version, it makes for a catchy standalone listen; and I really like the louche jazziness of Track 9, the alternate instrumentation of 'Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'.
In the film tracks run-through, it's nice to have for the collection all instances of Fiona's eerie four-note signature, which is similar to the SPECTRE signature used in FRWL.