Tom: You remember how Skyfall was a slow ballad, piano and brass, made incredible by Adele’s soaring vocals?
Tim: YES, and it was GREAT.
Tom: Well, Adele’s not on this one.
Tim: Oh, boy. I may need to get my fingers warmed up.
Tom: And that about sums it up, doesn’t it? Taking on a Bond theme means that you either need to break from the traditional Shirley Bassey style, and have modest but not great success (You Know My Name, Another Way To Die) — or you have to absolutely nail both the vocals and the writing (Skyfall). And this… isn’t quite there.
Tim: Quite? QUITE? Mate, there’s “there”, and then there’s where this is, which is the other side of the freaking universe. Because, oh, that writing. Sam Smith actually boasted, like it was a good thing, that he wrote the lyrics in twenty minutes. This is pretty much an actual first draft, and boy can you tell. This is a slow song, and presumably was always going to be a slow song, so the lyrics have to be clever. I don’t want to both (a) have time to think “so you’ve sung ‘been here before/always hit…’ so the line’s going to end with ‘floor'” and (b) be correct about that – make them fast or make them inventive, just don’t make them slow, dull and therefore predictable, especially if there’s nothing in the music to get excited about.
And also, “when you’re not here I’m suffocating”? This is JAMES SHITTING BOND, mate, not some desperate forty year old at the end of act two of a crappy rom com. And also also, the title. IF ADELE CAN RHYME SKYFALL WITH CRUMBLES, YOU CAN MAKE THE EFFORT WITH SPECTRE. Plenty of things rhyme with it: off the top of my head, director, ‘decked her’, sector, Bo’ Selecta!, projector, Hannibal Lector. USE THEM.
Tom: It’s not bad. It’s just outshone by everything around it. It is the Quantum of Solace of Bond themes.
Tim: Oh, it really isn’t. There are just so many things wrong with it, even after dealing with the lyrics. For starters, can we have a drum beat? Just one, perhaps? Just some semblance of life, really – cause I got nothing. No emotion, no stirring feelings, no sense of passion or energy or ANYTHING. Except, well, all the life on the planet after the lead in to the chorus, when I just want to shout AH-AH-AHHH-AHH-AHH-AH-AHH-AH-AH-AHHH. OO-OO-OOOH-OO-OO-OOH-OO-OO-OO-OOOOH. AH-AH-AHHH-AHH-AHH-AH-AHH-AH-AH-AHHH. OO-OO-OOOH-OO-OO-OOH-OO-OO-OO-HMMMM.
Other people could maybe have got away without a drum beat. Take Skyfall, because this is so clearly trying to emulate it, it’s almost shameful. Adele had an enormous voice. She could pull off a song with backing like this, without drums, because her vocal could fill in for it. Sam Smith, with his weedy falsetto? Really, really does not cut it, remotely. My honest thoughts? There is precisely one person who comes out of this endeavour well, and that’s Madonna, because Die Another Day doesn’t appear quite as atrocious as it previously did, now it’s got this to be compared to.
Am I overreacting? Well, mayb– actually no, I’m not. This is a James Bond theme, it should be GREAT, and I have every single right to be BLOODY FURIOUS if some tit like Sam Smith (yes, tit – quote from Radio 1 last Friday, “I actually thought Mexico was near Berlin”) doesn’t put the effort in. Most of all, I don’t want to be sat in a cinema wanting to sing Earth Song at the top of my lungs, because with nothing to do other than read opening credits for four and a half minutes I probably won’t be able to resist the temptation. Anything to drown out the soulless sound of this.