A Fart I Have To Face

Earlier this year I went to an evening at the BFI with David Arnold, legendary composer of film scores. By which I mean that I went to see him talk, I didn’t go with him, we’re not mates or anything.

He was talking specifically about his work on the Bond films, which as I’m sure you’re aware is fantastic (proof here), and he let slip that he was working on a new project which would be of great interest to fans of James Bond music, but he couldn’t say what it was at that time. I set my anticipationometer to ‘quite excited’ and waited to see what goodies would spill forth.

Sadly the answer turned out to be ‘a new Shirley Bassey album produced by David Arnold’. It was a bit like being told you might be getting the complete Bond film collection for Christmas, only to open your stocking and find a VHS of Never Say Never Again.

Anyway, the other day I heard one of the tracks from Shirl’s album and, as has been pointed out elsewhere, was quite surprised to hear what was clearly a possible theme song for Quantum Of Solace, which had obviously been shot in the kneecaps in favour of Jack White and Alicia Keys’ effort. Not only that but I was even more surprised to find that I quite liked it. If I’d had any more surprises that day I probably would have had to have my spleen replaced, as everybody knows that each surprise shrinks one’s spleen by 2%.

So have a listen to ‘No Good About Goodbye’ and see what you think. Is this a Bond theme? Is it a great Bond theme? Is it better than Another Way To Die? And, perhaps most importantly, what does Burly Chassis mean by the line “There’ll always be a space, a fart I have to face now” at 0:42?

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Judi Dench Drops An F-Bomb

I recently undertook a massive project to discover who my favourite James Bond is. Or rather, to confirm to myself what I keep telling people about who my favourite James Bond is, so that I could back up my argument with empirical evidence.

What this involved – and this is the kind of selfless act I carry out for the viewers of The Incredible Suit – was watching every Bond film and rating them out of 10, then adding all the scores together for each actor, then dividing the totals by the number of Bond films each actor made in order to give a mean average score. Yes, I really did all those things. It just took me two and a half years.

For the sake of keeping the results pure and untainted, I didn’t include Never Say Never Again because a) it’s not an official Bond film, and b) it would put Sean Connery into minus figures.

So here are the results, and you can treat these as official figures from the National Office of Officially Accurate Statistical Figures And Stuff:

1. Timothy Dalton 9
2. Daniel Craig 8.5
3. Pierce Brosnan 7.5
4. Sean Connery 7.2
5. George Lazenby 7
6. Roger Moore 6.7

Many people get their nethers in a tangle when I tell them Timothy Dalton is the Best Bond, Like, Ever, because they think Sean Connery should be the best because he was the first. Tommywaddle. He was great in the first three, maybe four, but after that, come on. Fat, slow and bored of himself. Go and watch Diamonds Are Forever, you’ll see what I’m on about.

Having said that, I thought I preferred Connery to Brosnan, but looking at the official figures, apparently not. You can’t argue with the stats.

Here are some of the reasons why I love Timothy Dalton as Bond:

He can act (remember, he was preceded by 12 years of Roger Moore’s eyebrow).
He looks like Bond should look.
His Bond hates his job but takes it seriously.
His Bond smokes. Cigarettes, not ludicrously massive cigars.
His Bond has no time for incompetent assistants.
His Bond looks really, really pissed off when his friends get hurt.
His Bond bleeds and his suit gets ruined when he’s been in a fight.
His Bond swears. If you can count “horse’s arse”, “piss off” and “bastard” as swear words these days.

Speaking of effing and jeffing, have you noticed what a potty-mouth M has become lately? It’s all “bugger” this and “bastard” that, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I bet Judi Dench drops an f-bomb in the next film.


Thanks to Cameron Arrigoni for the video!