Dr. No (film) - Soundtrack

Soundtrack

Monty Norman was invited to write the soundtrack because Broccoli liked his work on the 1961 theatre production Belle, a musical about murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen. Norman was busy with musicals, and only accepted to do the music for Dr. No after Saltzman allowed him to travel along with the crew to Jamaica. The most famous composition in the soundtrack is the "James Bond Theme", which is heard in the gunbarrel sequence and in a calypso medley over the title credits, and was written by Norman based on a previous composition of his. John Barry, who would later go on to compose the music for eleven Bond films, arranged the Bond theme, but was uncredited—except for the credit of his orchestra playing the final piece. It has occasionally been suggested that Barry, not Norman, composed the "James Bond Theme". This argument has been the subject of two court cases, the most recent in 2001, which found in favour of Norman. The theme, as written by Norman and arranged by Barry, was described by another Bond film composer, David Arnold, as "bebop-swing vibe coupled with that vicious, dark, distorted electric guitar, definitely an instrument of rock 'n' roll ... it represented everything about the character you would want: It was cocky, swaggering, confident, dark, dangerous, suggestive, sexy, unstoppable. And he did it in two minutes."

The music for the opening scene is a calypso version of the nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice", with new lyrics to reflect the intentions of the three assassins hired by Dr. No. Other notable songs in the film are the song "Jump Up", played in the background, and the traditional Jamaican calypso "Under the Mango Tree", famously sung by Diana Coupland (then Norman's wife), the singing voice of Honey Ryder, as she walked out of the ocean on Crab Key. Byron Lee & the Dragonaires appeared in the film and performed some of the music on the later soundtrack album. Lee and other Jamaican musicians who appear in soundtrack, including Ernest Ranglin and Carlos Malcolm, were introduced to Norman by Chris Blackwell, the owner of then-small label Island Records who worked in the film as a location scout. The original soundtrack album was released by United Artists Records in 1963 as well as several cover versions of "The James Bond Theme" on Columbia Records. A single of the "James Bond Theme" entered the UK Singles Chart in 1962, reaching a peak position of number thirteen during an eleven week spell in the charts. Ranglin, who had acted as arranger on several tracks, and Malcolm sued Eon for unpaid fees, both settling out of court; Malcolm and his band performed a year later at the film's premiere in Kingston.