Review for Best of Bond: James Bond

The name's hits ... classic hits and really when it comes to theme songs no series does it better than the songs that feature in James Bond. Best of Bond is a collection of all of the songs featured (so far, not including Adele's new Skyfall song) as well as a second disk of great rarities and pieces from the film's soundtrack.

It is amazing when you look through at just how many famous... and super famous people have contributed to the Bond series over the years. Paul McCartney, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Louis Armstrong, Tina Turner, Carly Simon, the list is endless and every song is perfectly fitted not just to the Bond series, but to popular music itself.

Every song seems to have its fingers on the pulse of the time with Garbage in the 90s, Duran Duran in the 80s and so on, but all have that unmistakable Bond flavour. Once you have listened to them all you could almost create a 'Things to include in a Bond theme' tick list. These include, horns, strings, a catchy chorus and of course echoes to the original Bond theme.

I'm sure everyone has there favourite Bond song, usually connected to whichever is your favourite film, but the ones that do stick out are Paul McCartney and Wings' Live and Let Die, Carly Simon's Nobody Does it Better and of course Shirley Bassey's epic diva perfomances on Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever. Personally I also love Duran Duran's View to a Kill and Chris Cornell's You Know My Name which both feel like great action songs and draw you into the film. The inclusion of the theme from On Your Majesty's Secret Service is also great and possibly (theme song aside) one of the best and most memorable themes from the films.

The second disk includes a number of rarities, unreleased tracks and selections from the scores. The scores for the films were always great, created either by John Barry who it is so surprising that he was only ever nominated once for an Oscar for his work on the films and never won a major award for any of them, Eric Serra (who composed the awful soundtrack to Goldeneye) and following that David Arnold who is the current composer. All this music is fine, but I do feel that maybe only the true Bond fans will listen to it more than once.

Although, I understand why they didn't it would have been great to have had a DVD or extra feature to watch the opening sequences to each Bond where the song was featured and/or the music video. But I guess this is being greedy and for those who want all this the current Bond 50 DVD and Blu-ray set will no doubt include all of this. Also, as with that set, with the release of the new Bond film this year both sets have become obsolete and so maybe a caption '...so far' would have been more appropriate.

Best of Bond is really an apt title for this collection as these songs could stand up there as not just the best film music themes, but the best songs in general. It is doubtful whether you will be listening to them all the time, but if you want to get in the mood for the new film then listening to this will certainly do that.