“You hear two things in the womb, you hear [the baby’s] heartbeat, and you hear the James Bond theme.”

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David Arnold, composer of five James Bond films, jests to a crowd of 24 sitting in the iconic Studio 1 housed inside Abbey Road Studios in London, England. Right behind Arnold sits a more-than-70-piece orchestra filling the world’s largest recording studio—where a number of the Bond, Star Wars, and Avengers films were scored—set to perform three of the most recognizable pieces of music in movie history, the James Bond Theme, Goldfinger, and Skyfall.

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Arnold, the orchestra, and 150 guests filed into Abbey Road’s Studios 1 and 2 on behalf of Bowers & Wilkins to celebrate 60 years of iconic James Bond music and the brand’s special edition the Px8 007 Edition headphones. Throughout the night we got to experience the sounds of Bond in three unique ways, first by way of the live orchestra. If viewing a live orchestra of nearly 100 professional musicians perform live in the most famous recording studio in the world wasn’t enough, we each got to sit directly next to one of the performers, being fully immersed in the event.

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After that, we moved on to the Studio 1 control room, sitting in with one of its engineers to listen to the performance again through Bowers & Wilkins flagship 801 D4 loudspeakers. Finally, before the evening commenced with a reception in Studio 2—the recording studio responsible for the vast majority of The Beatles' discography, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Radiohead’s The Bends, and much more—we listened to the tracks in Bowers’ new Px8 headphones.

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Image via Bowers & Wilkins

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Founded in 1966, Bowers & Wilkins has been working in partnership with Abbey Road Studios since 1988 when the studio adopted the brand’s Matrix 801 speakers. In the present day, the studios feature Bowers’ 800 Series Diamond D3 speakers that are the outcome of seven years of research and 868 individual changes.

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“If you’re going to be involved with anybody in the recording music industry from our perspective, there are several extraordinary studios that are right up there in the pinnacle. This is definitely one of those,” Andy Kerr, Director of Product Marketing and Communications of Bowers & Wilkins says. “It’s one of the most storied, it’s one of the most world-famous, and within it, we have the fortune that we have some incredible people working here… Having the input and the conversations that we have with the people that work here and the feedback that we get from them on a regular basis is brilliant because it helps us to produce better products.”

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Outside of being an integral part of Abbey Road, Bowers & Wilkins are a crucial part of countless albums and movie scores recorded within the studios’ walls. Everything that you hear in one of the studios’ movies or albums gets played into the control room on a set of B&W speakers. “For us to be connected with [James Bond] and many other films besides, of course it’s amazing…” Kerr says. “A good number of people don’t know what I do, but if I say to them, ‘have you seen Return of the Jedi?’… if you’ve  seen it, you’ve heard our speakers, and that I feel is a very powerful story.”

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B&W’s connection with the Bond franchise runs deep, with its 800 series loudspeakers being used to monitor the recording of Spectre and Skyfall and in celebration of the 60th-anniversary franchise, Abbey Road Studios engineers used the same loudspeakers to create Bond 25, an album featuring all 25 iconic Bond themes. Arnold has composed five Bond films himself, From Russia with Love, The World is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace.

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Before the night’s immersive experience inside Abbey Road Studios began, we got a chance to speak with David Arnold about the iconic James Bond film franchise, working with different Bond actors, and more. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

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Image via Bowers & Wilkins[/caption]

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Can you speak to what it’s been like to compose music for one of the most iconic film franchises of all time?

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As a person who has been on the other side of that equation, and has watched the James Bond films since childhood—loving everything about them, especially what John Barry was doing with the scores—it is sort of oddly satisfying to find yourself on the other side of that rope because you know, it’s somewhere you always wanted to be. The music really did speak to me for a very long time. I always felt excited by it and inspired by it, and it sort of suggested to me that it is what I should be doing and by doing it I felt like I was responding to the music and the films. Being a part of the franchise isn’t something you are really that conscious of, because you don’t stop and think, “Wow, I am a part of this!”

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Ultimately, once you get over the fact that you have been asked to do one of the films, you then have to do it, and the process of doing it is very different from the concept of doing it. You are aware of how important it is for people, and when you finish you hope it lands in the same way those early films landed for me.

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What was your favorite Bond movie to work on?

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I like all the Bond films for different reasons. It was very satisfying to do Casino Royale for a number of reasons: one was working with Chris Cornell, and another was working with Martin Campbell and the energy he brought to it. Casino Royale felt like it was the first film where I could kind of establish myself a little more as a composer because at the time we started, Daniel Craig hadn’t been cast yet, so we were sort of writing conceptually from the script and from the character on the page which was different from the cinematic character. Probably, Tomorrow Never Dies was my favorite because it was my first film—everything was new and there were zero expectations. No one had heard my rendition of a Bond score, and they didn’t know what it would be like. We were establishing a different cinematic musical language for Bond which touched on the legacy sound of John Barry, as well as moving forward with electronic elements and more contemporary music production elements as well.

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You’ve worked on multiple films with multiple different Bonds, is there a different strategy for each actor that you’ve worked with? Is scoring for Daniel Craig different from scoring for Pierce Brosnan?

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What was interesting about the first one I worked on with Pierce was that you know how Pierce is and how he moves and what his strengths are and that becomes familiar. What was interesting about Casino Royale, I read the script and started working on the song, they hadn’t cast anyone. So for the first time in a long time, I had no idea who this was going to be. It was just what was on the page. When they came to do the screen test, Daniel Craig’s movement was what made me feel like he was the right fit for that particular Bond. He was as M calls him, “A blunt instrument.” He hadn’t become all these things yet, so that was the strategy for Casino Royale. The song needed to be the progenitor of the James Bond Theme.

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We start the movie with “You Know My Name,” and end the movie with the James Bond Theme. So that journey is taken not only by the actor but by the music as well. Daniel’s performance very much informed the way I would write for and looking at the subsequent films that I didn’t do, as he became more exposed and eternal, subsequent composers like Tom Newman were very much looking inwards into who he was. All these things will have an impact on what you do and why you do it.

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Image via Bowers & Wilkins[/caption]

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What advice would you give to someone scoring the upcoming Bond films?

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It’s difficult to say that you should give advice to anyone because I think the best results come from when people decide to do things their way and have their own take on it. I think that should be left up to them to find their place, and I suppose I will echo Pierce Brosnan’s words to Daniel Craig which were just, “Enjoy the hell out of it!”

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You’ve been a part of the Goldeneye video game franchise as well, some of the most iconic video game music of all time. How rewarding was working on that?

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Video games are slightly different because you don’t write into a story. You are kind of illustrating moments of the gameplay. You don’t have a beginning, middle, and end when you are writing a game score, because it might never end. You have to write, in a way, for the energy of a player rather than the energy of a film which is a very different thing. It’s trying to transplant that sense of style that Bond has musically into a game. One thing I learned from working on the video games is that there is a lot of music needed—much more than in a film—and you have to guess what people are going to be doing, and write music for what could happen, rather than a movie where you are writing what is happening.

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You’ve worked on a number of other popular movies as well, Independence Day, the Fast and Furious franchise, etc, what is different about working on James Bond movies?

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The difference is it’s a James Bond movie, and that means the whole world is looking at you. There are only a few franchises that command that kind of worldwide interest—Star Wars is the most obvious example. People have strong opinions about the music in Star Wars and about and people have strong opinions about the music in James Bond and the sense of James Bond. You realize you are treading on hallowed ground and you have to be respectful of it.

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Can you speak to how special of an event The Sound of 007 at Abbey Road Studios with Bowers & Wilkins was?

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I felt especially excited for people to be able to sit A, in front of an orchestra and B, in an orchestra, just to experience the artistic integrity, skill, and talent of our musicians. A lot of work is done with samples and electronics nowadays, and even though that can sound fine, there really is nothing like the experience of hearing 75 or 80 highly skilled, trained artists with the most fabulous instruments giving the performance of a lifetime. It’s such a unique experience.

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Then, of course, you go into the control room at Abbey Road and listen to the recorded sound, and it sounds like the performance you just heard, and a beautiful reproduction of it, but when you are in the room you are in it and you are a part of it and it feels very different, I think.

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The most exciting part, for me, was that everyone who came out of that experience had a newfound respect for the art of an orchestral performance not necessarily just for film music, but just the artistry and the commitment involved to be that good.

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Source: Complex.com

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