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(c) Ian Hammond 1999
All rights reserved

Bond, James Bond

QF9, Melbourne to Singapore, seat 37G. A six and half hour run with a
spare seat next to me.

I pray they don't show The Man In The Iron Mask on this flight. My
prayers are only partly answered: they show Titanic (uncut). 
Later, I read the Qantas flight guide and realize just how lucky I
have been: on shorter flights The Man In The Iron Mask is
substituted for Titanic.

Time for the CD player.

I brought the wrong box of CD's -- I had intended to listen to the
Anthology series again. But, I had one of the CDs in the player
anyway.

I've dropped the player on it's head one to many times, so I have to
hold it upside down to get it to play some tracks.

And the noise-cancelling headphones with the special double-jack for
airplane seats? Well, I lost the double-jack adapter ages ago, and now
the tip of the ordinary jack has come off, leaving the CD playing in
brilliant one-channel stereo.

Thus armed I begin to write, with no theme in mind, on my little
palmtop computer (fifteen hours on two AA batteries). I try to ignore
the flickering fancies of a giant plywood ship. But I find myself
plugging in when ever the octagenerian Gloria Stuart
(http://www.hollywood.com/movietalk/celebrities/gstuart/html/oscars.html)
graces the screen. She's just great. Her speaking voice is so
commanding. It comes from a time when every actor had to be able to
dance, sing and speak. Her voice reminds me of someone -- ah yes,
Jean Simmons (http://www.princeton.edu/~tnfung/simmons.htm) in "The
Thorn Birds": "It's too late for me Meggie, but its not too late for
YOU".

Another well-spoken lady of the period, Maureen O'Sullivan
(http://www.virtualquincy.com/quincy/newsflash/osullivan/index.html),
who played the classic Jane to Tarzan, recently passed away. Lennon
would have seen her in the cinema as a chid and later wrote a song for
one of her daughters, Prudence Farrow. Her Tarzan, Johnny Weismueller
(http://www.mexi.com/MEXI/ACTOR/johnny.html), is on the Sgt. Pepper
cover (http://nw3.nai.net/~rjd55/pepper.html)..

Much later....

I'm listening to the I cannae do it side of Anthology (upside down,
on one channel) and Jack starts his death scene in You Know My Name.
He's still dying in the middle of Walrus (I skip a lot) and is
finally, gently released to sink to the bottom just in time for Kate
Winset to blow the whistle exactly as Lennon sings Om in Universe.

 
In-flight channel three of Qantas flights has been owned by Australian
Beatles/Sixties expert Glenn A. Baker for many years now. Each month
he has to search for yet another theme to bind 90 minutes of music
together. This month its James Bond and other Spy music, including
some awful Smokey Robinson and Nancy Sinatra tracks. Did you know that
over half the world's population has seen a James Bond movie or that
he was known as Mr. Kiss-Kiss-Bang-Bang in Asia? Neither did I, but I
was about to find out.

It was the Bond movies, and the spin-off TV show The Avengers which
helped propagate the sixties visual totems of Carnaby Street chick and
which represented the British movie equivelant of the Beatles
international success. 

Lionel Bart wrote the first Bond title song, From Russia With Love,
in 1964 for the singing London bus driver, Matt Munroe. Tom Jones, the
singing Welsh miner did another. Nancy Sinatra sang You Only Live
Twice.  The Beatles' second movie, Help! was modelled on the Bond
images.

It was our Paul and big George who supplied requirements for Live And
Let Die. Martin tells a story where the director of the flick thought
the tape they supplied was a demo!

I fell in love a couple of times in The Spy Who Loved Me, First, and
most, was the great Carly Simon (http://www.james-taylor.com/carly/)
for her song Nobody Does It Better. That voice that combined noble
distance with a quivering lovesick jellyfish. And the great lyrics,
which were slightly modified for the airplane broadcast:

        I wasn't looking, but somehow you found me...
        This is the captain speaking.
        Cabin crew please take your seats for landing.
        I tried to hide from, the spy who loved me...

The second case was the leading lady, Barbara Bach who so filled out
the image of Simon's song. So Russian. Ringo Starr had the good sense
to wed her a few years later.

Skipping a couple of decades, the most recent Bond, Tommorow Never
Knows made many of us sit up and think of Tommorow Never Knows. The
movie is another 90's attempt to recapture the elan of the sixties.

Monty Norman wrote the principle theme behind the Bond movies,
starting with a Ventures/Shadows-like dang-de-da-dang riff followed by
the Bond-defining totem doo-dah-dee-dah doo-dah-dee-dah, which I now
simply call the bond. Although all three writing Beatles made use of
the Bond at some time, it was Lennon who really explored it, the You
Can Talk To Me bridge of Hey Bulldog and the song"Isolation being
just two obvious examples.

Anyway, after a day in Singapore (GREAT book stores) I picked up a new
set of noise-cancelling headphones and, having dropped it again, my CD
seems to work the right way up. On the Singapore-Frankfurt leg, the
movie they showed was... I don't know. I slept.

ian hammond
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"all the way the paperback was on my knee" [sic]