The Sinning Daylights
Some unused Bond songs just refuse to fade away. Back in 1986, the Pet Shop Boys were led to believe they were going to be chosen to represent queens and their country by doing musical duties on The Living Daylights. So what happened and how different would Dalton’s first film have sounded had they got the gig?
Behind the scenes image of shooting the title sequence for The Living Daylights, taken from Thunderballs.
There are hundreds of unused Bond songs and most of them fall neatly into one of two categories.
Those officially written for a film but (no less officially) rejected.
Those written in the hope that the Bond producers will notice them and like them so much that they use them for the film.
The song the Pet Shop Boys wrote for The Living Daylights doesn’t quite fit into either camp.
It has been rumoured that the synth pop duo walked away from The Living Daylights after not being given carte blanche to write the score as well as the song. But according to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe themselves, they didn’t even get this far: “We never heard anything from the James Bond people.” In the liner notes for a re-issue of their 1990 album Behaviour, the duo explained that they had written the song after music industry insiders had intimated that they were about to by the producers. As far as they were concerned, they were first in line.
Did someone at Eon forget to send a memo or pick up the phone? Did a-ha’s agent get their first? Or did the producers get cold feet about booking one of the hottest - and queerest - acts of the time?
Pretty boys
According to director John Glen in a 2014 interview (in Field and Chowdhury’s Some Kind of Hero), it was Barbara Broccoli who saw the commercial potential in a-ha, with their fanbase of screaming 15 year old girls. Music journalist Jude Rogers says that the producers went for a-ha because they wished to replicate the success of Duran Duran’s A View To A Kill with “another pretty boy pop group”. It’s odd then, that the producers have not tried this since. Can you imagine Take That being recruited to sing GoldenEye or One Direction being asked to perform Skyfall?
It’s not even as if the Pet Shop Boys are repellently ugly to look at and, with several number ones under their belts, they were just as commercially viable as a-ha at the time - and considerably more so now. Today, Pet Shop Boys are in the Guinness Book of Records for being the most successful duo in all of UK music history.
Was it just because they weren’t as pretty as a-ha or was it something to do with their sexual orientation? Both Tennant and Lowe are reluctant to talk about their private lives, although Neil Tennant did come out publicly in 1994. Nevertheless, it has been widely assumed that they are both gay. They worked extensively with gay icons including Dusty Springfield and Liza Minnelli. The video for one of their most famous songs, It’s A Sin, was directed by out gay British filmmaker Derek Jarman. The queerness of this number 1 hit (released the same year as The Living Daylights) is barely even coded and the subtext was definitively brought to the surface recently in a 2021 Brit Awards performance by out gay artists Olly Alexander and Elton John.
The Pet Shop Boys were scheduled to perform alongside them but pulled out for reasons that are unclear. The tabloids have speculated they were uncomfortable being in the centre of such a ‘celebration of gayness’ but considering their outspoken support for gay rights over the years I find this unlikely. Around the time of The Living Daylights’ production they joined the fight against Section 28 by playing at a fundraiser. They were vocal in their condementation of the legislation which set gay rights back by decades and ruined countless lives.
Too gay to feature?
The reality is that we will probably never know why the Pet Shop Boys didn’t get The Living Daylights gig. But I can’t escape the feeling that their associating with queer culture may have contributed to them not being selected. Remember that the mid-late 1980s was not a good time (to put it mildly) for gay people . The history of gay rights is not one of linear improvement over time; it’s more a series of ups and downs. The 1980s was definitely a down.
Were they simply too gay to be chosen for a James Bond film, that bastion of heteronormativity, especially in the midst of the AIDS pandemic which further stigmatised supposedly promiscous gays?
Although the Eon Bond series has featured the work of gay songwriters since 1963 (Lionel Bart’s From Russia, With Love) we didn’t have an out queer performer until 1997, when Surrender (sang by out lesbian k d lang) was placed over the end credits. Again, did her queerness make her less marketable than Sheryl Crow? It would take until 2015 for a song by a performer openly identifying as gay (and since 2019, non-binary) to appear over the title sequence. The most high-profile song by a queer performer is in the non-Eon Bond, Casino Royale (1967), The Look of Love by Dusty Springfield, friend of the Pet Shop Boys.
Never fade away
What survives of the Pet Shop Boys’ work on the film is a couple of instrumental demos available as a bootleg (and YouTube) and a finished song with lyrics released a few years later and recorded - twice - with the assistance of a high-profile performer from No Time To Die.
Unlike their pop songs, there’s nothing especially ‘gay’ about the music Tennant and Lowe wrote for The Living Daylights. It’s more synth heavy than we would have been used to in 1987, although recall that John Barry was employing synthesisers as early as 1969 and he would incorporate a lot of electronic instrumentation into his score for The Living Daylights, reflecting the popular music of the period. Barry’s score for the film is one of my favourite scores - not just one of my favourite Bond scores. So I’m not saying I wish the Pet Shop Boys had scored the film instead of Barry. But their music is refreshingly different, perhaps too different for some, although - I would argue - not as different as the score (and song) Eric Serra presented in GoldenEye.
Take a listen for yourself. See what you think.
‘Theme for James Bond #1’ (instrumental)
The first of two tracks previously only available as a bootleg.
I think this track would sound perfectly at home in a Bond film, especially when incorporated into the score. Imagine a slightly more urgent version over the pre-titles sequence as Bond chases the enemy agent who has just murdered one of his colleagues. Or the chase across the ice in the Aston Martin.
It would work even better as a song in its own right. Fortunately, we sort of get to hear this courtesy of them using the music on a later track:
This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave
This version of the opening titles for The Living Daylights, redone by Sam Rogers, uses the Pet Shop Boys song and imagines what they would look like with originally-cast Bond Pierce Brosnan in the role.
The song appears as track 2 on their 1990 album Behaviour. According to those liner notes accompanying a re-release of the album, Tennant and Lowe said that, although the song had been ‘rejected’, they stuck to their Bondian guns and didn’t rework the music, keeping a signature sound:
“That's why you have the guitar at the start, which is a Stratocaster sample I'm playing. It has my trademark pitch-bend at the end. I love twang.”
According to the liner notes, an actual guitar is played on the track by none other than Johnny Marr, who plays twangy guitar on the song and score of No Time To Die. Marr also played live on Pet Shop Boys’ song in a 2012 BBC recording. This is the most Bond-like performance of the song, helped no end by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra bringing a lush Barry-esque sound.
Incidentally, the orchestra on the original 1990 recording of This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave was arranged and conducted by Angelo Badalamenti, most famous for his collaborations with David Lynch. The mind boggles at the possibility of a Lynch-directed Bond film scored by Badalamenti.
Everything’s the same?
My first impression of the lyrics for This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave (written after a-ha’s The Living Daylights) was that they had little in common with Bond.
a-ha:
Comes the morning and the headlights fade away
Hundred thousand changes, everything's the same
Pet Shop Boys:
Each morning after Sunblest
Feel the benefit, mental arithmetic…
Although both songs begin in the ‘morning’, the Pet Shop Boys specifically use British details (Sunblest is a brand of sliced bread for any non-UK readers). They appear to locate it a world away from the opaque metaphors for international espionage employed by a-ha.
However, both songs are about being simultaneously in the midst of change while being beholden to the past. In the case of the a-ha song, it evokes the liminal space shown in the film: the final years of the Soviet Union, caught between the past and the possible future. Correspondingly, the Pet Shop Boys song, the narrator cannot stop themselves thinking back on their school days and how that might have influenced their present:
I dreamt I was back in uniform
And a candidate for examination
History, someone had blundered
And a voice rapped "knuckle under!"
Living a law just short of delusion
When we fall in love there's confusion
This must be the place I waited years to leave
This must be the place I waited years to leave
It’s the same sentiment - just on a smaller, more human, more personal scale.
In a magazine interview, Neil Tennant explained the origin of the song’s lyrics:
“This is about a dream, which I've had several times, that I'm back at school in the sixth form block doing an exam and I think (very alarmed) “How has this happened? What's happened?" and I get told to get on with what I'm doing. That explains the title, because you wonder where you are and you realize that you're in the place you couldn't wait to get out of. And also we kind of tied it in with Eastern Europe. Schools are kind of authoritarian places with strange rituals and I just imagined now that dreaming you were back in a communist state would be as bizarre as being back in your school days. The words were written quite recently but the music was written a long time ago when we thought we were going to be asked to do the theme for the James Bond film, The Living Daylights.”
Despite Tennant making it clear that these lyrics were created long after their work on The Living Daylights had ended, the comparison with what was going on in Eastern Europe - setting for a big chunk of the film - is an intriguing one. Would Tennant’s dream, that he was possibly having at the time of his work on Bond, have influenced their lyrics for The Living Daylights? Or did the film influence his dreams?
The lyrics include a quote (“someone had blundered”) from Tennyson, although it’s from the queer poet’s most famous work, routinely studied in schools even now, The Charge Of The Light Brigade and not the poem (Ulysses) so memorably excerpted two decades later in Skyfall.
A second instrumental track also survives. It is considerably more upbeat and sounds to my ears like a possible love theme. Things get more typically Bond-y when the piano kicks in midway through.
Theme for James Bond #2 (instrumental)
These three tracks represent one of the countless times where the Bond series has almost taken a different direction. Musically, I don’t find them to be an extreme contrast with the music that was eventually chosen for The Living Daylights. Perhaps the Pet Shop Boys were just misled into believing the job was theirs.
In an ideal world, perhaps they could have collaborated with John Barry. He would have probably found them easier to work with than a-ha; Barry likened the experience to attempting to play ping pong with four balls. In some interviews, he was far less diplomatic. Barry himself was not shy averse to collaborations with queer artists. But perhaps the producers just weren’t ready to take the risk.
This article began life as part of the Quantum of Solace queer re-view but I quickly realised there was more to say about this than would fit into an already long piece.
