As 2006 rolled around, it wasn’t just the James Bond films that needed a bit of a reboot. The music needed a reset too. And so, with the release of Casino Royale, the first Bond film to star Daniel Craig as 007, Bond’s producers set about making sure they had a theme tune that felt as revitalising and powerful as what was on the screen. It might have felt like a bit of a surprise at the time, even to the man himself, but who better to turn to than the late, great Chris Cornell, a frontman armed with a voice that could do with epic and emotional, muscular and melancholic.
It all began, Cornell told Songwriter Universe magazine, when he got a call from Lia Vollock, the President Of Music for Sony Pictures, who was overseeing the soundtrack. Vollack told the Soundgarden singer that the film needed a song and a singer that would reflect the dramatic new direction of the franchise. “They wanted a strong male singer, they wanted a song that would be remembered,” he said.
Once he’d gotten over the shock of being asked, Cornell initially had reservations about it – guys like him, he reasoned, tended to resist things like that. But then his thoughts turned to the films and artists he most warmly associated with Bond films, going back to being a fan of the Sean Connery films he’d seen as a kid, and also he was impressed with where the series was headed in the present. “I’m a big Daniel Craig fan,” he said. “I had seen many of his films and I knew he would be great as James Bond. I also liked the idea of doing a James Bond theme song for another reason. I’m a Paul McCartney fan and I remembered how he had written and sung the Bond theme Live And Let Die. It was a thrill I could do a Bond theme like my hero Paul McCartney had done earlier.”
When Cornell was shown footage of the film’s opening scenes, he was sold. “I thought, ‘If they do this right, it could be genius’,” he said, speaking to . “Then they showed me the opening sequence where my song was going to be and I was really excited to be the guy to make that song.”
The fact that Casino Royale was unlike any Bond film he’d seen before opening his mind up to what the song could be, he explained to MTV. “Daniel Craig is an actor’s actor, and there’s emotional content to the movie,” he said. “He’s not the swaggering, winking super-agent guy. He’s like a human being in this movie.”
The themes at the core of the film – loss, identity, trust – were things that he was able to relate to his own life as he began to approach the song that would come to be called You Know My Name, he said. “What touched me about this story was the existential dilemma of someone who picks this for his profession, and what he would have to sacrifice,” he told Variety. “There’s an isolation in that; the stakes are very high. I’ve done a lot of living in my 42 years and it wasn’t hard for me to relate to that.”
Heading to Prague to watch a rough cut of the film, Cornell met up with composer David Arnold and they mapped out a plan. “David suggested that we write a song that echoed the film score,” he said. “I started writing You Know My Name and I gave him a call.” It was, he said, a collaboration that was fired back-and-forth between the pair. “It had lyrics first – the melody hadn’t been written yet,” he states. “Then David came up with some musical ideas. I wrote most of the lyrics – he came up with some of the lyric lines – and we did a demo.”
Working up a proper version of the song at AIR Studios in London, the recording facility had particular resonance for Cornell, having been co-founded by iconic Beatles producer George Martin. “It was the perfect place and experience to make a James Bond record,” he said. As a Beatles nut, Cornell was surely aware of a song by the Fab Four called You Know My Name (Look Up The Number).
More inspiration came from another, more unlikely, former Bond theme singer. “I decided I was going to sing it like Tom Jones, in that crooning style,” Cornell said of the Welsh legend whose booming voice elevated the tune in 1965’s Thunderball.
Released in November 2006, You Know My Name became one of the biggest hits of Cornell’s career, also giving him his only UK Top Ten. It would feature on his second solo album Carry On, which came out in 2007, an album that used the creative momentum garnered on You Know My Name as its springboard. “Writing for a James bond movie allowed me to go into an imaginary world,” Cornell said. He had helped to launch a new era of James Bond film and, in the process, had kickstarted a fresh phase in his own career.
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