Ace Records, in London, is one of the better reissue labels in the English-speaking world. They have consistently done justice to the past through their meticulously annotated and intelligently curated compilations. Between their main label and their sublabels, they have touched on genres ranging from fifties R. & B. to sixties soul to seventies punk and funk. The label’s new compilation, “Come Spy With Us: The Secret Agent Songbook,” collects twenty-five songs under the broad umbrella of espionage music.
While the genre is sometimes dismissed as a Cold War relic, it’s still very much in vogue: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which opens this week, is as much a spy film as a superhero film, and there are still spies all over television. But current spy stories often rely on period music to establish their world. “The Americans,” the FX series about married Russian operatives infiltrating suburban Washington, D.C., is a perfect example. It’s set in the eighties and it never lets you forget it; the show’s first season memorably used songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a reminder not only of the period but of the spy shows from the period, broadly speaking, thanks to that song’s famous association with “Miami Vice.”
Back in the sixties, most shows and movies had contemporary settings, and they commissioned music accordingly. Those compositions are at the heart of the Ace compilation. The most famous track, of course, is the James Bond theme, which has a complicated history. Monty Norman, a former big-band singer and composer, worked on the first Bond movie, “Dr. No,” and came up with the memorable surf-inflected riff that has become a central part of the 007 mystique. But the composer John Barry, who arranged the “Dr. No” music, also claimed ownership. Court rulings have generally sided with Norman, and he has won libel claims against newspapers for attributing the music to Barry. Ace’s compilation dodges the issue somewhat by including a version by Johnny and the Hurricanes, an Ohio rock band that specialized in instrumental covers of older songs. (Their greatest hit, not spy themed, was a rock version of “Red River Valley.”) Barry isn’t neglected here, though: the set opens with “A Man Alone,” which he composed for the 1964 film “The Ipcress File,” starring Michael Caine, which was was designed as a more realistic and grim spy thriller that would function as a specific antidote to the glitzy, glamorous Bond franchise. The “Ipcress” music follows that charter perfectly: it’s more haunting than the Bond music, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying.
The world of spy themes doesn’t stop at Bond (or at Bond offshoots or Bond antidotes), and neither does Ace’s set. Lalo Schifrin’s immortal “Mission: Impossible” theme is here, along with the Challengers’ version of Hugo Montenegro’s “Theme from the Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Both of those illustrate the relationship not only between spy music and surf music—similar in instrumentation, similar in insistence—but also between spy music and the music of spaghetti Westerns. As the Bond movies and “The Ipcress File” demonstrate, the genre flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, though Americans tend to know British movies better than British TV shows. The compilation attempts to remedy this by including selections like Red Price and his Combo’s “Danger Man,” the theme to the show starring Patrick McGoohan, which would be renamed “Secret Agent” when it aired in the United States. The spy genre took off in the sixties and quickly became a staple on TV and movies screens, which also meant that it was quickly parodied. That’s acknowledged here, too, with music from Don Adams’s “Get Smart.”
It’s true, perhaps, that the most memorable spy music is instrumental: the themes that can be played over tense chase scenes. But there are also many songs associated with the genre. Here, the Ace compilation does a superb job of both unearthing and recontextualizing material. Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love,” entirely famous in its own right, is included because it was originally part of the soundtrack to the Bond spoof “Casino Royale.” The Walker Brothers’s “Deadlier That the Male,” a modest hit on the British charts but not one of the group’s most memorable songs, was used as the title song of the 1967 British thriller of the same name, which starred Richard Johnson as Bulldog Drummond and almost earned an X rating from the British Board of Film Censors for its depiction of sexy female assassins.
There are far too many good selections here to list them all: Billy Strange’s “Our Man Flint,” Nancy Sinatra’s “The Last of the Secret Agent” (Flint and Sinatra would collaborate on the theme song for the Bond film “You Only Live Twice,” which isn’t on the set), and Matt Monro’s “Wednesday’s Child.”
There’s an interesting story running through the disk that has to do with race and genre. Though Bill Cosby starred in “I Spy” as early as 1965 (the brassy Roland Shaw theme is included), most spies were white. The movie world would have to wait another half decade for blaxploitation and its crime thrillers. But the music was a different story. The Welsh singer Shirley Bassey, whose was Nigerian on her father’s side, sang “Goldfinger,” and though that’s not here, her equally bombastic but less familiar theme song to the 1965 film “The Liquidator” is. And Sarah Vaughan, who recorded an entire album of Henry Mancini’s compositions, is represented by the “Peter Gunn” theme, performed with lyrics as “Bye Bye.” (Was Peter Gunn a spy or a P.I.? Who cares? The song is amazingly strange.)
Motown furnishes two of the most compelling selections, though for different reasons. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles sing “Come Spy With Me,” which was the theme of an Andrea Dromm/Troy Donahue vehicle that was so unsuccessful at the time that it has never been released on home video. But the song is a revelation, opening with a brassy fanfare and then settling into a undeniable groove (the bass line, which is probably being played by James Jamerson, is a master class all on its own). Robinson’s lyrics are typically brilliant, drawing parallels between espionage and a clandestine love affair (“We can share intrigue of all variety / What a pair of secret agents we can be / You’ll be there beside me, yes, and secretly”).
Far less successful, though no less enjoyable, is the other Motown entry: the Supremes’ performance of the theme song to the 1965 spy comedy “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.” The movie, which stars Vincent Price as a mad scientist who dispatches an army of female robots, directly or indirectly inspired generations of over-the-top spy spoofs, including the Austin Powers series. The title song is as knowingly preposterous the film; while Robinson somehow alchemized bad source material into high art, Diana Ross and the Supremes play along winningly, delivering an energetic performance that is high and camp and low on everything else. The movie’s opening credits were done by Art Clokey, the animator responsible for Gumby; here they are. The Supremes sing along.
Cover art: Ace Records
