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.
