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Adele · S5 E1
The Call from Bond
The producers of Skyfall ask her to record the theme. She says yes before she reads the script.
2012. Adele's phone rings. On the other end are the producers of the next James Bond film, asking if she'd like to record the theme song. She says yes before she's read the script.
Adele, "Skyfall" (official music video, 2012). The James Bond theme that wins the Academy Award, the Grammy, the Golden Globe, and the Brit Award. The video is pure cinema: silhouettes, water, a voice that sounds like it belongs in every Bond opening credits sequence that ever existed.
Skyfall
Co-written with Paul Epworth, "Skyfall" channels sixty years of Bond theme tradition while sounding unmistakably like Adele. The arrangement opens with a single piano note before strings, brass, and a full orchestra build around her vocal. The key is the final chorus: the orchestra surges, but Adele pulls back, letting the melody sit beneath the wall of sound rather than competing with it. Pure Ella Fitzgerald instinct applied to a spy film.
The Call
The Bond producers approach Adele after the success of 21. She has never written for a film before. Paul Epworth, who co-wrote "Rolling in the Deep," is brought in as collaborator, and they write the song together in a process that Adele later describes as completely different from writing for an album. The brief is specific: it has to sound like a Bond theme, it has to fit the film's tone, and it has to stand alongside Shirley Bassey.
TAP TO REVEAL: How long did it take Adele and Paul Epworth to write "Skyfall"?
“"I was a little hesitant at first. A Bond song, that's massive. But as soon as I read the script I knew I could do it. The story just fitted my voice."”
What did Adele do before she even read the script for the Skyfall film?
Goldfinger, Shirley Bassey
From the Goldfinger soundtrack (1964). The gold standard of Bond themes, and the voice Adele had to stand alongside. Shirley Bassey's delivery is pure theatre: enormous, dramatic, and completely unafraid of being too much. What connects Bassey and Adele across fifty years is the same instinct: both treat a Bond theme not as a film cue but as a performance that has to work on its own, in a room, with no movie behind it.
Goldfinger, Shirley Bassey (1964)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Bassey set the template that every Bond theme since has either followed or deliberately broken. Adele followed it: orchestral, dramatic, built around a single voice. The difference is that Adele's version sounds like a confession. Bassey's sounds like a warning.
Skyfall
The song is written. Now it needs to be recorded, orchestrated, and delivered to a film franchise that has been running since before Adele's mother was born. Next episode: Paul Epworth returns, an orchestra assembles, and the biggest Bond theme in decades takes shape.
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