10 Best James Bond Songs That Were REJECTED (And Why)
6. Scott Walker - The World Is Not Enough
Rejected because: It was "too much of a downer"
1960s teen idol Scott Walker would have been an ideal fit for the cool britannia, swinging 60s feel of some of the Connery-era Bond flicks. In the years that followed, though, the Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore singer reinvented himself from popular crooner into an avant-garde experimentalist always pushing and reinventing musical boundaries.
Nevertheless, Walker's shot at a Bond theme came in 1999, some three decades after his mainstream period.
Admittedly, Walker's song was never intended to replace Garbage's fairly generic Bond theme over the writhing women dripping in crude oil in The World Is Not Enough's opening credits. Instead, composer David Arnold and longterm Bond lyricist Don Black worked with Walker to create a song that reflected Bond's doomed romance with the villainous Elektra King; a song which was supposed to play over the movie's closing credits.
The song, Only Myself To Blame, avoids the more esoteric experimental artsiness of Walker's 90s work to bring us a sombre and self-reflective jazz ballad that is uncharacteristically emotionally vulnerable for a Bond song.
The World Is Not Enough director Michael Apted found the song "too much of a downer for the end of a movie", replacing it with a techno remix of the classic Bond theme. And, to be fair, this slice of emotional sincerity would have seemed weirdly out of place following directly on from our hero knocking boots with Denise Richards's nuclear physicist and delivering a terrible "I thought Christmas only comes once a year" line.