I may be speaking from an extremely partisan position, but for my entire lifetime - and certainly my culturally-aware lifetime - there has never been anything in cinema quite like James Bond. Even giving a pass to the weaker entries in the now-25-strong ‘official’ series (and you’ll have to read my post from earlier this week to see how the first 24 stack up), the films have, for 59 years, provided a scale and scope of escapism that many rivals have attempted to surpass, but none ever have. No wonder the cinema industry has been hanging on to the opening of No Time To Die with grim determination - and relief that, finally, the film is being released.
This is, after all, Hollywood’s longest-running franchise (anything featuring Godzilla or Sherlock Holmes not withstanding), in an era when bankable repeat business driven by definitive movie brands is what keeps the multiplexes going. To date, the series launched by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman in 1962 with Dr. No has earned a collective $16.3 billion in global ticket sales, according to a calculation by Forbes in 2018. That stat alone underlines just what the almost two-year delay to No Time To Die means to the film industry. As it is, MGM and Eon Productions, the company Broccoli and Saltzman founded in 1961, have spent $250 million making the film (the highest budget ever for a Bond production) and $66 million on promoting it, though no doubt the myriad product placement deals - from the usual watch and car brands to, bizarrely, a limited edition pair of Adidas trainers - will have offset some of that cost.
Nevertheless, while 007 has endured plenty of save-the-world scrapes in his time, the stakes couldn’t be higher for an industry deadened by the global pandemic. Yes, there have been other priorities and, yes, there’s been television and a tsunami of everyone-has-a-favourite streaming recommendations, but there is nothing - repeat, nothing - like the big screen experience. And there is nothing like a new Bond film to experience it through. What the series might lack in Oscar-worthy artistic integrity it more than makes up for in areas that popcorn-munching paying punters actually enjoy, namely a stupidly good time, with the right cocktail of action, confected glamour, a little bit of knowing humour, and a window opened on the world though spectacular locations. Which is why the arrival, at last, of No Time To Die fills me with both unbridled excitement and just a little worry.
The worry comes from the obvious: is it any good? Ever since the ‘Bond 25’ project was announced in 2016, a year after Spectre appeared, expectation has mounted. Of course it did. It always does. The first issue was whether Daniel Craig, who had rebooted Bond when receiving his double-o status with 2006’s Casino Royale, would return. He’d been quoted saying, rashly, that he’d “rather slash his wrists” than play 007 again, but in fairness, he was asked the question not long after Spectre had wrapped. As he has subsequently said in interviews, it was like asking a marathon runner if they’d run another just after passing the finishing line on the first.
However, getting Craig to sign on for a fifth outing turned out to be the easiest challenge for Bond 25 to surmount: first, Danny Boyle, who was brought in to replace the equally auteurist Sam Mendes (who’d directed Craig's third and fourth, Skyfall and Spectre), walked away amid “creative differences” (allegedly trying to change Bond too much). In came Cary Fukunaga, a relatively unknown director in the genre, but whose work on TV series like True Detective had marked him out as an innovator. In, too, came Phoebe Waller-Bridge at Daniel Craig’s behest, to add a little of her own magic to a script already written by longtime Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. All of this further pushed back a release date of what was, for certain, Craig’s final Bond film. But then a global calamity as deadly as 007 had ever faced down forced the opening of No Time To Die to be rescheduled not once, not twice, but three times.
Now, almost two years after it was supposed to be on our cinema screens, it’s here. Expectation levels are off the charts. Enticingly, the producers have been feeding us delicious scraps of No Time To Die through trailers. From these we’ve pieced together that Craig is joined for a second time by Léa Seydoux as love interest Madeleine Swann, that Christoph Waltz returns, cryptically, as perennial nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and there is the usual supporting gang of M (Ralph Fiennes), Miss. Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw). And we know that principal villain this time is Remi Malik as Lyutsifer Safin, while Lashana Lynch has kept people guessing as to whether she’s being teed up to play a female Bond (she’s not) as the fellow 00, Nomi. There are gadgets, car chases and shootouts, obviously.
For subscribers to the Bond mythology, No Time To Die also, we’re promised, resolves an arc commenced by Casino Royale. That film wasn’t just a reset of the character’s “sexist, misogynist, dinosaur” ways, as Judi Dench’s M accused Brosnan’s Bond of in GoldenEye, but the introduction of themes that made the character decidedly more vulnerable, emotional even. It wasn’t, however, the dramatic reboot some seem to think it was. But in everything from the cinematography to the characterisations, the Daniel Craig Bond films have marked a tonal shift from the cartoon-like self parody they were, at one stage, in danger of becoming. The Bond producers have acknowledged that 007 had to reflect a post-9/11 reality, in which spies didn’t drink vodka-martinis and drive exotic (and highly conspicuous) sports cars, but actually operated in the shadows, cyphers for governments with a genuine need for secret agents to be just that, secret. This was key to the critical and commercial success of the Jason Bourne films, which redefined the spy-action genre as more dystopian than Bond’s encounters with deranged super-villains. It was a realism that 007 had to shift towards to remain audience-credible.
We don’t, however, want Bond to be another Bourne. We want “Bond, James Bond” with all the Bond traditions, tropes and cliches. And, it would appear, we get plenty of that with No Time To Die. Now that it's opened I’ll spare you any plot spoilers if you’re planning to go and see it in the coming days, but we do already know that it centres around Bond being forced out of retirement after his CIA friend Felix tells him about the kidnap of scientist by the sinister Safin who has seriously dangerous intentions for the world. As they usually do. You’re welcome, of course, to read any of the first reviews that have appeared since Tuesday night’s premiere.
The one hope, going into No Time To Die’s general opening today in the UK, is that it will break the supposed curse of Last Bond Appearance Syndrome. This is the slightly flimsy supposition that the five Bond actors until Craig have all made final appearances in underwhelming 007 outings. I’d dispute that assessment for Sean Connery (Diamonds Are Forever - No.5 on my ranking, posted earlier this week), and George Lazenby only made the one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was pretty good (No.7), but it is true that with Roger Moore’s A View To A Kill, Timothy Dalton’s Licence To Kill, and Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day, their tenures ended disappointingly. The Den Of Geek website correctly pointed out that No Time To Die brings an end to Craig’s time as Bond after a largely acclaimed run of films, with directors Martin Campbell, Marc Foster and Sam Mendes (twice) taking the franchise into new territory, character and narrative-wise. And now it is Fukunaga who has been given the keys to cinema's most famous and enduring screen property.
Daniel Craig has undoubtedly moved the needle as far as Bond goes, in his 15 years in the role - itself a landmark, albeit one determined by the circumstance of the extended gap between Spectre and now. He caused shock and even denial when first cast for being blond and of a somewhat stockier physical stature than the image first cast by Sean Connery in Dr. No (to the extent that the CraigNotBond movement emerged online amongst those with clearly too much time on their hands). Now it would be hard to imagine anyone else. “I’m in total denial,” co-producer Barbara Broccoli - Cubby's daughter - recently told Variety of the end of the Craig era. “I’ve accepted what Daniel has said, but I’m still in denial. It’s too traumatic for me.”
It is certainly going to be strange: I grew up in the era of Roger Moore, and accepted the transition to Timothy Dalton and then Pierce Brosnan, but the Daniel Craig films have reinvigorated my love of the entire franchise. This, then, raises the stakes of how Broccoli and her step-brother Michael G. Wilson go about a potential Bond 26. Casting the lead will be the first challenge, given that the media has, since Craig first suggested his time was over, been tripping over themselves with names, from Idris Elba, Tom Hardy and Henry Cavill to Richard Madden, James Norton and, most recently, Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page all tipped to replace him. Even Lynch has been suggested as the first female Bond, purely for playing the double-0 Nomi in No Time To Die. However, Broccoli insists that the process to find the next James Bond has not started yet. “Oh, God no. We’re not thinking about it at all,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “We want Daniel to have his time of celebration. Next year we’ll start thinking about the future.” “He’s been such a great Bond,” Wilson added. “Those are big shoes to fill.”
What is certain is that Bond, in Broccoli and Wilson’s eyes, wouldn’t necessarily have to be white and dark-haired in the Connery image. “You think of him as being from Britain or the Commonwealth, but Britain is a very diverse place,” Wilson said to Variety, with his step-sister underlining the seriousness with which they regard the key process of finding their next Bond first, before a 26th film commences development. “For better or worse, we are the custodians of this character. We take that responsibility seriously,” Broccoli said. “He can be of any color,” she added, but stressed the following point: “but he is male. I believe we should be creating new characters for women - strong female characters. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.”
That, in itself, is a key statement, given that political attitudes have shifted with the #MeToo movement. “Bond’s been evolving along with all the other men in the world,” Broccoli told Variety, and to some extent that’s true. In Vesper Lynd and Madeline Swann, Craig’s Bond has been virtually monogamous. That doesn’t mean to say that glamorous women don’t still play a part in 007's lifestyle, but there has been a shift - arguably begun during the Brosnan era - towards less simpering female characters serving more than just lazy eye candy and perpetuating that horrendously anachronistic tabloid term ‘Bond girls’.
The other assurance the Bond team have given is that 007 will remain a cinema proposition. Despite fears (and, surely, the studio’s temptation) that COVID-19 would lead to No Time To Die being released on streaming platforms first, even the acquisition of Eon’s production partner MGM by Amazon has brought pledges by all parties that Bond will remain a big screen attraction first and foremost. Or at least for now. “We make these films for the audiences,” Broccoli has said. “We like to think that they’re going to be seen primarily on the big screen. But having said that, we have to look to the future. Our fans are the ones who dictate how they want to consume their entertainment. I don’t think we can rule anything out, because it’s the audience that will make those decisions. Not us.”
The Amazon buyout has accelerated the discussion. In July, Wilson and Broccoli issued a statement to The New York Times for a piece about MGM bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy in which they referred to “the continuing success” of the Bond films as being at a “critical juncture”, with its future “dependent on us getting the next iteration right”. They looked to De Luca and Abdy to be allowed to run the studio “unencumbered”, a possibly veiled remark about Amazon as a streaming giant. In the immediate term, fears about parental meddling would be unfounded, especially given that the acquisition is yet to pass regulatory approval, but also, Amazon didn’t acquire the Bond franchise outright, as it is a partnership between MGM and Eon. But still, the spectre, so to speak, of Bond being developed as some sort of television spinoff rarely disappears from view. “I think we’re in denial!” Wilson quipped to Total Film during a conversation about the franchise’s future, and the possibility of 007 appearing in a TV series. “We make films. We make films for the cinema. That’s what we do,” They had resisted the temptation of television “for 60 years”.
Clearly, though, the expectation and excitement generated by the prolonged release of No Time To Die, coupled with the critical and public success it is now generating, will only accelerate the need for Wilson and Broccoli to sit down, soon, and decide where they take their Bond custody next’. “It’s tough to think about the future until this film [No Time To Die] has its moment,” Broccoli told Total Film. “I think we just really want to celebrate this and celebrate Daniel, and then when the dust settles, look at the landscape and figure out what the future is. Although I think one thing we’ve certainly learned in the last 18 months is you never know what the future is.” One thing’s for certain: “James Bond will return”.
So it’s finally here: the 25th Bond film, No Time To Die, receives its premiere tonight, at long last, having been delayed three times since its original November 2019 release date, the result of original director Danny Boyle walking away from the project, Cary Fukunaga taking over, and then COVID-19 proving to be a greater adversary than any villain 007 has faced to date. Added to the weight of expectation is that it is decidedly Daniel Craig’s fifth and final appearance as James Bond, having somewhat reinvented the character (in my opinion at least) from the outset of his tenure, as the franchise took on the grittier Jason Bourne films and Tom Cruise’s ever-more audacious Mission: Impossible series at the box office.
Conventional wisdom has it that the best screen Bond was Sean Connery, but Craig’s run has arguably come closest, running ahead of Roger Moore’s playboy Bond, Timothy Dalton’s rugged Bond, Pierce Brosnan’s stockbroker Bond, and George Lazenby’s one-off (but highly creditable) Bond. However, beyond the individual portrayals of the vodka martini-guzzling secret agent - well, as secret as you can get in a three-grand Tom Ford suit - how do the 24 ‘official’ films so far in which he appears stack up?
Here, then, in reverse order is my ranking of each entry in the canon made by Eon Productions, the company set up in 1961 by producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to turn Ian Fleming’s literary creation into a six-decade cinematic institution:
24. Die Another Day (2002)
It didn’t take long for the James Bond film series to border on self parody, but then that was half the fun of it. They have always been formulaic, but also have balanced the occasional touch of campery with sterner drama. Die Another Day, however, had neither the drama or the subtlety of the vast majority of the series, veering dangerously - and unintentionally - close to Austin Powers’ silliness, what with giant lasers and invisible cars. A shame, really, as Pierce Brosnan had been a credible 007. But once the scriptwriters jumped shark with Pierce Brosnan’s final outing, all the good work he’d built up since GoldenEye evaporated. Not even Halle Berry’s swimsuit-clad emergence from azure Cuban waters did much for it. What came next - Daniel Craig’s debut in Casino Royale - was the reset the Bodly badly needed...
23. Moonraker (1979)
The second Bond film I actually went to a cinema to see at an age when I was probably as enamoured with it as any other entry in the series I’d hitherto mostly seen on television. 40-odd years on, however, its flaws are too obvious: while the title Moonraker was, in fact, one of the earliest Ian Fleming novels to be envisaged being turned into a film (by the author himself), by the time the Bond producers put it into use as the 11th episode in the franchise, it was turned into a frankly ludicrous story that ended in a Star Wars-style space shootout. This was the result of the misshapen belief that Bond suddenly had to compete with George Lucas’s then-box office-imperious space operas. Even the ageing Moore looked bemused by it all. For various economic and union reasons, production was moved from Bond’s traditional Pinewood home to Boulogne-Billancourt in south-west Paris. When I worked there, my office overlooked the main sound stage’s distinctive shape, into which you could see how the interior of villain Hugo Drax’s Earth-threatening space station was built into it. Still the most memorable part of the film,
22. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Speaking of zeitgeist-bating villains, Jonathan Pryce’s hammy turn as a thinly-disguised Murdoch-clone media baron was a prime example of the Bond scriptwriters attempting some topicality. But instead of making an interesting - for Bond at least - statement about media power, we ended up with something that you didn’t have to work in the media to see right through as implausible and corny, though the brief scenes of a Hamburg hotel I’ve stayed in myself were something of a saving grace. Pierce Brosnan, too, plays Bond to steely effect, and while the Bondisms are well within the traditions of the canon, Tomorrow Never Dies trades too much on a somewhat dry plot with a quasi-political message that doesn’t properly land…or needed to be said in the first place.
21. A View To A Kill (1985)
Look, I’m not bashing Roger Moore. Like ranking your favourite Doctor Who according to the one you grew up with, as a child of the 1970s (I was born in 1967) you should say that Moore was ‘my’ Bond. The problem is that by 1985, Moore was 58 and the notion of Bond being a virile thirtysomething was getting stretched to the detriment of the film. Not that it doesn’t have its moments (well, they all do), and in the always entertaining Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, AVTAK had some engaging villainy to challenge 007, not to mention the prescient application of Silicon Valley as the film’s ultimate location, before the tech industry was anywhere near the omnipresence it has now. But, still.
20. The World Is Not Enough (1999)
With the exception of a genre-honouring theme song by Sheryl Crow, Pierce Brosnan, again, was poorly served by both plot and script on his third 007 outing. Like all of them, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not bad, but the weaknesses stand out over better entries in the series, not least of which a second and fairly pointless appearance by Robbie Coltrane, and Denise Richards’ turn as Dr Christmas Jones, which took Bond girl vacuousness to a new low. Robert Carlyle does a reasonably effective job as the KGB agent-turned-terrorist Renard, while Sophie Marceau adds a classy touch as the oil heiress who proves more than a match for Bond. But, again, like its predecessor, The World Is Not Enough tries too hard to make a point, rather than deliver on expectations of a Bond film.
19. Octopussy (1983)
A 19th place for Roger Moore’s sixth Bond film might seem harsh as it’s not bad. There’s just something about it that doesn’t quite put it in the series’ upper echelons. It is a John Glen-directed film, which is usually a decent benchmark for the Bond canon, but the film is probably undermined by its weak script and Moore playing 007 a little too casually, even for his breezy application of the role. There is plenty of decent action, of course, which from a cinema point of view would have made it a good night out in 1983, but Octopussy, as the unlucky 13th entry in the series, started to make the whole franchise look tired.
18. Licence To Kill (1989)
Like George Lazenby’s single appearance as 007, Timothy Dalton’s brace of Bond films never really gave the classically-trained Welshman the chance to prove his metal in the role. Clearly he had something of a tough act to follow in replacing Roger Moore after his seven turns, but for reasons best known to the producers, Dalton’s sophomore appearance - even with that man John Glen again - took too much influence from television action series than the adverntures of Britain’s pre-eminent superspy. Aerial scenes over the Florida Keys were admittedly impressive, but the storyline of Her Majesty’s leading secret agent taking on Robert Davi’s Central Casting drug kingpin Sanchez came across more Miami Vice than vintage Bond. Even cop show character stalwarts like Anthony Zerbe in the mix gave it more of a television scale rather than big screen Bond. A 15 certificate for its earthier scenes didn’t help with box office returns, either. Dalton would leave the role there, as the series came to a jarring halt due to legal disputes.
17. The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)
On many levels, this should be much higher in the rankings. After Moore’s stylish debut in Live And LetDie, the Bond producers gathered together a solid cast, led by Christopher Lee (a cousin of Ian Fleming) as the plummy-voiced, three-nippled titular assassin Francisco Scaramanga, Fantasy Island’s Hervé Villechaise as his impish manservant Nick Nack, and Britt Ekland at the height of her Britt Eklandness as the appallingly lightweight Miss Goodnight, but with the exception of a few genuinely impressive set-pieces (including Scaramanga’s flying AMC Hornet car, there was a tendency towards too much 1970s hipness, and even a little of the era’s psychedelia (in the showdown between Bond and Scaramanga) rather than the all-out action gags that the Bond films had established for themselves during the Sean Connery era.
16. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Frankly, this should have been the Bond film made instead of Moonraker, so it was no surprise that 007 was restored to a more traditional outing for this first film of the 1980s, and the last made by United Artists before it was taken over by MGM. More importantly, after the sci-fi nonsense of Moonraker, Moore was given a better platform with which to portray his version of Suave Bond that, arguably, he did better than any of the other six actors in the franchise. Again with John Glen at the helm, Moore stands out amid a less starry cast, and a less trivial storyline, to the film’s benefit. It’s not at the top of the Bond game, but what it lacks in wit it makes up for in action which was finely tuned. Still, though, as with its follow-up, Octopussy, questions were already being asked about the series’ longevity, as the formula was starting to creak a little.
15. Quantum Of Solace (2008)
Frankly, I’ve wrestled with this ranking of Daniel Craig’s second Bond film. Because, as I think you’ll gather by the end of this post, I’ve been a huge fan of Craig as 007 and, equally, have loved what the three directors (in terms of films released to date) have done with him. Quantum was very much a postscript to the rebooting Casino Royale, rather than its sequel, which was a little bit of a shame. Even Craig has admitted that it "wasn’t quite what it should have been", but in mitigation, producer Barbara Broccoli has cited a Hollywood writers’ strike, and also the prospect of an actor’s walkout as a debilitation on Quantum’s development. Nevertheless, the opening sequence car chase through Italy, with Bond at the wheel of a modern Aston Martin being shot at by Quantum hitmen, was truly breathtaking, as were the rooftop scenes in Siena after Mr. White’s double-agent had shot their way out of MI6’s clutches - all skilfully arranged by director Marc Foster. Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene took a new twist on the traditionally cat-stroking Bond baddie, but there was an unsatisfying dryness to the outcome of the film, not to mention a shorter length than most others in the series. Still, it’s not bad and, if I was in a more generous mood, would have placed it higher than 15th.
14. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
On artistic merit alone, Quantum Of Solace should indeed be higher than this, a film released almost 30 years beforehand. The Spy Who Loved Me, however, became the reference point for Bond films past, present and future, as well as being the one where it all fell into place for Roger Moore in his third appearance. While being somewhat reminiscent of You Only Live Twice (instead of satellites being gobbled up in space we had nuclear submarines captured at sea), veteran director Lewis Gilbert orchestrated arguably the coolest opening sequence ever committed to a Bond film - or, indeed, any film ever - with 007 chased down a ski slope by KGB agents until he flies off a cliff to be saved by a Union Flag-themed parachute opening with audacious flourish. We also dipped back into the Cold War, albeit with signs of Anglo-Soviet detente in the form of Barbara Bach, and Q Branch coming up with its best gadget since the Aston Martin DB5 - a Lotus Esprit that becomes a rocket-firing submarine. In Curt Jürgens, as the web-handed eco-villain Stromberg, you had another memorable baddie, accompanied by Richard Kiel’s van roof-chomping Jaws. Throw in some stunning Sardinian scenery and you have a Bond film - my first at the cinema - that remains memorable to this day. Better entries have been made - this is still 14th - but already we’re into the part of this ranking where it’s like choosing a favourite child in a very large brood of offspring.
13. The Living Daylights (1987)
With Timothy Dalton, 007, lost the arch camp that had increasingly accompanied Roger Moore as he grew older (and the Bond films become more like Carry On Spying), and instead introduced an intensity that returned the character to Sean Connery’s darker moments. The Living Daylights, too, applied an intelligent approach to Cold War politics without becoming too seriousness (the obligatory ski chase involving Dalton and Maryam d'Abo sliding down a mountain in a cello case is a classic), although it moved through familiar east European settings with vintage spy film style, before ending - very presciently - in Soviet invasion-era Afghanistan - and an absolutely brilliant climax involving Bond battling a baddie and a ticking bomb at the back of a Hercules over the Khyber Pass. A Bond masterclass from the Bond veteran director John Glen.
12. GoldenEye (1995)
After the lengthy legal wrangling that also saw Timothy Dalton resign his licence to kill, the Broccoli family finally got their man. Pierce Brosnan had been earmarked for Bond by Cubby Broccoli ever since they’d met on the set of For Your Eyes Only, but contractual obligations to the TV series Remington Steele had kept the smooth Irishman at arms length until the middle of cinema Bond’s fourth decade. Broccoli’s patience was richly rewarded, with Brosnan combining the eye-twinkling charm of Roger Moore with a degree of the sophistication that Sean Connery had beneath that sturdy Glaswegian exterior, two factors that, to be honest had been missing from Dalton’s colder interpretation of the character. There was much to like about GoldenEye, which is easily Brosnan’s best in the series. It felt modern, and moved the character on satisfactorily, introducing Judi Dench as the first female M, whose introduction to her star agent is to call him “a sexist, mysognist dinosaur”, giving the Bond franchise a healthy kick in the pants in the process (while also acknowledging the contemporary dismantling of the Soviet Union). Martin Campbell’s direction was crisp, with little wasted in terms of the plot or the set pieces. Welcome back, Mr. Bond.
11. Dr No (1962)
The one that started it all. The one that gave us “Bond, James Bond.” Shortly before Dr. No appeared in cinemas, Darryl F. Zanuck’s D-Day epic The Longest Day appeared, setting the trend for the next couple of decades of grandiose film-making involving as many star names as you could cram on to a billboard (John Wayne, Kenneth More, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Peter Lawford, Rod Steiger, Kurt Jürgens, George Segal, Robert Wagner and Paul Anka amongst them. Indeed, such was the number of superstars in the three-hour black-and-white marathon that some made only virtual cameos. Amongst the line-up was a former milkman and amateur bodybuilder from Edinburgh, playing a lowly conscript in the Normany landings. The Longest Day would become the highest-grossing film of 1962. Two weeks after its release, Dr. No was released, heralding the start of the most enduring - and lucrative - franchise in film history. For this, alone, it deserves prominence in the 007 rankings. While it didn’t contain any of the gadgets and visual gags that would become the stock-in-trade of both Bond and its numerous parodies in the six decades to come, it established Sean Connery as, for many, the definitive 007, and in a film that, in retrospect, appears closest of all to Fleming’s literary characterisation. Of course, compared with the later Connery films, Dr. No was made on a very tentative budget, in total contrast to most of the mainstream films of 1962, but there was something decidedly expansive about the first of Terence Young’s three Bond directions, making exquisite use of Fleming’s beloved Jamaica, and turning Ursula Andress’s bikini-clad emergence from the Caribbean to the tune of Under The Mango Tree into one of cinema’s most iconic scenes. Even if the Bond films wouldn’t extend to a further 24 pictures, Dr. No stands out as an enjoyable and engaging ‘60s spy film, with colour and wit, as opposed to the tendency towards bleak Cold War themes in other examples of the genre. What it also introduced is, arguably, the most famous signature music in film history - played over the equally distinct gun barrel opening - and featuring a dark, distorted electric guitar riff (apparently written in just two minutes) at a moment in music history when rock and roll was still in its infancy, and mainstream cinema audiences were only likely to respond to orchestral scores and easy-listening music.
10. Spectre
What we now know as Daniel Craig’s penultimate Bond film had a tough act to follow in Skyfall. By now, too, there was a story arc to continue, after the Vesper Lynd/Quantum thread, and the introduction - in concept - of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Skyfall. Here, Blofeld is finally revealed, this time in the guise of Christoph Waltz. The trouble with Spectre is that it does have an impossible task after Skyfall - a task made harder by the fact that Sam Mendes directed both. Spectre has divided opinion amongst Bond fans, with some (including critics) branding it a disappointment. I think that’s harsh: all of the Craig films have been subtly dark and notably grittier than any in 007 history. Perhaps the ending is a little weak, with Bond encountering his arch-nemesis after yet another attempt to blow up the MI6 headquarters (one of our greatest national jokes - the Secret Intelligence Service located in one of the most prominent buildings on the London riverside, right next to Vauxhall Station…), but getting there meant plenty of terrific Bond romps, from the Day Of The Dead opening set-piece in Mexico City to the car chase in Rome, and then 007 chasing down the kidnapped Léa Seydoux in a plane eventually shorn of its wings.
9. Thunderball (1965)
We reach single figures in this ranking with Sean Connery’s fourth instalment, and another example of a hard act to follow, coming straight after the genre-defining Goldfinger. Thunderball was actually meant to be the first Fleming novel to be adapted for the big screen, but it became the centre of complex legal wrangling between Fleming and producers over claims that the book was actually based on an original screenplay. That legal dispute wasn’t resolved until as recently as 2006. That not withstanding, Thunderball booked a solid entry in the series, a ‘proper’ Bond film, with spectacular locations, sharks and underwater sequences, a clever use of an RAF Vulcan bomber as centrepiece of peak 1960s nuclear jeopardy, and Bond almost dying at a health farm. Of nothing more than a sidenote, Connery effectively remade Thunderball with the semi-serious Never Say Never Again, in which Porridge writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais reused one of my favourite gags from the prison sitcom - [Nurse - holding a sample jar]: “Mr. Fletcher - could you fill this for me please?” [Fletcher - sat on a hospital bed]: “What, from here?”].
8. Casino Royale (2006)
Cinema’s James Bond needed resetting. After the CGI horrors of Die Another Day, 007 faced new competition, most significantly, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, which tapped into the post-9/11 new world order of electronic warfare, cultural paranoia and a very different kind of paramilitary spycraft that made dinner jackets and vodka-martinis irrelevant. Perhaps sensing the acute ridicule Pierce Brosnan’s ultimate appearance had met (but with the actor still expected to play Bond again), established Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade sought to return the franchise to its classic origins with Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel (indeed, his debut as a novellist) and based on his own experiences during the Second World War as a British naval intelligence officer. The Bond Fleming had invented for Casino Royale was meant to be an “extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened” adding that he saw Bond as “a blunt instrument”, attached to ”the dullest name I ever heard [James Bond]”. With Brosnan eventually ruling himself out of another Bond film for, apparently, fear of going into his 50s like Roger Moore had done, Broccoli heirs Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli found their “blunt instrument”, a relatively diminutive, blond-haired actor who’d been building his reputation as a solid character actor in film and television, leading to a standout performance as a drug dealer in Matthew Vaughan’s Layer Cake. Opinion was split when he was announced as the new Bond as he patently didn’t look like any of the Bonds before, not even Moore. Looking back, it was a masterstroke: Casino Royale took Bond back to the start of his ’00’ licence, recalling his first kill as well as the love affair for Vesper Lynd that would be part of the story arc ultimately No Time To Die will resolve, along with Craig’s tenure. New Zealander Martin Campbell, who’d helmed the BBC nuclear thriller Edge Of Darkness, as well as Brosnan’s Bond debut, GoldenEye, was tasked with turning Craig into James Bond, and refreshing the Bond machine for the 21st century. Out went the nonsense of Die Another Day and in came a Bond closer to the civil servant that Michael Caine played in the Harry Palmer films, albeit with a better wardrobe, better locations, and an Aston Martin DB9. The four-year break between Casino and its predecessor built up a dam wall of expectation, which meant that crowds swarmed to see the new incarnation of 007 with a mixture of curiosity and expectation. They weren’t disappointed, and nor were the film’s producers, coining in $606 million worldwide, the highest-grossing James Bond film to date.
7. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Logic might dictate, or at least suggest, that the Bond film which marked its star’s only appearance in the role might have been a turkey. OHMSS was anything but, but it confounds to this day why George Lazenby made just one appearance as 007. Taken as a whole, OHMSS is a perfect Bond film (many will rank it even higher than I have done), and while Lazenby - who at 29 was the youngest actor ever to play the lead - didn’t have, perhaps, the same impact or charisma as Sean Connery, who he replaced, director Peter R. Hunt orchestrates a fantastic adventure. Telly Savalas nails it as Blofeld, while his Swiss lair’s collection of ‘Angels Of Death’ being brainwashed for the purpose of spreading a deadly virus includes a young Joanna Lumley and a pre-Magpie Jenny Hanley. Arguably, though, the standout of OHMSS is Diana Rigg as Bond’s ultimate, and ill-fated love interest, Contessa Tracy di Vicenzo, the actress at her most beautiful, playing the part as the model for Eva Green’s much later classy portrayal of Vesper Lynd. As for Lazenby, his single outing as Bond can simply be explained as his choice. He confounded everyone - including the Bond production team - by walking away from the role, at some point explaining his decision thus: “Fantasy doesn’t interest me. Reality does. Anyone who’s in touch with the kids knows what’s happening, knows the mood. Watch pop music and learn what’s going to happen. Most film-makers don’t watch and aren’t in touch.”
6. Live And Let Die (1973)
The arrival of the the third actor to play Bond - Roger Moore - heralded something of a tonal shift for the franchise. 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever cemented Sean Connery’s status as the definitive 007, returning after Lazenby’s brief stint for one more turn with all the bells and whistles of a classic Bond film, with the 1970s budget and sideburns to boot. For Moore’s debut, writer Tom Mankiewicz and director Guy Hamilton dipped faithfully into the plot of Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel, with a storyline involving Bond in tackling a North American smuggling operation tinged with Caribbean voodoo, and dipped perilously into the blaxploitation cinematic movement, just two years after Richard Rowntree’s Shaft had made black urban themes hip. While this might sound like a convoluted association for a Bond film, Moore’s arrival - relatively fresh on the back of his 1960s exploits as TV’s The Saint (as well as, bizarrely, the US Western series Maverick) did reset the series. Moore, for a start, was not the dark-haired Bond that Connery and Lazenby had conformed to - in many people’s eyes epitomising the character Fleming had imagined. But with Live And Let Die, Moore’s slightly camp, safari suit-wearing Bond had not yet developed, the eye-winking was held back for future outings. What we got was a genuinely entertaining romp that holds its magic still, 48 years on, not least of which the speedboat race through the Louisana bayous that was a mainstay clip of TV’s children’s film quiz Screen Test with Michael Rodd. Live And Let Die was, too, possibly the first consciously hip Bond film, driven by Paul McCartney’s memorable theme tune, the voodoo and, in Yaphet Kotto as “Mr. Big”/Kananga, a welcome break from the Nehru-jacketed, cat-stroking Blofeld role.
5. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Some fans and critics still struggle to acknowledge Diamonds as one of the great Bond films, but I’m always ready to challenge that point of view. Because when you take it as a hole, it’s a lot of fun, with at-times batshit-mad set-pieces that probably provided most of the blueprint for the Austin Powers piss-takes, but not so much that it descends into self-parody. Even accepting that Connery returned to 007 for one last time for the pay packet, he doesn’t appear as disinterested as well he might, and fits into the semi-serious plot with ease and authority. Opinion is still mixed, of course, on the presence of camp baddies Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, or indeed of Charles Grey’s equally waspish Blofeld, but the early scenes in Amsterdam will always resonate with me as a former resident of that city, and with Las Vegas - another of my haunts - providing a sun-kissed backdrop to the whole yarn’s conclusion, we have one of the more memorable films in the series, even if it as far removed from the darkness of earlier and later entries. And if nothing else, it has that Shirley Bassey theme song.
4. You Only Live Twice (1967)
As the Bond film that came out in the year of my birth, I have a particular affinity for You Only Live Twice. That fondness gets stronger at the thought of yet another classic John Barry theme tune - sung by Nancy Sinatra - (shamelessly purloined by Robbie Williams for his hit Millennium…). But as the fifth episode in the series, you got the feeling that Cubby Broccoli was hitting his stride in terms of the What Can We Do This Time? challenge. Thus, the sets were more ambitious, the locations more exotic, the stunts that much more outrageous, and designer Ken Adam’s hollowed-out volcano cleverly provided the Bond films with one of the all-time brilliant finales in cinema history. Perhaps not enough credit goes to Roald Dahl, who reapplied the kooky whimsy of his children’s writing to a contemporary spy thriller (a reversal of Ian Fleming also writing Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang), or director Lewis Gilbert’s expansive vision, injecting the same sense of big-sky drama he put into Reach For The Sky, the Douglas Bader biopic. Gilbert would seemingly reuse some of the gags in You Only Live Twice for the aforementioned Moonraker, but that shouldn’t be held against him, as this 1967 entry justifiably sits well in the Top 5 Bond Films for being, frankly, the full package.
3. Skyfall (2012)
2012 was quite the year for Brand Britain, what with the London Olympics opening with Bond himself - Daniel Craig - appearing on Her Majesty’s service with HRH herself. But with the arrival of Skyfall, directed by no less a figure as Sam Mendes, Bond took on an altogether more adventurous cinematic heft. A lot of that is down to Roger Deakins’ exquisite cinematography - the brief scene of 007 swimming in the rooftop pool of a Shanghai hotel is arguably my favourite scene in any Bond film ever, purely for its artistic quality. But in Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s script, Skyfall delves deeper than ever into Bond’s past, with Javier Bardem’s Double-O agent-gone bad Silva (and even a moment of homo-erotic tension between them), forcing an emotional, maternal connection between Judi Dench’s M and Craig’s 007. From start to finish, Mendes created a truly compelling Bond film, without compromising on all the gags we love the series for just to underline his theatre credentials. Skyfall also became the first Bond film in history to feature Britain, prominently, with its final third drawing a geographic line between London and Scotland, as Bond and M take the iconic Aston Martin up to the titular Skyfall, the Bond ancestral family home, for a spectacular (and surprisingly moving) final showdown with Silva.
2. Goldfinger (1964)
Watching all the early ’60s Bond films now shows up their contemporary technical deficiencies. Goldfinger’s iconic car chase, for example, with 007 driving the Aston Martin DB5 around the portly villain’s Swiss factory (actually, it was an industrial park in Wales) was as much as the age’s cinema could provide, with Sean Connery clearly sat inside a motionless Aston while a backscreen jerked around him. But that’s looking at Goldfinger through a 2021 viewer’s sophistication, where we can no longer tell the difference between real and CGI. I raise all this in my thoughts about Goldfinger merely to get them out of the way. Because in the third Bond film, Cubby Broccoli stepped up a significant gear. Director Guy Hamilton pulled off the first properly ‘classic’ Bond film, arguably setting the blueprint for every one that followed. It’s a view shared by Daniel Craig himself, who named Goldfinger his favourite of the entire series: “Just everything about it,” he told the Sunday Times. “The suits and the car and the look and the feel of it. This is Bond firing on all cylinders.” After the Caribbean setting of Dr. No, and the European landscape of From Russia With Love, Guy Hamilton took Bond into a more expansive spread of locations (a hallmark of the series ever since) - the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami where Bond takes on Auric Goldfinger at cards, the Swiss alps where he encounters Tilly Masterson, the Kentucky stud farm where Goldfinger literally wipes out the Mafia, and then the actual Fort Knox, where Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus kicks off the audacious plot to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the US gold reserve. After the rudimentary briefcase of From Russia With Love, Q Branch also stepped up their game with Goldfinger, delivering arguably Bond’s most famous gadget, the DB5 with “modifications” that included an ejector seat for unwanted passengers, machine guns in the lighting recesses, revolving number plates, an early form of satnav, bullet-proof screen, tyre-slashing wheel hubs and an oil slick delivery system. In Gert Frobe, the German actor (well, his voice stand-in, British actor Michael Collins) we had one of the all-time great Bond/Bond villain interactions: [Bond] “Do you expect me to talk?” [Goldfinger]: “No Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!” as a laser beam edges closer to the Bond family jewels.
1. From Russia With Love (1963)
It might be counter-intuitive to position the second-oldest Bond film as its best, given that it lacks the technical brilliance of the most recent, with 21st century production values, but From Russia With Love for me combines all the things I love about Bond films with all the things I love about spy thrillers. Made just 12 months after Dr. No, director Terence Young swapped the debut’s sun-kissed Caribbean setting for the considerably greyer tones of Eastern Europe, as Bond comes up against SMERSH seeking revenge for the death of Dr. No in the first film. What it lacks in the outrageous gadgetry that would follow (Q’s greatest contribution is a nifty “standard issue attaché case” containing an Armalite rifle, a throwing knife, tear gas canisters disguised as talcum powder tins, and a string of gold sovereigns), it more than makes up for in sophistication. In Robert Shaw’s body builder Red Grant, Bond meets one of the first great adversaries, especially in their thrilling, claustrophobic encounter on a train, along with second, Lotte Lenya as SPECTRE’s knife-in-shoe-wielding ‘No.3’ Rosa Klebb. We also get a full first glimpse of Bond’s refined pedantry, when he requests a coffee from Ali Kerim Bey, head of MI6 ‘Station T-Turkey’ in Istanbul, and orders it “medium sweet”. I have never known what that actually means - one lump or three? - but its a scripting touch that adds to the overall cool of From Russia With Love that, arguably, the Bond franchise would not return to until Timothy Dalton’s first appearance, The Living Daylights, fully coming back with the Daniel Craig era that is about to come to an end.
“It’s great to be here! It’s great to be anywhere!” is Keith Richards' customary wry introduction to Happy, the single song he gets to front at Rolling Stones gigs. It’s the phrase that entered my mind as soon as we exited the Tube station and saw people thronging to the grand old theatre that I still regard as the Hammersmith Odeon, but now goes by the commercial name Eventim Apollo (and, convolutedly, at various times in its 90-year history, the Gaumont Palace, Labatt’s Apollo, Hammersmith Apollo, Carling Apollo Hammersmith and the HMV Hammersmith Apollo). Because it was great to be out, for one, but also great to be at a gig again, my first since...God knows when. Actually, I can tell you: December 2019. Presumably, then, no one outside Wuhan had heard of “the thing”, as Guy Garvey refers obliquely to it, drawing attention to the fact that, for the vast majority of the three-and-a-half thousand punters assembled for Elbow’s repeatedly-postponed return to the Hammersmith [Insert Name Here], this will be a unique occasion.
“Sorry we’re late,” he quips, once headline proceedings have commenced (as he probably begins every night of a tour already into its final third). He likes to get underway with an audience-softening zinger, and has used this gag before, but tonight there’s an obvious poignancy to it. Like every other UK venue Elbow are appearing at, the audience is tentative, cautiously stepping into the concert experience and its traditions with the added reserve of not fully knowing what the etiquette is - mask on or off?
It is, for many, a first night out in months, with habitual gig-goers having to juggle suddenly clashing shows, with rescheduled dates appearing on calendars like planes in a holding pattern for Heathrow. Before Elbow take to the stage there is polite observance for the support, the Suzanne Vega-ish American, Jessica Hoop, followed by Peter Alexander Jobson of longstanding Elbow mates and fellow Lancastrians, I Am Kloot. Jobson is as jocular as Hoop is winsome, but it serves the correct purpose of a support set in these times to ease the audience into the gig experience once more. Even then, Elbow’s launching into Dexter + Sinister, from 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes, comes as an assault on the eyes as much as the ears, with bright, white staccato strobes pulsing, piercingly, shocking sensorial systems belonging to human pit ponies that have spent the better part of the last 18 months hunched over laptops and smartphones in the permanent half-light of WFH.
It is the start of a two-hour reminder that Elbow are one of the UK’s best live acts, but while they are clearly comfortable in the grand, but modestly-sized interior of the Apollo (a venue they have appeared at on many occasions), you are, very early, reminded of their appeal - the “soaring” anthems that have become associated with the warmth and wide-open communal singing of outdoor summer festivals, rather than a Depression-era cinema next to the M4 flyover in West London.
Garvey is the focal point, but he performs with an avuncularity that is a rarity in rock, not consciously trying to outshine his bandmates, but applying his cuddly bear-like frame and warm humour, to immediately bring the crowd onside. He projects an everyman charm, the loveable mate you’d be just as happy in the company of down the pub as in front of you on stage. It’s an engaging nature that comes across regardless of whether he’s addressing a radio audience, guest starring in Peter Kay’s Car Share, or performing before tens of thousands at Pilton Farm. He is, obviously, Elbow’s vocal representation, but more than just its singer and co-songwriter, he maintains the geniality of a band that produces compelling heartfelt songs without the aggravating pretentiousness of Coldplay, a quartet of similar length of service (“We've been going almost 30 years,” Garvey declares to gasps).
There is, too, a distinctive northerness to Elbow’s music. It’s hard to properly describe, but it’s a north-western ambience accentuated by Garvey’s drawling Bury vowels, unsullied by life outside the region. Theirs is also a music that defies definition, which probably puts them in the “prog” category (Garvey is a noted fan of Peter Gabriel, and Elbow’s first album was cut at Gabriel’s Real World Studios), which is fine by me. You do, though, hear strains of other, equally indefinable influences, like Talk Talk and even the Velvet Underground (especially on Kindling, which appears midway through the set). Because, as these two hours in Hammersmith demonstrate, there’s an intricacy and complexity to Elbow’s music and lyrics, but also a hymn-like quality. Barely a song can’t be described as “anthemic”, a cliché I know, but this is why Elbow are so intrinsically suited to the open space of the festival. Here, you also acknowledge just how good Garvey’s voice is, always at the top of expellation without ever sounding strained. Their songs might bear a lyrical intricacy but the instrumentation of guitarist Mark Potter and his keyboard-playing brother Craig, along with bassist Pete Turner and touring drummer Alex Reeves, plus a couple of strings players (and, I should add, a stageside signer for the hearing impaired, Katie Fenwick - a first for me at a gig - who, to her credit, had learned the lyrics of all three acts) spreads economically across the scope of the band’s often emotionally wrought songs.
Alas, Katie was too far from my Row U eyrie to be of any benefit in articulating Garvey’s wonderfully poetic lyrics, but there was so much more going on in a 17-song set drawn from seven of Elbow’s eight albums released to date, plus the ‘bonus’ of the delightful What I Am Without You, a fairground Wurtlitzer joy of a number, reminiscent in places of Clive Dunn’s Grandad (and from the forthcoming ninth album Flying Dream 1), which was sandwiched by one of their earliest, The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, and most recent, White Noise White Heat. There were the obligatory singalongs, an inescapable aspect of an Elbow show, starting early with Mirrorball, along with the arm-sailing Magnificent (She Says) and Grounds For Divorce (with Garvey orchestrating a three-part crowd harmony as warm-up to the song's “wooah-woah” chorus), all leading up to the festival behemoth that is One Day Like This. It is, always has, and forever will be a communal pile-in event in its own right, and even if you don’t know all the words, it’s impossible - even for the most ingrained curmudgeon - not to participate. One Day is one of those songs that other acts must be truly envious of, such is its emphatic closing-number nature, but it provides not only the show’s conclusion, but a final paragraph on the nature of the Elbow canon. The strings, too, made me wonder that it must surely only be a matter of time before Garvey & Co get the nod from the Bond producers to produce a theme.
The term ‘emotional’ when applied to pop music can often mean durge or, at risk of enraging those who feel otherwise, Adele’s first couple of albums, at least. Elbow transcend that with intelligence and music that commands the ear, all wrapped in the pleasing personality that is the easy-going frontman, so lacking in commonly-found rock star traits. As a return to gigging goes, we probably couldn't have done any better.
I would never say that flying domestically in the United States before 9/11 was as straightforward as catching a bus, but it did seem like just another form of stagecoach traversing the great American prairies. You would turn up at the airport, collect your boarding pass and, more or less, board your plane with much the same ease as taking a Greyhound bus or an Amtrak train. The logistics of a continental nation were such that domestic aviation was simply a means of getting about for business or pleasure. But that was before 19 terrorists turned four otherwise mundane flights into cruise missiles. It was before a 28-year-old from “leafy” Bromley tried to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoes three months later. It was before the world entered two decades of conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, with that conflict subsequently transported back to the Manchester Arena, Le Bataclan, Borough Market, Bali and elsewhere. And we can’t expect that export drive to end just because the “mission” in Afghanistan, at least, has apparently now ended.
Almost a month to the day after 9/11 I flew from California to New York for a trade show. My flight from San Francisco to Newark was the exact reverse route of United Airlines Flight 93, the plane brought down in rural Pennsylvania by passengers heroically trying to wrest control back from hijackers presumably targeting the White House or the Capitol in Washington DC. The plane taking me north-east was a widebody Boeing 767, a pretty redundant appointment given that there could only have been 30 passengers on board. Often on lightly filled flights you’d get a choice of seats but this one had a choice of entire rows. A heavily bearded man wearing combat-style cargo trousers walked down the aisle to a seat somewhere behind me. The few eyes sat around the economy cabin followed him with a hint of suspicion and even a little fear. These were febrile times.
At the show itself some of my colleagues decided they wanted to visit Ground Zero. I couldn’t. Even out of respect, it was too soon to gawp at the hole in Lower Manhattan that had once been the World Trade Center’s North and South towers before being reduced to a pile of rubble, twisted metal and the remains of occupants and the emergency responders sent in to rescue them. An estimated 25,000 workers in the World Trade Center were saved. 2,606 died as a result of the collapse of the Twin Towers and destruction of adjacent buildings. Some victims only came to be identified years later by strands of hair and bone fragments.
It would be 12 years (and various trips to New York later) before I could finally bring myself to visit Ground Zero. In the end, it was to see the then-newly opened 9/11 Memorial and its two reflecting pools, built on the towers’ footprint. It was impossible to hold back tears reading the names of victims inscribed on bronze parapets enclosing the pools. Many were of firefighters who’d gone into the stricken towers and didn’t come out. Entire ladder companies wiped out doing their jobs. Tragically, even this roll call only represents a proportion of 9/11’s casualties, when you factor in those who’ve died since from health conditions seemingly caused by the toxic dust and ash that enveloped the warren of streets in New York’s financial district that Tuesday morning, 20 years ago today.
When I went to New York in October 2001 for the trade show, the city had already reverted to its usual stoic self. During a break in the event I went uptown to see my ‘New York boss’, who was based in one of the Rockefeller Center towers on 6th Avenue. As the events of 9/11 were unfolding, he and his team at our company’s North American corporate headquarters had been instructed to evacuate their 54-story building. A month on, I emerged from my meeting at the same building onto Avenue Of The Americas to see a brace of fire engines barreling northwards, lights ablaze and sirens wailing. Normally locals ignored such aural intrusion, regarding it as part of the Manhattan cacophony - once the noise abates they continue on with their day. But on this occasion, pedestrians, shoppers and office workers stood on the sidewalk and applauded as the trucks sped past, their cabins populated by grim-looking crew, one or two hanging off standing plates at the back. It was a brief vignette of the scarred firefighting community of a damaged city - the self-styled “greatest city in the world”.
On 9/11 itself I was 3,000 miles away from New York, at home in California. By chance, that morning I was up early to finish packing for a trip to the company mothership in Amsterdam. I made a cup of tea and switched on CNN, my daily breakfast ritual. Living on a coast nine hours behind Europe made it essential to catch up on the day's global news developments before my Dutch colleagues started to head home from their own days in the office. Just after 6am my time, a “BREAKING NEWS” caption briefly flashed on screen, reporting news of an aircraft hitting a New York skyscraper. The assumption was that it was just a terrible accident involving a light plane, a possibility given the number of sight-seeing flights that buzz the city all day long. Soon, though, the picture changed to something far more serious. CNN interrupted an ad break to cut to live images of a horizontal gash between the 93rd and 99th floors of the northern façade of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Smoke was billowing from the fissure that had been created at 8.46am EDT by an American Airlines Boeing 767 slamming into it on full throttle.
At 9.03am, a second 767 flew into the South Tower, erupting in a vibrant ball of orange flame, the plane’s rapid approach from the south and its subsequent explosion frighteningly caught on live TV by the cameras now trained on the scene. The first crash had still been thought to be an accident until the second one confirmed something far more sickening. 34 minutes later, a Boeing 757 crashed into the ground floor of the Pentagon on the western side of its outer ring, having also been flown at maximum speed into a narrow dive, clipping street lamps in the final moments before impact. And there was more: shortly after 10am, another 757 came down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, five minutes after the World Trade Center’s 110-storey South Tower collapsed. At 10.28, its sister tower fell too, 102 minutes after first being struck.
Picture: Kelly Guenther
Over the course of that morning the world bore witness to one of the most brutal acts of violence committed in the name of any cause, an event played out in three parts: the hijacking and crashing of the aircraft, the collapse of the Twin Towers and then the response that would ultimately result in the “forever war” that President Joe Biden has just brought to an end. That Tuesday was era-defining for everyone alive at the time, not just in the world’s immediate shock and revulsion, but to everything from world economics and geo-political relationships to national security, privacy concerns and defence procurement. Even popular culture shifted from a Cold War legacy to adversarial Middle Eastern themes as Hollywood echoed real world developments with television dramas like Homeland and 24 all playing on the paranoia and suspicion of a region and the people it had harboured in the planning and execution of the attacks. Not surprisingly, it led to a rise in Islamophobia.
As the world marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, it’s worth considering just how long that day’s tail has stretched, and still does. The plethora of documentaries broadcast to mark the anniversary have triggered precise memories and rediscovered the vague. Even now, watching footage of the South Tower’s collapse and seeing the billowing clouds of smoke and dust looks like an audacious Hollywood CGI effect. But it was anything but. Such images remind us of the shared experience of seeing something so horrific unfold in real time on live television. Arguably, there had never before been a broadcast event so raw, of a wholly different - and horrific - nature that no viewer and or producer could have ever envisaged.
When news broke of the planes hitting the towers, the woman who is now my fiancée was at home in London cradling her then-six-month-old daughter while watching the BBC. That child turns 21 next March. In Amsterdam, the colleagues I was supposed to be flying to see on September 11th were in an office looking out over the Amstel river. Planes taking off from Schiphol Airport on its easterly ‘Buitenveldertbaan’ runway would often soar past the building as they gained height, some invariably heading to ‘New Amsterdam’ on the other side of the Atlantic. That afternoon, they wouldn’t have arrived, once American airspace was closed in response to the hijackings, and any transatlantic flights past the navigable ‘Point Of No Return’, the mid-Atlantic position where there is only enough fuel to continue on to the destination, were redirected to remote airports in north-eastern Canada.
In California, 12 hours after the news first broke from New York, I was still in my pyjamas, frantically surfing the TV networks to see if any one channel had better information than another. By 6pm my time I had to stop. After showering and getting dressed I drove up the 101 freeway towards San Francisco, noting how quiet the normally choked rush-hour roads were. I was also struck by how the Bay Area’s powder blue skies were bereft of the vapour trails usually criss-crossing airspace triangulated by the airports of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. I left the freeway at San Bruno and drove up to a park overlooking SFO. Planes appeared scattered like abandoned toys across the airport’s runways and aprons after the FAA had given its ‘all-stop’ instruction to all commercial air traffic, once it became apparent that a mass hijacking was in progress. There was a serenity to the scene in stark contrast to that which the world had witnessed earlier that day.
Picture: FBI
Only later did the full horror become apparent, along with the scale of the attack. We eventually learned the name of Mohammed Atta, the dead-eyed ringleader of the so-called Hamburg Cell that had executed the plot, and who had been personally selected by Osama bin Laden to lead the operation. At check-in for American 11, Atta had drawn attention to himself at Boston’s Logan Airport by appearing nervous and sweating profusely. Shortly before the 767 pushed back from its gate, airline manager Michael Woodward, who’d been on board finalising paperwork, spotted Atta staring back at him from seat 8D in business class and felt a chill. An hour later, Atta was at the controls of the Boeing as it hit the North Tower. Behind him in north-eastern American airspace were the conspiracy’s three other teams: five terrorists on board United 175, also out of Logan, five on American 77 from Washington-Dulles, and four on United 93 departing from Newark (a suspected 20th hijacker had possibly missed the flight after being denied entry to the United States).
Growing up, terrorism was something that happened in Beirut or Belfast. Occasionally London would be targeted by one of the IRA’s so-called “spectaculars”. There had been hijackings, too, in the 1970s and 1980s, but the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 made a stark statement about terrorism’s obsession with aviation as a means of causing mass casualties. However, the “planes operation”, as bin Laden had called the plot, was on a different level altogether. It was effectively a military mission, weaponising passenger aircraft to carry out the ultimate suicide bombing. This wasn’t the work of a reclusive extremist in a basement, soldering together Semtex, wiring and an alarm clock, but of an organisation with the sort of institutional financial backing to arrange flight training for the hijack pilots and boot camps for the ‘muscle’ hired to take over the aircraft using boxcutters and mace to slash and stab cabin crew and pilots. The attack’s concept appeared to deliberately replicate the precision targeting seen for the first time during the 1991 Gulf War in video of American Tomahawks whistling over Baghdad rooftops and disappearing down ventilation shafts.
In the event, 2,977 innocent individuals were killed as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. 147 died on board the two planes in New York, a further 120 at the Pentagon and 40 on United 93. The World Trade Center body count included “ground casualties” - a combination of those still in the buildings when they came down, including 343 firefighters, 72 police officers and other rescue workers, and those who’d been working on the upper floors of the towers and chose to jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Chilling footage exists of fire crews assembling in the North Tower’s lobby as the sound of human bodies crashing into the plaza outside became a sickening steady, almost industrial drumbeat.
When the towers collapsed, questions were raised as to why. When they were built in the late 1960s developers assured locals that they weren’t living in the shadow of a giant target by pledging that the buildings were designed to withstand the direct impact of a Boeing 707. 9/11 comprehensively proved that wrong: those who managed to get out of the towers before they collapsed testified to seeing huge amounts of internal steel and concrete displaced by the eruption of the airliners, each laden with thousands of gallons of jet fuel that burned so furiously the buildings’ structure was weakened. It took just 56 minutes for the South Tower to collapse after United 175 slammed into itt.
The 24 hours after the attacks were filled with uncertainty. In the BBC’s illuminating documentary 9/11: Inside The President’s War Room, Dan Bartlett, who was at George W. Bush’s side on 9/11, said: “We didn’t know if it was the beginning, or the middle, or the end.” In another BBC documentary, Arthur Cary’s moving Surviving 9/11, ABC News journalist NJ Burkett - who was filing a piece-to-camera in front of the South Tower as it started to collapse - found himself obsessing about what lay ahead: “At the time I thought 9/11 was just the beginning, that we were going to have suicide bombers at Broadway shows, suicide bombers on the Subway. I thought that was the opening salvo of an ongoing series of terrorism attacks on New York. It started to rule my world: when is the next event going to happen?”.
On that Tuesday night I went to bed with the window of my apartment open as it was warm. At some point I was woken by the noise of an approaching jet aircraft, piercing the silence that had enveloped the Bay Area since the FAA’s instruction. I lived less than five miles in a straight line from Moffett Field Airfield, a base shared by the military and NASA. For all anyone knew it could have been another target. I held my breath as the sound of jet engines grew closer before relief as the plane continued on into the night. Next day in the office - where the company’s entire Silicon Valley campus took part in an impromptu service of remembrance for the 9/11 victims - everyone in the area seemed to have experienced the same dread as me as they, too, had heard that plane cut through the night.
Working for a European company on the West Coast meant that afternoons were quieter, but in the days and weeks immediately after the attacks I was restless. I became obsessed with needing to know the details of what had happened. I spent hours feverishly refreshing the BBC website in the hope of discovering something new, about how 9/11 had happened, who had made it happen, or what could follow. In early October - around the time of my trip to New York - the US started carpet bombing the Tora Bora caves and other Al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan and the Pakistan borderlands. Later that month, I was assembling an IKEA desk in my spare room when news broke on the Internet radio station I was listening to that ground forces had gone into the Afghan mountains. The fightback had begun, a response that would lead to magnitudes-more deaths in the two decades of wars in the wider region that would follow, as well as further casualties in the acts of terror brought back from the battlefields to western cities.
NJ Burkett
“We are - all of us - survivors of 9/11.” said NJ Burkett in the BBC documentary and in a way he’s right. If it haunts me still, it’ll haunt anyone else who was watching television that Tuesday, 20 years ago. The denouement of the war in Afghanistan hasn’t brought me any sense of closure, either. 9/11 was the trigger for the War On Terror, with the West’s retaliation in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world, but this only fuelled an extreme ideology that would haunt us further, in London on 7 July 2005, Paris in November 2015, and in scores of other atrocities on city streets thousands of miles from the desert. It manifested itself in the lawlessness of post-war Iraq and in Syria, and just last month at Abbey Gate outside Kabul Airport. Ultimately, in the conclusions about 9/11, it was a manifestation of a hatred that had begun as far back as the 1950s in the Middle East, festering and metastasising in various forms of terror and armed resistance.
Perhaps, like the global crisis we’ve all had to cope with over the last 18 months, we will have to live with the constant threat of angry men with hate in their hearts and nefarious backers funding them, vowing to continue what the 9/11 hijackers started. We can’t live in fear, of course, and just as wearing face masks on the Underground is an inconvenient necessity, still having to remove our shoes and belts at airport security is much the same.
At London City Airport last month, on our way to Edinburgh for a brief family holiday, there were teenagers too young to know why they were being forced to walk through a scanning arch in their socks. For me, it was a small - tiny even - reminder of the legacy of what had happened on this day 20 years ago. Three weeks after our trip to Scotland, Kabul fell. And it felt like we were back at Square One.
