Live And Let Die | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I have never seen this song (or any song ) live, but @AppleScruffJunior posted a video of Paul performing it in the Freshen Up thread, and the pyrotechnics were incredible.

Paul was asked for You Gave Me the Answer: ‘Live and Let Die’ 50th Anniversary Special!
“Are there any particularly memorable performances of the song that you can remember?”

He replied:

Yes! In the early days of doing it with all the explosions, I remember this very old lady at the front. At a guess, I’d maybe say she was ninety or something. She was loving the show, and I’d started singing the opening lines of the song, ‘When you were young, and your heart was an open book…’ But then I looked at her and thought, ‘Oh God ! We’re going to kill her! What do we do?’ I carried on and got to the crucial bit, ‘Say Live And Let Die ’ and… BOOM! The explosions went off. I sheepishly looked over, expecting the worst, and she was going, ‘Yeah!’ She was loving it! So, we didn’t kill her; we thrilled her!

sir walter raleigh said
Been on a Bond marathon lately. Lots of great themes, (Carly Simon/Gladys Knight/Chris Cornell, a-Ha, Shirley Bassey, etc) but Paul takes the cake. The breakdown in the song (“what does it matter to ya?”) is downright filthy, and the the main theme is just perfect to be interwoven with the main Bond theme in the soundtrack. Truly one of the great rock songs of all time. Paul absolutely knocked it out of the park on this one. 

I think Paul has said that he chose to arrange that bridge with a kind of reggae style, as a way of referencing the film’s Jamaican setting.

I enjoy “Live And Let Die “; but I have to say that George Martin’s orchestral arrangement of the fast instrumental parts is my favourite aspect of the entire record, I think it really elevated Paul’s song. It’s interesting to hear it as maybe the first song Paul ever had to write “to order”, with a lyric that necessarily had to mirror the kill-or-be-killed miliieu of the secret-agent – pretty far from his typical subject matter! 

(Also, I wonder if the song’s title of “Live And Let Die ” was similarly a requirement; or if Paul was given freedom to think of something different, yet chose to go the way he did? What was the first Bond theme that wasn’t the film’s title, anyways, was that 1977’s “Nobody Does It Better” or had it happened earlier? I’ve only seen a single handful from the whole series…)

Also, something that just occurred to me, is that the next time Paul was called upon to write a movie title song, a dozen years later, it was once again for a movie about spies! (I’ve definitely never seen the allegedly dreadful “Spies Like Us”, but remember the single, which was pretty bad too – although Paul employing hip-hop touches demonstrated that he was pretty on-the-ball for 1985)

Thanks for all the info, MMD, nice to see you! 

I remember reading a magazine article that ranked all the individual themes from 1962 through 2019, or thereabouts, along with YouTube links, and I checked them all out, good and bad, the seven or nine I knew pretty well, as well as all the others; although I felt free to abandon many of the later ones after 30 seconds – that Madonna one was awful, I thought.

(Tina Turner, Grace Jones, and Lulu’s “Man With The Golden Gun”‘ were my favourites of the ones that were new to me.)

Monkberry Moon Delight said

I think Quantum of Solace was even better than Casino Royale and both were a step up from the three Brosnan films for Arnold

I assume you mean that the score is better, not the film itself.  I’ll have to rewatch and keep an ear out for the score. I was never a fan of Jack White’s theme, but actually did enjoy the movie when it first came out.