There are bad decisions, and then there are BAD decisions.
In the mid-1990s, the Swedish group Ace Of Base was ridiculously hot.
So they were chosen to do the theme for Goldeneye, the film to restart the Bond franchise after a long dormancy.
Here's the demo version played over Goldeneye's opening credits...be kind, it is just a demo version, after all...
So what happened?
According to legend, in one of life's nasty little irony's, the band's American label, Arista Records, decided that Goldeneye was going to be a big box office bomb, and that having Ace Of Base associated with the film would damage their career. So they pulled the plug on the project.
Oops.
Of course, Goldeneye was a huge smash, and Ace Of Base never quite regained the heights of popularity their debut had, especially in the U.S.
Year later they reused the song, retitling it "The Juvenile," and replacing the words "the Goldeneye" with "The Juvenile." No, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me, either. Here's the "new" tune:
It's not a bad tune, and I've never been a big fan of the Bono & Edge written/Tina Turner performed version that was used, which always struck me as less than the sum of its parts. So you have to wonder what would have happened had Arista not been so terribly, terribly wrong...
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ReplyDeleteThe lyrics seem a little more on-topic than the Bono & The Edge song. The production would have needed to be significantly beefed up (with Eric Serra writing the score, it's hard to say how this would have ended up).
ReplyDeleteJohn Barry did a lot of work with Duran Duran and a-ha to whip those band's songs into something more Bond-like. I feel like Ace of Base would have benefited from the same treatment here.
But Barry was long gone by this point, and the producers were flirting with other music styles anyway. This could have been interesting in an outlier, Madonna-like way (whose song I like, but it's no Bond classic).