Listen To Radiohead's Unreleased Spectre Theme Song

Whenever it comes time for a new James Bond movie there are three universal questions that are always at the top of the list. Who’s playing the lead comes first, in case that’s changing. Next is who’s playing the new Bond Girl? And once you have those out of the way the question becomes, who’s doing the theme? We've heard Sam Smith's offering from Spectre, but now we can listen to the song Radiohead submitted for consideration.

Peforming the opening song for a James Bond is a fairly prestigious get. Some of the biggest acts of their respective days recorded the these tracks, which may or may not actually include the title. Today the producers actually go to multiple artists looking for songs, and then choose the one they like best. This means that there are unreleased songs that were written for various James Bond movies, but never appear on scren. Now, as a Christmas gift to fans, Radiohead has released the song for Spectre. Check it out



Called simply Spectre, the song is absolutely haunting and it’s something we can totally hear running over the opening credits of the movie. In the post on Soundcloud the band says that although having the song show up in the movie didn’t work out, they still love the track. We like it too. The majority of Bond theme’s have the same title as the film they are in, though there are a few exceptions. The eventual theme for Spectre, "Writing's On The Wall," became one of the exceptions.

The fact that the band recorded a song is not that surprising. Several months ago, when the official song was still unknown a U.K. man dropped £15,000 on a bet that Radiohead would be the band that recorded the film’s title track. Now it looks like somebody had some inside information that the band had been asked to write the tune. Unfortunately, he apparently wasn’t aware that the same had been asked of others artists as well. Eventually, it was announced that Sam Smith’s "Writing’s on the Wall" would be the official theme. You can check it out below and see how the two compare.



The two tracks aren’t without their similarities, which makes you wonder how much control the filmmakers have over the creation of the song. There may have been a particular type of song that they wanted as the opening theme, in order to evoke a particular mood at the beginning of the film and they may have guided the various artists in that direction.