Chris Martin’s lost James Bond theme goes on auction with unheard Coldplay tapes | Coldplay
A lost demo recording of the song, said to have been designed by Coldplay’s Chris Martin for the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, is going up for auction along with other recordings from the band’s early years.
For Wax Poetics auctionBritish producer Chris Allison makes available an archive of recordings the band made before their second EP, The Blue Room, produced by Allison and released in October 1999.
The World Is Not Enough, performed by Martin with acoustic guitar, is sold as a single recording in cassette format. It was never released, and it is unknown whether it was even made available for the movie starring Pierce Brosnan, whose theme song was recorded by Garbage (also called The World Is Not Enough).
Coldplay are on record as fans of James Bond. Responding to a fan’s question on their website, the band said the following about the song Spies from their 2000 debut album Parachutes: “The band, [Bond composer] I had John Barry (composer of the best ever theme songs in film and television!) in mind and there was a Bond movie in development, the latter of which was a nod to The World Is Not Enough.
Elsewhere in the auction are the original master tapes recorded for The Blue Room, the band’s first album for Parlophone, the label they signed to in April 1999 while they were studying at University College London (their first EP, Safety, from them had appeared in 1998).
Described in the auction listing as “one of the most important and directly surviving documents of Coldplay’s formative years”, the tapes include unheard alternative versions of three tracks that end up on Parachutes (Spies, We Never Change and Shiver), as well as an unheard version of the Blue Room track Bigger Stronger.
Other batches reach back even further: A tape marked simply as Coldplay Tracks contains recordings of nine songs, including rehearsals of Shiver and We Never Change, as well as the previously unheard and intriguingly named Ode to Deodorant.
One tape, titled Coldplay: 5 Tracks, contains other developmental recordings from their early catalogue, and another tape contains live recordings from the first concert in Chester. Allison also sells rare promotional versions of The Blue Room on CD and vinyl.
There’s material beyond Coldplay, too. Allison produced another Parlophone-signed band, the Beta Band: Debut EPs The Patty Patty Sound and Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos, as well as tapes and other formats documenting the recording of their self-titled debut album and frontman Steve Mason’s solo project King Biscuit Time, will be auctioned.
There’s a wealth of material from the early years of Wedding Present, another band Allison produced, including archival recordings of their 1987 debut album George Best, their 1988 EP Ukrainian John Peel Sessions, and their 1989 second album Bizarro.
Allison will donate a portion of the proceeds from the auction to the music education initiative Restore the Music.
