On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Although a long time coming, EMI have finally furnished the Bond music buying public with expanded releases of the best Bond scores and I would have to admit that On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the one to which I was looking forward the most. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be as exciting as hoped, mainly because most of the unreleased music is actually quite low key and often reprises music featured in the original album tracks. As per the expanded Living Daylights and so on, the original album order is maintained with the bonus tracks at the end, which makes the album less satisfying that it might have been.
One of the originally released tracks is credited with being expanded (although some of the other tracks seem to be a little longer, but this is not commented upon in the packaging), although the additions to Journey to Blofeld's Hideaway are fairly negligible, but the drive to completism is commendable. Many of the newly released cues deal with Bond's escapades at Piz Gloria many of which are suspenseful, as in the creeping strings and vibraphone of Gumbold's Safe; brass and percussion are added to the opening motif and it builds to an exciting conclusion, but takes some time to get going. Many of the other extras underscore Bond's encounters with the female population of Piz Gloria and have a good lusty edge, although they occasionally lose focus and ramble a little. Dusk at Piz Gloria and Sir Hillary's Night Out (and it's bizarre subtitle) contain inventive soundscapes, but not always a hugely musical ones. It's easy to understand why Barry made the choices he did on the original album (with the exception of the always dreadful Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? an inclusion I could happily do without) as those cues are more concise and stand alone much better.

The final few cues turn the spark back on; Blofeld's Plot features an ingenious, creepy snippet of Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?, while the album culminates in the exciting Bobsled Chase, even if Barry includes a repeating synth wobble that even Jerry Goldsmith would think twice about using. The original album was one of the few to have good sound and this release just polishes it up that little bit more and it really does sound like it could have been recorded yesterday. Quite an achievement given how bad some scores from the same era sound. The brief liner notes are reasonably interesting, although could have been more informative about the music itself, particularly the inclusion of a listing detailing the correct running order. This would be especially useful here as the balance between low key and exciting isn't very good and the overall result is quite an uneven album. The extra tracks are variably interesting, but don't improve on the original selection to quite the same extent that the other expanded Bond albums do.

With thanks to Neil at John Barry - A Life in Music, the correct track order is:

2, 6, 3, 12, 13, 1, 14, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 5, 4, 9, 10, 21, 11.