Carly Simon -- Nobody Does It Better

 

Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth to start off Thursday. Y'know...I mistakenly thought that Carly Simon's big hit "Nobody Does It Better" had been used as a commercial jingle for Heinz Ketchup when it had actually been Fleecy Fabric Softener which got the song (strangely enough, it was Simon's "Anticipation" which got the ketchup gig). There was some vague remembrance that "Nobody Does It Better" was used to hawk some household product, and I think that it was the first time that I had ever listened to the hit.

I can imagine that as a kid I must have done a double take when I found out that "Nobody Does It Better" had actually been a theme song for the third of Roger Moore's James Bond outings "The Spy Who Loved Me" which was released in July 1977 in the UK (August in the USA). The first 007 flick which I ever saw on the big screen was Moore's final outing as the superspy, "From a View to a Kill" in the mid-1980s so anything before that was simply through reruns on television. With the usual rule of motion pictures finally hitting TV perhaps three years following their initial run at the theatres, it would have been around 1980 that I finally got to see "The Spy Who Loved Me", so maybe around the same time that I first saw the Fleecy ads. It's ironic then that a song that was used to hawk softener had once been used to advertise a spy whose hidden weapon often...well, you get the picture.😱

Getting back to "The Spy Who Loved Me", it has remained my favourite of the Moore Bond outings, partly because of Simon's theme but also because of 007's Lotus Esprit, the final battle against villain Stromberg, Jaws, and that opening sequence before the credits. I heard that British audiences had gone absolutely gangbusters when the parachute opened up into the Union Jack.

"Nobody Does It Better" was released as a single in the same month as the movie by Simon with lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and music by Marvin Hamlisch. It's been one of the better-received Bond themes and it's one of my favourite Bond songs as a work that has been reflective of how a lot of those 007 themes were going for the more contemporary sounds of that decade compared to the swinging jazz of the 1960s including the James Bond theme itself. The combination of piano and strings of that time, which was also part and parcel of "Nobody Does It Better", has always struck me with the label of "POWER BALLAD OF THE 1970s" and I think that Japanese pop music picked up on that, too.

Apparently though, somebody did it better than "Nobody Does It Better" since despite the fact that it had been nominated for awards such as an Oscar and a Grammy, it didn't win anything. Still, I cherish it much more than those winners. It hit No. 2 on both the charts in America and Canada.

So, what was getting out in July 1977?

Momoe Yamaguchi -- Imitation Gold （イミテイション・ゴールド）

Hiromi Iwasaki -- Nettaigyo（熱帯魚）

Nanako Sato -- Subterranean no Futari Botchi（サブタレニアン二人ぼっち）in "Funny Walkin'" (June 25th 1977)