Duran Duran bassist John Taylor has opened up on the responsibility the group felt while recording their James Bond theme song A View to Kill. 

The group, which recently announced its 15th album ‘Future Past’, topped the US Billboard Hot 100 and landed at No. 2 in the UK with the track, as featured in the 1985 James Bond movie of the same name.

And while the track remains the only Bond theme to score a No. 1 in the US, John tells the For Your Ears Only podcast that, as a massive fan of the spy franchise, he felt pressure to get it right. 

“I think I gravitated towards the character of James Bond and the films in particular, as a kid was the gadgets, the locations & the travel,” he recalls. 

“I didn’t get a passport until I put a record out and never left England until I had to travel with the band. 

“Those Bond films really served as a passport to exotic places for me and I think it’s something that we kind of took with us and the kinds of music videos that we did in Sri Lanka and Antigua. 

“We were sort of tapping into a little bit of that James Bond thing.”

Admitting their involvement in the movies was “really driven by fandom… all of the band were huge fans of the films and really, really wanted to be a part of it,” the Invisible hitmaker went on to reflect on the impact of the track.

“It was a terribly difficult song to record. If it wasn’t a No. 1, it was going to be a disappointment. So it had to serve a specific purpose for the James Bond people, but it had to serve an even greater purpose for us in a way. 

“It was a big, big record to make… I think that Duran’s involvement did what Paul McCartney’s did; I think it rose the bar on what the theme song could do for a film, if it was placed rightly.”

He added: “It’s so fantastic having a song like this in your armoury, when you go out onto stage, because for all of these many, many fantastic songs that make up the sequence of title songs, in the James Bond series of films, there’s not many of them that get performed live today by the artists that wrote and performed them. 

“So I always feel really blessed when we get to launch into A View to Kill.”

Duran Duran’s new album ‘Future Past’ is available to pre-order now on various formats.