The world of spy themes doesn’t stop at Bond (or at Bond offshoots or Bond antidotes), and neither does Ace’s set. The “Ipcress” music follows that charter perfectly: it’s more haunting than the Bond music, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying. (Their greatest hit, not spy themed, was a rock version of “Red River Valley.”) Barry isn’t neglected here, though: the set opens with “A Man Alone,” which he composed for the 1964 film “The Ipcress File,” starring Michael Caine, which was was designed as a more realistic and grim spy thriller that would function as a specific antidote to the glitzy, glamorous Bond franchise.

Ace’s compilation dodges the issue somewhat by including a version by Johnny and the Hurricanes, an Ohio rock band that specialized in instrumental covers of older songs. Court rulings have generally sided with Norman, and he has won libel claims against newspapers for attributing the music to Barry. But the composer John Barry, who arranged the “Dr. No,” and came up with the memorable surf-inflected riff that has become a central part of the 007 mystique. Monty Norman, a former big-band singer and composer, worked on the first Bond movie, “Dr. The most famous track, of course, is the James Bond theme, which has a complicated history. Those compositions are at the heart of the Ace compilation. It’s set in the eighties and it never lets you forget it the show’s first season memorably used songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a reminder not only of the period but of the spy shows from the period, broadly speaking, thanks to that song’s famous association with “Miami Vice.”īack in the sixties, most shows and movies had contemporary settings, and they commissioned music accordingly. “The Americans,” the FX series about married Russian operatives infiltrating suburban Washington, D.C., is a perfect example. But current spy stories often rely on period music to establish their world. While the genre is sometimes dismissed as a Cold War relic, it’s still very much in vogue: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which opens this week, is as much a spy film as a superhero film, and there are still spies all over television. The label’s new compilation, “ Come Spy With Us: The Secret Agent Songbook,” collects twenty-five songs under the broad umbrella of espionage music. to sixties soul to seventies punk and funk. Between their main label and their sublabels, they have touched on genres ranging from fifties R. They have consistently done justice to the past through their meticulously annotated and intelligently curated compilations. Ace Records, in London, is one of the better reissue labels in the English-speaking world.

Songs in the movie spy