The month of #Johnuary continues with the John Barry soundtrack for Moonraker.

Hmm, I have to be honest I’m not a huge fan of the movie and also not a huge fan of the song either. It’s just a bit nothingy. It’s slow to start, and it doesn’t really let Shirley Bassey show the full punch of her voice.

Even the writing seems clumsy as it struggles to fit the word Moonraker in. There’s no discernible chorus and the name Moonraker is a bit awkwardly fitted into the line “Just like the Moonraker goes… in search of his dream of gold”.

This was the third and final Bond song to be sung by Shirley Bassey. There’s quite an interesting story behind it though. The song had nearly been offered to Frank Sinatra and then was offered to Johnny Mathis and Kate Bush who both declined, so Bassey was offered it only a few weeks before the release date.

Bizarrely an instrumental strings version of the title theme was apparently used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.

The score for the film is actually very highly regarded, in particular the track ‘Flight into Space’.

I think this one will probably be near the bottom of my ranking list at the end of the week.