Sticky Fingers topped the charts. Yet it seems that songwriters John Barry and Don Black were oblivious, sculpting a glittering sonic dais on which vocalist Shirley Bassey shines like the midnight sun. They existed in their own little universe. They make no attempt at being contemporary. And the advantage to doing that is you keep one step ahead of being unfashionable, because you were never fashionable in the first place.
Bond is a very curiously British sort of protagonist.
And the music always has this mixture of big Hollywood schlock with proper Englishness. Everything he writes is so simple, but on the button. There's not much stuff that gets tricky and misses the point. Barry shaped his compositions to be an integral part of the 007 legacy, and although they were entertaining on their own, reflected the character of the series and its hero. The drawback to championing this singular vision is that often the tunes fared poorly with consumers.