Monty Norman, who composed James Bond’s theme song, has died at the age of 94

Looking for inspiration, he found it right under his nose, in an unused song in the bottom drawer of his desk.

The tune was called ‘Bad Sign, Good Sign’ and had been written by Mr Norman about a year earlier for an unreleased musical adaptation of VS Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr Biswas. The song had a “fuzzy Indian-style melody,” as Mr. Norman later put it, and a sniffling East Indian protagonist (“I was born with that unfortunate sneeze,” he sings, “and what’s worse, I got into the.” world upside down”), which seemed to have little in common with 007.

But there was a mysterious quality to the song that Mr. Norman realized he could work with. He changed the melody, splitting it up into separate notes and shifting the riff from the sitar to the guitar. He knew right away that he had his theme for 007. “His sexuality, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all contained in a couple of notes,” he said.

With its instantly recognizable “dum dada dum dum” guitar riff, the song became one of the most recognized songs in the world, a staple of the 007 series through six different Bonds, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig. Mr. Norman was listed as the sole author of the theme, although composer John Barry wrote the song for “Dr. No” and has been widely credited with shaping his driving fusion of jazz and pop.

“Sonically, it represented everything about the character that you could want,” composer David Arnold, who composed five Bond films, said in a 2008 interview with Variety. “It was cocky, cocky, confident, dark, dangerous, suggestive, sexy, unstoppable.”

Mr Norman was 94 when he died on July 11 in a hospital in Slough, England, west of London. His wife, Rina Norman, said he died “after a short illness,” but gave no specific reason.

In a music career spanning more than half a century, Mr Norman sang with British big bands in the 1950s, appeared on variety shows alongside comedians Benny Hill and Peter Sellers and helped create the French musical ‘Irma la Douce” a hit English-language stage show, earning a Tony nomination for co-writing the book and lyrics in 1961.

But he remained best known for writing the subject for Bond, a project he almost turned down. He was working on two stage shows when he was invited to score the film’s music by Broccoli, who adapted Ian Fleming’s 007 spy novel for the big screen and was impressed by Mr. Norman’s theatrical work. As Mr. Norman said, he only took the job after Broccoli and Saltzman offered to fly him and his wife to Jamaica, where the film was being shot on location.

“That was a hit for me,” he recalls in an interview on his website. “I thought even if ‘Dr. No, turns out to be a stinker, at least we would have sun, sea and sand for that.”

After a 20-hour charter flight to the Caribbean, he began writing some of the film’s calypso-influenced music, including “Underneath the Mango Tree,” which features Bond’s love interest – the unlikely name Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress – on Strand, after emerging from the water with a pair of large seashells. (Her vocals were dubbed by Mr. Norman’s then-wife, singer and actress Diana Coupland.)

Filmed on a relatively small budget of $1 million, “Dr. No” became a box office hit, grossing $60 million worldwide. Mr. Norman’s theme song played over the first title sequence, which featured 007 coming out of the barrel of a gun, and was used again after Connery lit a cigarette and delivered one of the character’s signature lines for the first time: “Bond, James Bond.”

The film’s commercial success and the enduring appeal of the Bond franchise helped fuel years of debate about Mr. Norman’s role in writing the subject. Some critics have said that the main credit for the song should have been Barry, who later scored nearly a dozen Bond films and whose orchestra recorded the song for the film. Barry claimed authorship of the track, which Mr Norman dismissed as “absolute nonsense”.

When London’s Sunday Times published an article in 1997 claiming that Barry was the true composer of the subject, Mr Norman sued the newspaper for defamation and won. He was awarded £30,000 in damages.

“There’s an old saying in showbiz,” he later told the Scotsman newspaper: “Nobody argues about a flop.”

An only child, he was born Monty Noserovitch on April 4, 1928 in London and grew up in the East End of the city. His father was a carpenter and his mother sewed children’s clothes. The family had a musical vein – some of his uncles performed in amateur operas – and when Mr Norman was 16 his mother bought him his first guitar, a 1930s Gibson, which he kept for decades.

After the family moved north of London to the town of St Albans, Mr Norman began taking guitar lessons from Bert Weedon, a versatile musician who later wrote a best-selling instruction manual, ‘Play in a Day’. Encouraged by Weedon, he began singing with jazz groups, eventually joining big bands led by Cyril Stapleton, Stanley Black and Ted Heath.

Mr Norman launched a solo career as a singer before turning to songwriting in the 1950s, building a career in London’s West End and collaborating with the likes of writer Julian More and theater director Peter Brook, with whom he collaborated on ‘Irma la Douce” worked. His other musical credits include Expresso Bongo, a music industry satire adapted into a film starring Cliff Richard, and Make Me an Offer, about the antique shops around Portobello Road.

He also composed music for films such as The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll” (1960) and “Call Me Bwana” (1963) by Broccoli. Returning to the stage, he won Olivier Awards for composition in 1979 and 1982 for the musicals Songbook (he also received a Tony nomination for the show, which opened on Broadway as The Moony Shapiro Songbook) and Poppy , a pantomime-style comedy set during the First Opium War between Britain and China.

His marriage to Coupland ended in divorce. In 2000 he married Rina Caesari. In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren.

Mr Norman said he had modest expectations of “Dr. No” and was surprised when one of Broccoli’s assistants pulled him aside after he signed on for the project and told him, “See if you can make a good topic because I’m guessing we’re going to have two films and one.” bring out a TV series about it.”

“That sounded like a lot,” Mr Norman told the Scot in 2012. “That’s impossible. It’s amazing that the franchise has been around for 50 years. And it’s amazing that I’m still here.”