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Bad Sign, Good Sign (2.52)
Stage Musical: A House For Mr Biswas.
Music: Monty Norman.
Lyrics: Julian More.
Publisher: EMI Music Publishing.
Julian More and I, in the very early Sixties, wrote the first draft of a stage musical called A House For Mr
Biswas based on a Best Selling novel by V.S. Naipaul and set in the Asian community of Trinidad. Unfortunately
for us, the show was found to be prohibitively expensive and even worse, in 1960 it was pretty near impossible
to find an all Asian and West Indian cast in London. So the songs never got further than one or two live demos
and the show was sadly abandoned. With a heavy heart, I did what all composers do with their obsolete songs, I
put all my melodies from Biswas, including Bad Sign Good Sign, into my bottom drawer hoping one day to resurrect
one or two of them in some other context. As time moved on, many people suggested I record the progenitor of the
signature theme first heard in Dr No. So, with musical cuts of the middle production area, and with the help of
Mehboob Nadim's evocative sitar and Pandit Dimesh's terrific tabla rhythms the embryonic melodies of the James
Bond Theme, for the first time in nearly forty-five years, can be heard in their original form.
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Bad Sign, Good Sign (2.52)
