No, the Moonraker Tapes are Not Lost—and Never Were!

Have you figured out that I’m a film soundtrack nut?

Today, La-La Land Records announced two very exciting soundtrack releases: expanded two-disc editions of the top-notch film music from the James Bond films Moonraker (1979) and The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), both containing music by the legendary film music composer John Barry.

I sprayed my porridge over my laptop screen when I saw that this morning and was hyper-ventilating for most of the morning.

For those readers who don’t frequent film score fan places, you might be wondering what’s so special about two really old soundtracks that have already been out on disc for decades. Let me answer that.

What has been out for decades is the original soundtrack albums of these scores. Original soundtrack albums are not complete. For films of this era, they were typically Long Play record length presentations of the main highlights of music from the film, but not complete.

The original soundtrack album of Moonraker, for instance, put slightly over thirty minutes of the film’s music out. This new La-La Land Records CD puts all fifty-six minutes of the film’s score music out, plus thirty minutes of additional music and bonus tracks, plus a recreation of the original soundtrack album program.

The additional music and bonus tracks includes source music, instrumental versions of the title song, and, in this case, recordings of the aborted early version of a theme song with abandoned lyrics by Paul Williams.

It’s a treasure trove.

In addition, the original soundtrack album sounded muddy on both LP and CD. They sounded as if the album master tape used as their source had been processed through a mud filter. By building the stereo tracks up again from a two-inch multi-track master tape, Mike Matessino and producer Neil Bulk have managed to present Moonraker in a quality that blows all previous releases out of the water.

I haven’t spent any words on The Man With The Golden Gun yet, but it’s a similar story, except the original soundtrack album of that title was a bit more generous and didn’t sound so bad. My friend Chris Malone has done a stunning job of sound work on that one.

The main topic I want to tackle however, is a myth.

“I thought the Moonraker tapes were lost!”

I don’t know how many times this myth had been debunked.

Let’s unpack the story.

Back in 2003, when producer Lukas Kendall was given a budget by MGM to expand five James Bond film soundtracks on CD, and do straight CD reissues of the rest, Lukas wrote an article in his magazine Film Score Monthly, in which he confronted why he could not expand all the soundtracks.

He only had budget to expand five titles. He wanted to prioritise the best scores in the series, naturally. He also had other restrictions. For one, the original soundtrack album content had to be presented first, and the additional music at the end, even though this would present the music out of a natural order. For another, all the CDs had to be a single disc, meaning that material had to be left off the CDs of Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, as both of those titles would have needed two discs to present them completely.

Of Moonraker, however, Lukas said that the tapes were not listed in the Abbey Road studio vault in which the other titles were archived, and he said that there was no budget to do a search.

He didn’t actually say that the tapes were lost, but messages have a tendency to get distorted as they make their way through the crowd. His message got bent in the retelling, and it became, “The Moonraker tapes are lost.”

It didn’t help that respected figure Stéphane Lerouge, who has produced several soundtrack albums for Universal France, mused that the Moonraker tapes may have been dumped by Davout Studios, Paris, when they cleared their facility of unclaimed recording tapes. Davout is the studio where the score was recorded. Again, the distorting power of message propagation turned what was a musing into a definite fact.

Think about it, though. To get music into a film, you must do more than just record it. You must also dub it. It doesn’t happen by magic. The dubbing happened in England. That means the master recording, or at least a copy of the master recording, must have been shipped to the UK.

Indeed, author and expert Jon Burlingame, in his book The Music of James Bond, affirmed that the tapes were escorted to the UK. Forgive me that I don’t recall if the book itself stated this—it’s not to hand as I type—but he reminded me only today on Facebook that the tapes were personally escorted to the UK by none other than Dan Wallin, the recording engineer.

Since Davout Studios was a recording facility, not an Eon or United Artists archival facility, it makes no sense that the tapes would have been shipped back there after dubbing, and in the year 2000, a bunch of James Bond fan club members, who were doing a tour of Pinewood studios, saw the Moonraker tapes in a crate there.

Later, the late academic, author, and authority Gergely Hubai informed me that he could confirm that the Moonraker tapes were indeed extant, archived, and catalogued by MGM. They were not lost.

Maybe—maybe—they weren’t always catalogued, which, if so, would mean that, in times past, the tapes might not have been easy to locate in an inventory search, but they were always there, and they have clearly been catalogued since. I chose and emphasised the word ‘maybe’ in that sentence because I have no knowledge on that particular matter.

Despite all this, the myth prevails.

Even now, some people are musing that the extra music on La-La Land Records’ Moonraker must have come from stems or other secondary sources, despite what is said on the official release notes, because, as these people insist on still saying, “The master tapes are lost.”

Well, they are not, and they never were.

You can, and should, pre-order these superb film score releases either from La-La Land Records or The 007 Store today.

The following images are sales promotion images from La-La Land Records and The 007 Store.