Vic Flick, the famed British session musician who picked out the famous jangly guitar motif on the James Bond theme song, has died aged 87.
The musician’s son, Kevin Flick announced his father died on 14 November, after having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Born in Surrey in 1937, Flick had previously performed with the composer John Barry in the John Barry Seven, when Barry was brought in to rearrange Monty Norman’s theme for Dr No, the first James Bond film.
The theme song was recorded in 1962; Flick played the famous riff on a 1939 English Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe guitar plugged into a Fender Vibrolux amplifier, which added a “heavy sound”. He was paid a one-off fee of £6.
“It had an edge to it, sort of a dynamic sound,” Flick told Jon Burlingame for his 2012 book The Music of James Bond. “I overplayed it – leaned into those thick low strings with the very hard plectrum, played it slightly ahead of the beat, and it came out exciting, almost ‘attacking’, which fit the James Bond image.”
In a 2021 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Flick said he credited the “mysterious, powerful sound” of the guitar in the Bond theme to the “plectrum I used and the guitar’s strings. I placed the DeArmond pickup near the bridge. I put a crushed cigarette packet underneath it to get it nearer the strings. That helped to get that round sound … it was a sound we created, to a certain extent, and it had a bite that they loved.”
Flick would perform on the soundtrack of several 007 films, including Shirley Bassey’s theme for the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger.
He also played on hundreds of recordings, including hits like Peter and Gordon’s A World Without Love, Petula Clark’s Downtown, Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual and What’s New Pussycat?, Bee Gees’ Spicks and Specks, and Ringo’s Theme (This Boy) for the Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. Over the years he worked with the likes of Jimmy Page, George Martin, Cliff Richard, Eric Clapton, Nancy Sinatra and Dusty Springfield.
“He was a musician’s musician,” Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues wrote in the foreword to Flick’s 2008 memoir Vic Flick, Guitarman: From James Bond to The Beatles and Beyond. “He always stood up to play! Yes, I know it sounds obvious – but you couldn’t play ‘our’ music sitting down. The real guitar heroes always stood.”
In 2013, Flick received a lifetime achievement award from the National Guitar Museum.
