Ed Sheeran says that he almost sang the theme song for No Time to Die. James Bond fans will remember that Billie Eilish created the anthem instead. On an episode of That Peter Crouch Podcast, the singer revealed he was very close to performing it. Unfortunately, the change in directors led to a different direction that did not involve the red-haired singer. It’s not like the Grammy-winner was a bad choice, but it had to sting for Sheeran, who is a star in his own right. Finneas O’Connell and his sister would go onto to capture multiple awards for their iteration of a Bond theme. Not just a Grammy, but a Golden Globe and an Oscar to boot. So, Sheeran has to believe that he could have achieved something similar if given the opportunity. Here’s what he had to say about the situation down below.
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“I was within a f—ing gnat’s pube of doing one,” Sheeran explained. “They changed directors, and then they just changed scripts, and that was it. But we had done all the meetings. I had started writing it.”
“You’ve got to — eventually, as an English singer — want to do a Bond song,” he added, mentioning, “I’m not gonna pretend it didn’t hurt not doing it. If they come back, I’ll be like, ‘Yeah yeah, of course.’”
Billie Eilish Talks About No Time to Die
The Grammy-winner talked to Deadline about how it all came together with her brother. “And it was actually kind of fun to write,” Eilish began. “Sometimes writing songs is a horrible experience. But on this… I remember, I was reading the lyrics after, trying to figure out whether it was me or Finneas who wrote this line or that line, but you just kind of forget. You totally forget because, really, we wrote it together. And it was fun.”
“I was surprised by that, honestly,” O’Connell chimed-in. “We felt so beholden to writing a great Bond theme. The best setup is to write without any expectations. Really, when you write with no expectations, that’s how you get a song like ‘Bad Guy’. You go, ‘Let’s try this, try that, mess around with it.’ With ‘No Time to Die’, we were like, ‘Oh God, we have to write a great song.’ But we became aware how weird it was that we were having just a wonderful time writing it.”
Would you have liked to see what Sheeran could have done with it? Let us know down in the comments!