The guitarist Vic Flick, who has died aged 87, enjoyed a 50-year career as a guitarist and composer. He worked with countless leading names from the pop industry, from Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Engelbert Humperdinck and Cliff Richard to Petula Clark, Burt Bacharach and Shirley Bassey, but above all will be remembered for being the guitarist who played the indestructible James Bond theme, with its trademark “dum di-di dum-dum” rhythm.
It was first used in Dr. No, in 1962, and in December that year it reached 13 on the UK chart. The theme featured in every subsequent Bond film, though with many versions besides Flick’s. “I’m proud of it,” said Flick, “and I’m proud to be associated with it and I’m proud of all the things that developed from it. But at the time I had no idea that it was going to be like that.”
Flick was a member of the John Barry Seven when the piece was composed. John Barry had been brought on board by the film’s producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli, because they were unhappy with the theme written for the film by Monty Norman. They wanted something similar to Barry’s soundtrack for Beat Girl (1960), which was Adam Faith’s first film and Barry’s first soundtrack, and on which Flick had also played.
As Flick recalled: “John Barry was asked to do it, but Norman had been contracted to write the music so it had to be Monty’s music. Monty came up with a theme, and Barry said let’s do it like this.”
It was Flick’s idea to take the theme down an octave to give it a gutsier tone. He played it on his Clifford Essex Paragon, a hollow-bodied guitar, because his Fender Stratocaster had been stolen, and used his favourite Vox AC15 amplifier. He pushed the guitar’s pickup closer to the strings by wedging a crushed cigarette packet under it. “Also important was the way the guitar was recorded,” he added. “It was picked up by the mics for the orchestra, and it gave the guitar a mysterious, powerful sound.”
The theme became integral to the Bond mythology. “Bond’s sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness – it’s all there in a few notes,” said Flick. He later noted ruefully that, “Monty Norman made hundreds of thousands of pounds, John Barry made millions from the spin-off, I got seven pounds 10 shillings for playing on it.” In 2008, the original Barry recording of the theme with Flick’s playing was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Born in Worcester Park, Surrey, he was the son of Mabel (nee Curry), an amateur opera singer, and Harold Flick, a music teacher. When Vic was 14, his father started a band with himself on piano, Vic’s elder brother, Alan, on bass and a couple of neighbours on drums and saxophone. Vic had been studying piano since he was seven, but since that instrument was taken, he decided to try the guitar. Having obtained a Gibson Kalamazoo, he began practising assiduously, devising a crude amplification system by attaching a tank commander’s microphone to the guitar and plugging it into his father’s radio.
After leaving school in 1953, Flick worked as a heating and ventilation technician while continuing to play music. He first dipped a toe into professional musicianship by playing with Les Clarke and his Musical Maniacs at Butlin’s in Skegness, but bookings were scarce. He then formed the Vic Alan Quintet with his brother. They were hired for a summer season at Butlin’s in Clacton, where Flick’s playing caught the ear of the resident bandleader Eric Winstone. Flick sat in with Winstone’s band as well as his own, and Winstone subsequently recruited him for gigs and BBC radio work.
In 1957 he was invited to replace Ken Sykora as guitarist in the Bob Cort Skiffle Group (who performed the theme tune for the BBC’s primitive attempt at a rock’n’roll TV show, Six-Five Special), just before their tour with Paul Anka and the John Barry Seven. A few months later, Barry invited Flick to join his band. Barry was particularly keen to recruit him because he was a rarity among guitarists in being able to read music. Flick was given a sheaf of pieces to learn for an imminent high-profile performance at the Metropolitan theatre in London’s Edgware Road, attended by numerous music business luminaries. A few days later he made his TV debut on Oh Boy! with Barry’s band.
He would spend five years with the group, and for two of them he led the band while Barry concentrated on film work. Singles such as Hit and Miss (used as the theme to TV’s Juke Box Jury), Walk Don’t Run (1960), with its trademark tremolo effect, and The Magnificent Seven (1961) were all showcases for Flick’s guitar. Their album Stringbeat (1961) was especially significant for Flick, since it was built around his solo guitar with a backing of strings and prompted a surge in demand for him to play on sessions for other artists. It also contained his composing debut, Zapata, a piece evocative of cowboy movies.
As a session musician, Flick appeared on a huge list of high-profile hits, including Jones’s It’s Not Unusual and What’s New Pussycat?, Clark’s Downtown, Bacharach’s Trains And Boats and Planes, Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String, and Peter & Gordon’s A World Without Love (on which he played 12-string guitar, and which topped the US and UK charts). He was featured on Paul McCartney’s 1977 album Thrillington, and frequently worked with the Beatles producer George Martin, who brought him in to play on Ringo’s Theme (This Boy) for the 1964 Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night.
Flick played on several more Bond soundtracks, including From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. He recalled how, when recording Bassey’s title song for the latter, Barry told Bassey she wasn’t holding the final note long enough and had to do it again. “So Shirley slipped behind a studio partition, took her bra off and threw it over the top of the partition. She said, ‘Okay, let’s take this last note again.’”
In the 1970s and 80s Flick worked as composer and arranger on several Merchant Ivory films, including Autobiography of a Princess (1975) and Heat And Dust (19983).
In 1989 he teamed up with Eric Clapton to record Michael Kamen’s theme from Licence to Kill (starring Timothy Dalton as Bond), but the piece was eventually dropped in favour of a title song sung by Gladys Knight. In 1999 he reprised the Bond theme on the album Bond Back in Action, and the following year did it again on his own album James Bond Now, a collection of Bond themes in new guitar-orientated arrangements. Also in 2000 he published the memoir Vic Flick, Guitarman: from James Bond to the Beatles and Beyond. In 2005 he performed on the soundtrack of the computer game From Russia With Love (which also featured the voice of Sean Connery).
In 2013 Flick received the lifetime achievement award from the National Guitar Museum.
He is survived by his wife, Judith (nee Reavil), whom he married in 1960, his son, Kevin, and a grandson, Tyler. His daughter, Jayne, died in 2000.
• Victor Harold Flick, guitarist and composer, born 14 May 1937; died 14 November 2024
