Tuesday, April 27, 2010

"For Your Eyes Only" by Sheena Easton



Birthday wishes go out today to Sheena Easton, the sultry Scottish songstress who recorded For Your Eyes Only as the theme to the 12th James Bond film - a film which was entitled, appropriately enough, For Your Eyes Only.  The song was released as a single in June 1981 alongside the movie and would eventually crack the Top Ten in the US and the Top Five in the UK*.

Easton's (actually Bill Conti's and Mike Leeson's) was not the only song of that name in the running, though; Blondie also wrote a song called For Your Eyes Only in hopes of scoring what at that time was a guaranteed hit single and a bit of pop culture immortality besides.  They ended up having to settle for including it on their 1982 album The Hunter**, while Easton's version scored a nomination for Best Original Song at the 54th Annual Academy Awards.

To date Sheena Easton has had 3 of her 16 albums in the Top 40 for a total of 8 Top 40 singles, although her last album, Fabulous (2000), failed to chart.  She has kept herself busy in recent years with stage and television appearances, such as in Young Blades, in which she played Queen Anne.

*It was also the second of three Bond themes to have been sung by Scots - the first being the theme to The Man with the Golden Gun, sung by Lulu in 1974, and the third being the theme to The World is Not Enough, which was performed by Shirley Manson and the band Garbage in 1999.
**The single did not chart, although Island of Lost Souls and War Child did.  It would, however, be their last album of new material until 1999's No Exit.
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