Licence to Kill

Gladys Knight recorded the title song of the sixteenth Bond film in 1989, written by Narada Michael Walden, Jeffrey Cohen and Walter Afanasieff. Its opening horn figure quotes the brass motif of Goldfinger, which obliged the producers to pay royalties to John Barry, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. Barry himself did not score the film — Michael Kamen did — and the song stands at the point where the series moved from Barry's orchestral idiom towards contemporary chart production. It was the last Bond film for sixteen years to reach cinemas without a long hiatus following.