There's been a fair amount of ink spilled on X Japan over the years in certain media outlets. You can even find recent interviews with drummer/pianist/primary songwriter and Japanese megastar Yoshiki in prestigious publications like Time magazine.

X Japan, however, remain something of an enigma on British shores. Sure, Yoshiki – a classically trained pianist with a background in drumming for the power metal band X Japan – can sell out the Royal Albert Hall solo, but X Japan themselves have never played a single show in the UK, despite being around for over 40 years.

If you're a fan of power metal, speed metal, or Iron Maiden, there's a good chance you'll dig a lot of X Japan's music. But their relative obscurity here in the UK isn't the only reason we're dedicating two episodes to them. It's because the story of the band is absolutely wild, and in episode one, we'll delve into that story in detail. Next week, we'll take a deep dive into their discography.

Grab a cuppa and let's dive in!

We knew this episode was gonna grow arms and legs when we realised that there are 27 Bond songs to talk about. So, now that we've dispensed with the history of Bond music, it's time to tackle every single one of these songs in chronological order. This doesn't include the original Bond theme from Dr. No (cause we discussed that at length in side A), but does include the two songs in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the two non-Eon Bond films, Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again.

It's a lot to cover. So we approached it a bit like our covermount episodes, only we decided to rank each song from 001 to 007 cause how could we really pass up that chance? We also give a little bit, the tiniest smidge, of detail about each film its place in the canon and the critical and audience receptions for each film. And song, where appropriate.

Ready? Shake your Martinis and let's get stuck in.

What if we told you that the musical history of James Bond is actually so much more interesting than the history of the films? And that's not knocking the history of the films - they're plenty fascinating too.

The music though? Super interesting. From the theory and the cultural cache of the Bond song, to the near misses and the rejected tracks, we cover a lot in Side A of our look at the music of James Bond.