A
classical girl band, if that isn't an
oxymoron, whose first album appeared in
2000. Bond consists of four members: the Australians
Haylie Ecker on first
violin and
Tania Davis on
viola,
Gay-Yee Westerhoff on
cello, and a
second violinist who goes by the name of
Eos, because
one member of a pop group has to have the funny name.
Bond was the brainchild of the producer
Mel Bush, the man behind
Vanessa Mae, a solo violinist who burst on to the scene several years before Bond with a similar formula of electronically souped-up classics-lite promoted with the simple expedient of
not wearing very much.
Many of the tracks on their first album,
Born (
2000), were also produced by
Magnus Fiennes and/or the
Croatian composer
Tonči Huljić: Fiennes is the brother of actors
Joseph and
Ralph, and composed the soundtrack for Ralph's film
Eugene Onegin.
Of the 13 tracks on the original version of
Born (later releases also include their
2001 single
Wintersun), only one is an acknowledged classical piece,
Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky aficionados should steer clear of the Bond version, which adds electric violins and a rock beat to the familiar
cannonades.
The hit single from
Born,
Victory, is a Huljic composition, and like the rest of his contributions to the album is supposed to echo Eastern European marches and folk songs. Anyone expecting a latter-day
Béla Bartók will be disappointed: Huljić, who insinuated to
the folks back home that the whole project was his idea, is better known in Croatia as a purveyor of disposable
pop music, both with his own band
Magazin and with seemingly any blonde singer who happens to come his way.
The lack of avowed classical music on
Born saw it disqualified from the British
classical chart after two weeks, when the
Chart Information Network decided that 'The dance beats mean it is not really a classical
idiom.' The album, then at number 2, entered the
pop chart at number 36.
Bond's publicists milked the dispute for all it was worth, leaking the news that their record company
Decca had banned them from using a nude photograph on the album cover, and
Born rose by ten places the week after.
Bond are
prime suspects in the controversy over the apparent
dumbing down of classical music. Alongside Vanessa Mae and such groups as
The Planets, whose concoctor
Mike Batt is better known for
The Womble Song, they make up an
identity parade which non-purists might be very happy to have to judge.
Detractors complain that the group are no better than
manufactured pop music, regardless of the girls' first-class degrees from, in Haylie's case, the prestigious
Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Certainly, Bond are leading lights in the emerging
classical crossover genre, a catch-all title for
smash-hit tenors,
graduates from the shows and the endlessly churned out
classical chillout compilations.
Their admirers, however, hope that Bond might attract listeners who might feel intimidated by classical music and will be inspired to move on to
the hard stuff. Haylie still keeps up a solo career, and gave a concert in July
2001 with the
Luxembourg Philharmonic.
Bond's second album,
Shine, was released in
2002 and promised to cause as much of a stir as
Born. Although Huljić and Bond had parted company, the collaborators included
Stuart Crichton, responsible for a
bootleg fusion of
Kylie Minogue's
Can't Get You Out Of My Head and
New Order's
Blue Monday.
Shine's reworkings of
Albinoni's
Adagio for Strings (as
Big Love Adagio) and
Borodin's
Polovtsian Dances still wouldn't qualify it for the classical chart. The waft of
Roma violins on the unoriginally titled
Gypsy Rhapsody might not be too frowned upon, but the samples of
racing cars and
heartbeats on
Speed, and the version of
Led Zeppelin's
Kashmir, might well have had
Shine drummed out in any case.