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"Millennium" is a song by English singer Robbie Williams from his 1998 album ''I've Been Expecting You''. In September 1998, it was released as the album's first track which became Williams' first single to top the UK Singles Chart. The song also received extensive airplay in the United States and Canada, where it was the lead single from Williams' 1999 compilation album, ''The Ego Has Landed''. The song borrows heavily from the musical arrangement of John Barry's "You Only Live Twice", the title track of the 1967 James Bond film of the same name, said to be one of Williams' favourite James Bond movies. However, it is a re-recording in a slightly different key instead of a direct sample for reasons of cost.〔 ==Recording and composing== The song that would become "Millennium" started being written in 1997. Once producers Steve Power and Guy Chambers heard Williams' demo, which already had a sample of "You Only Live Twice" by Nancy Sinatra, they found potential for a single given it showed a different sound from Williams' debut album ''Life thru a Lens''. As Power explained: "It had the more programming-based feel that we wanted to introduce on the second album in order to get away from the guitar-based feel of the first album, and it already had the chorus hook, the Bond theme sample, on the demo version, which I remember mixing before last Christmas." The lyrics were mostly done, although Chambers felt it lacked "an obvious title for the track," and suggested "Millennium" for being "both strong and topical". Then Chambers asked for a "football chant" which only had a melody before Williams came up with "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough'." The whole writing process took about four hours, and Chambers described "Millennium" as "the simplest song Robbie and I have ever written -- only two chords. And it's written in D flat major, which is very unusual in pop music." Writing and pre-production was done at Blah Street Studios in Hampshire. Trident Studios in London were used for the majority of the recordings, including drums, bass and samples for the backing track, and the backing vocals, which included three female session singers and male vocals by Williams' guitarist Gary Nuttall. Williams' vocals were done at Jacobs Studios in Surrey.〔 Williams suggested using a only accompanied by a hip-hop beat. Guy Chambers found a beat by speeding the sample up. The record label, Chrysalis Records, discovered that a new recording would cost only one tenth of the licensing fee that would be required to sample "You Only Live Twice", so they asked for a new string section that still acted as a recognisable pastiche of the song. Nick Ingman arranged the orchestra, which according to Power "was in the wrong key for 'Millennium', although we did want it to sound like the original sample in the choruses and we did refer to John Barry's original score for that", and conducted a 26-piece string section, plus harp and four French horns, at Angel Studios in Islington to the programmed backing track, with a guide vocal over the top.〔 Power said the song used most of the 48 tracks offered by the multitrack tape: "We had about six tracks of backing vocals, and nine tracks for the strings. Then there were the programmed tracks; and when you get into programming, you'll layer about four kick drums to tape! For speed, and to keep the creative flow going, we put them all down to separate tracks rather than spend time deciding which one we wanted loudest when recording. So we had a lot of independent outs from the programmed backing track onto separate multitrack channels, like the programmed percussion and sampled noises. Then there were the unused scratching tracks, and the live percussion --all in all, I think we filled maybe 36 or 38 tracks in total."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Millennium (song)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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