Has Ed Sheeran been granted a licence to thrill? The 28-year-old singer-songwriter has been linked to the theme song for the forthcoming Bond movie, with reports that Daniel Craig wants him for the job. Bond 25 still doesn’t have a title and won’t be released until April 2020 but Sheeran is nothing if not prepared. “I’ve already had a theme tune written for about three years,” he admitted in 2017.

With the possible exception of animated musicals, no other film franchise is as inextricably linked with pop music as the Bond series. Over 57 years and 24 official Bond movies, the title sequences have provided an opportunity for the biggest stars of contemporary music to sing paeans to a cold-blooded government assassin.

On the face of it, James Bond is quite an unlikely pop icon. He is a very old-fashioned heroic archetype: macho, violent, sexist, ice-cool to the point of emotionlessness, a military man with a streak of personal vanity and a snobbish taste for the trappings of wealth and luxury. It is hard to imagine him letting his hair down at a rock gig. In Ian Fleming’s original books, the character expressed no interest in music whatsoever. In films, he is occasionally spotted at a classical concert or opera, usually on a murderous assignment. In Goldfinger (1964), Sean Connery’s Bond illustrated his disdain for pop by likening un-chilled champagne (“Dom Perignon ’53” to be snootily specific) to being “as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.” Nine years later, a Beatle would be singing his praises.