Englishman David Arnold, 40, is only the second composer in the ongoing legacy of the James Bond films to score more than one movie. Picking up the mantle from a seasoned veteran like John Barry - whose definitive scores graced 11 Bond films - might seem a formidable task, but Arnold likened it to the passing of the Olympic torch.

"I've always said it's like being one of those runners at the Olympics. The flame travels from Greece and is passed on from one runner to the next," he explains thoughtfully via phone from his home in London. "When it's handed to them, they have a responsibility to keep it alive until they hand it over to the next guy. I think it's true with Bond - I think my job is to keep it in good shape so whoever does come along next can hopefully inherit something which is still vibrant and still important and still relevant."

Arnold has composed the soundtracks for the last three Bond films, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is not Enough (1999) and the current blockbuster, Die Another Day. For his trial run, Tomorrow Never Dies,he attempted to reassure the audience that the old sound could still be cool by "building the bridges between all the great old [music] and potentially what could be great new [music]." As he continued with the next two movies, he introduced new elements, different instrumentation and electronic programming. The end result is contemporary movie music that embodies Barry's previous work without necessarily sounding like the esteemed composer.

"I just think it's got his spirit. There's always going to be a couple of cues that sound like him, but we kind of got a long way away from that, certainly at this stage with 'Die Another Day.' We've got a whole kind of Cuban thing going. There's a lot of very heavily processed electronic stuff and orchestral stuff, which is being chopped up and processed as well," Arnold says.

The guitar that Arnold plays on the main Bond theme, as well as anywhere else the distinctly recognizable riff is heard in the soundtracks, is a Gibson ES-135. He put heavy strings on the guitar, because "you only ever play the two bottom strings for the Bond theme," and it's become his 007 guitar.

"We treated [the individual tracks] slightly different, but at the heart of it, the sound of the guitar is the sound of guitar," Arnold continues. "There's something great about having that sort of classic sound in amongst a hugely orchestral moment or completely electronic moment. It's like all the sudden, the sound comes up and it is James Bond, and there's no getting away from it. It's kind of a great safety net in a way, because it's so evocative.

"As long as they ask me to do these films, I guess I'll be using the Gibson on it, and at the end of the tenure when it's time to hand over the flame, it'd be interesting to stick it in a box and write all the different film titles that it's been played on."

The biggest challenge for Arnold with Die Another Day was coming up with a new take on the theme, after having done two Bond films previously. "There's a beauty but the main problem with a Bond is, there is a sort of formula at work," he confides. "James Bond is James Bond in all the movies, there's Q, and there are gadgets and girls and cars and explosions and chases. You can't stray too far from what he is.

"I took a dual approach of just being more brutal and extreme in my processing of sound. There was a lot of experimentation going on with sound as well as trying to keep the music exciting."

Arnold began his foray into the world of film through rock and roll channels. He played the clarinet through the 8th grade, and it was his father - an amateur musician - who introduced him to the guitar. His father was sent into town by his mother to buy a new suit, but instead he purchased a guitar he saw in a music store window. He was singing with a swing band at the time and left a lot of sheet music lying around the house. The young Arnold picked up the guitar at age 8 and started teaching himself Perry Como and Frank Sinatra songs by looking at diagrams in the sheet music.

As he got older, the punk movement stormed through England and Arnold heard the guitar in a completely different context. He went to London to purchase his first ax, a 1966 Gibson SG with black pickups and a Bigsby tremolo, which he bought used through an ad he saw in MelodyMaker magazine. "It's one of those guitars that I've never heard bettered in terms of a rock sound," he says enthusiastically. "It's one of those odd, rare, stellar instruments. That kind of started me on the road with guitars." He began performing, writing songs and auditioning for bands (he tried out for both the Clash and the Waterboys), while at the same time working on a series of amateur movies with his mates. An art college friend, filmmaker Danny Cannon, was working on an underground English film, The Young Americans, and asked him to come up with a fitting soundtrack. Arnold, a huge fan of Icelandic pop singer Bjork, contacted the eccentric artist and asked her to sing his haunting closing song, "Play Dead." She was just finishing up Debut, her first solo album after splitting with experimental band The Sugarcubes, and she readily agreed.

"We're lucky, she came around and we showed her a bit of the movie, I played her the track, she said yes, we had some ideas for the lyrics, she came back three days later and we recorded it," Arnold remembers. "It developed a sort of life of its own, and it was a bit of a benchmark for both of us, I think, it certainly was for me. I don't know if we could do anything that was better, the two of us. It seemed to be essential what happened."

Essential, indeed - it turned out to be the catalyst that would jump-start his career. The film's score brought him to the attention of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who took a chance and hired the unknown composer to score their sweeping 1994 science-fiction epic Stargate. The success of the film allowed the three to again collaborate on what became the biggest blockbuster of 1996, Independence Day,for which Arnold won a Grammy Award. He then scored A Life Less Ordinary for Danny Boyle, director of the controversial film Trainspotting. Arnold was then offered Tomorrow Never Dies. His other soundtrack credits include Godzilla, Shaft, and more recently, Changing Lanes with Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck.

Surprisingly, Arnold has had no compositional training; he studied scores in school and learned his craft by working on a couple dozen amateur films.

"The thing about film music and Hollywood, they're very results-oriented. The method by which you get to the end is not important," he explains. "What's important is that you bring an idea and concept to it, a take on it which no one else is going to do.

"Film composition isn't about one particular style of music. It's about knowing music and understanding drama. I bring a different kind of approach and sort of rock and roll ethic to what I'm doing, even if it's orchestral," he continues.

Serious 007 aficionados will want to check out Arnold's Bond compilation album Shaken & Stirred,featuring performances by Iggy Pop, Chrissie Hynde, Pulp and Aimee Mann, among others.

Next on his agenda is the film "2 Fast 2 Furious" with director John Singleton. He's also thinking of making a record of his own. No doubt, his coveted Gibson SG will find its way onto the recording, and perhaps he'll replace the heavy gauge strings on the ES-135 and tune it up.