PEAKY BLINDERS, BBC’s historical Birmingham crime caper fronted by Cillian Murphy, was known for its first-rate musical cues, from using Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ Red Right Hand as its theme to other contributions from Bowie, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead and more.
Now Peaky Blinders creator and writer Steven Knight has a new six-part series ready to go, in which music fulfils a more central and motivating role. Described as a “high-octane thriller and family saga”, it takes place in Birmingham and Coventry in 1981 just as the ska boom led by The Specials and the 2-Tone label was peaking, and riots were erupting across the country. Entitled This Town, The Specials’ complete lyric “is coming like a Ghost Town” seems apposite.
“It’s about Birmingham, it’s about Coventry, and it’s about the music that I was listening to in the early ’80s,” Knight tells MOJO. The cast includes Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, Jordan Bolger (The Book Of Boba Fett) and David Dawson (My Policeman), while the plot involves music as an escape route from desperate circumstances. “They’re four young people connected by family and by friendships,” says Knight of his core characters. “The only way they can get out of the situations they’re in – one’s being drawn into the IRA, one’s being drawn into gangs – is through music, or by getting famous. The music’s in the background, and then it becomes the foreground. They don’t set out to form a band, but it is absolutely a lifeboat for them.”
The soundtrack will include vintage reggae by Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Prince Buster, post-punk sounds from The Clash, Blondie and The Specials, and to play out, era-relevant covers by Gregory Porter, Self Esteem, Celeste and others. The group – Knight won’t reveal their name but says it involves an expletive – will also perform songs written for the series by poet Kae Tempest, producer Dan Carey and singer-songwriter ESKA. “The brief was, It’s 1981 – what would you have written then?” says Knight. “The characters are responding to what’s going on in their lives and putting it to a soundtrack that’s current at the time.”
