Soundtracks are integral to the overall feel of a television series. The music in BBC’s Peaky Blinders has left such an impression on viewers that it even spawned a music festival earlier this year, demonstrating how stylistic details convey mood in storytelling.
Warning: this article contains minor plot details from Seasons 1 to 4 of Peaky Blinders. However, it does not include spoilers from the recently aired Season 5.
“They’re still not playing it,” I grumble as the opening credits take up the screen.
It’s a Sunday night and I’m watching the Season 5 finale of Peaky Blinders with my siblings. In this case, the “it” refers to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ brooding “Red Right Hand”, the theme song for the BBC television show starring Cillian Murphy and Helen McCrory.
It seems my indignation is here to stay, as the show producers appear to have abandoned the use of “Red Right Hand” altogether in the later seasons. In Season 1, I could always depend on the track’s clipped tones to signal my absorption back into early 20th century Birmingham. By Season 3, however, we started getting covers of the song instead of the original. And now in Season 5, we’ve lost the Red Right Hand altogether. It’s become so strongly associated with the show that it feels disorienting not to hear it at the start of each episode, which is a testament to one aspect of Peaky Blinders I can never stop thinking about: the music.
The curation of a soundtrack, especially during montages and in the opening and closing credits of a television show, can drastically transform how a story comes across. Through music we receive guidance on how to feel when watching: the selected songs convey emotion, which in turn sets the tone for a scene. I’m sure I’m biased because my music taste consists primarily of modern alternative rock, but I’ve always felt that Peaky Blinders nails it on the music front. Tracks are hard-hitting when they need to be in order to illustrate the gritty underbelly of Birmingham in the 1910s, 20s, and now 30s.
Take this scene, for example, in which Tommy Shelby (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) attempts to carry out a murder, set to “Bad Habits” by The Last Shadow Puppets.
Today, an official Peaky Blinders soundtrack is being released, with music spanning the series’ five-season run so far. Musicians such as Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys, Royal Blood, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, The White Stripes, David Bowie, Radiohead, Anna Calvi, and Black Sabbath have been featured on the show and likewise on the soundtrack. The series balances edgy hard rock with softer, more languid choices to illustrate vulnerability; the result is endearingly human.
“The Peaky Blinders story and the music we use are twins, born at the same time. It would be difficult to imagine most of the pivotal moments without the soundtrack.”
Steven Knight, Creator
In many instances, the music drives the action forward in Peaky Blinders. It’s often used to drown out the rest of the sound, building suspense and capturing the tone of any given scene. The tracks are well-selected as tools of characterization, such as in Arthur Shelby’s attack on Luca Changretta’s men in Season 4. Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes’ “Devil Inside of Me” is overpoweringly apt, but we also know Arthur isn’t unilaterally bad – his internal struggles are laid bare with the help of the soundtrack.
As if that weren’t enough, this past September saw a music festival crop up as another means of hyping the new season: The Legitimate Peaky Blinders Festival. A lineup of artists whose music was played in the television series was (flat)capped off with secret special guest Liam Gallagher of Oasis fame (or rather, notoriety). Fans dressed up in their best tweeds and three-piecers to attend the festival in none other than Birmingham, the home of the historic gang both in real life and in the series.
“You just know when a song is ‘Peaky’. The artists are outsiders. They have resisted the tyranny of the mainstream, shall we say?”
Cillian Murphy
If you’d told me that a television series had enough weight behind it to justify an immersive music festival, I’d never have believed it – but it really did happen, with cast members present. The organizers even hired hundreds of actors to start brawls onsite amidst the live performances of musicians who had one thing in common – being on Peaky Blinders.
I’m not sure what this tells us about how people in the United Kingdom and beyond have adopted the historic Peaky Blinders as part of popular culture today. Perhaps it’s a sort of touchstone of working class British culture, and a recognizable one at that, given the show’s popularity. Either way, I sure am glad that a real-life history has been reanimated and acknowledged with such vigor through artistic interpretation, and aided by a killer soundtrack. Yes, the Peaky Blinders were a real gang, and a terrifying one at that. Yet the television series and its corresponding music has put the story on the radar in a strangely favourable way – by order of the Peaky Blinders.
The Mindful Rambler 