Used to soundtrack the iconic opening scene from the first episode of the first season of Peaky Blinders – featuring a suited and booted Thomas Selby (Cillian Murphy) riding a black horse into a post-World War I Birmingham slum – Nick Cave’s doomy, ominous 1994 single Red Right Hand is now indelibly identified with writer Steven Knight’s award-winning historical crime drama. So much so, in fact, that two covers of the song from Cave’s Let Love In album, one by Arctic Monkeys, the other by PJ Harvey, have also featured in the show.
But when co-producer Murphy and music supervisors Anthony Genn and Martin Slattery set to work on the soundtrack to the new Netflix film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the trio felt that the original version of Cave’s much-loved song didn’t quite work in a pivotal scene where Knight had always envisaged using it.
“That was a interesting kind of conundrum, because Steve had written it in from the beginning, and he was kind of withholding that from the beginning of the show that we’ve always known, to this point in the film,” Murphy tells Edith Bowman on the Soundtracking podcast. “I remember talking to Tom [Harper, the film’s director] on the phone, and he’s going, ‘It doesn’t work’. I was like, Come on, it’s Red Right Hand, it’s got to work! And then we all sat down and looked at it and it just didn’t work. And so then the exercise became, like, how do we like convince Nick and Warren Ellis to re-record this, and make it part of the landscape that Ant and Martin are creating as well, but also make it different from the the beginning. But when you have somebody like Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, that team, they just absolutely smashed it.”
“I said, You need to call them,” interjects former Pulp and Elastica member Genn to much laughter.
“So I called him,” says Murphy. “That was a great phone call. I mean, it’s not often you get to pick up the phone to Nick Cave.”
“He hadn’t read the script, but I explained the story, and I explained why the original version didn’t work. And he was really into the idea of going at that song again, because, I mean they play it live but he hadn’t really like investigated it again properly since.”
“Then when we heard that [new] version, it just made sense,” Murphy continues. “It has all that weight, all that history, all that pain, that the original version doesn’t doesn’t have.”
You can watch the full Soundtracking interview, which includes Murphy talking about why he thinks that Fontaines D.C. were the perfect band to the write original songs for the film, below.
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