Cillian Murphy has compiled a playlist of songs that define Peaky Blinders, in celebration of the release of the film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
The Oscar winner returns to his most famous role of Thomas “Tommy” Shelby, the notorious Birmingham criminal who leaves self-imposed exile to confront his demons and help his son (Barry Keoghan). The movie co-stars Tim Roth and Rebecca Ferguson, and comes to Netflix on March 20 following a brief run in cinemas.
Filmed for the official Peaky Blinders Instagram account, Murphy picked seven songs that fit certain themes. The first is the Black Sabbath classic ‘War Pigs’. Described as “a song from Birmingham”, the star calls it “a phenomenal, blistering piece of music”, before drawing parallels between the two Birmingham-born legends. “I think you could draw some line between Tommy Shelby and Ozzy Osbourne is you so wished,” he said. “Kind of rebels, both of them.”
When asked to choose “a song from the series I love”, he selected ‘You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen. Murphy made the selection because it “feels like it’s the essence of Peaky Blinders and Tommy Shelby kind of distilled into a track,” describing it as “so dark, and so brilliant.”
For “a song to get into character”, Murphy chose ‘The Eraser’ by Thom Yorke. Revealing he used the track for inspiration during filming of the movie, he said: “it’s the atmosphere of the song, but there’s a lyric in it which is, ‘The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear.’ That felt to me very much like Tommy Shelby, like you can’t get rid of him.”
He dedicated ‘Mandika’ by Sinéad O’Connor to the character Polly Gray, Shelby’s sister, played by the late Helen McCrory. “(O’Connor) was such a punk and a rebel, and she spoke truth to power. I picked the song ‘Mandika’ because it’s such a classic and it’s so energetic and I feel like Polly Gray had that same ferocity and fearlessness as a woman that Sinéad O’Connor embodied.”
The songs of David Bowie feature throughout the show, as the icon was a big fan. Picking his favourite from the artist, the actor chose ‘Blackstar’ track ‘Lazarus’. “David Bowie was a very early advocate of the TV show” he recalled. “He loved it from the start when many people didn’t… I worked with him briefly in the year before he died and we’d spoken about it. He told me how much he loved it. I sent him the cap I wear in series one with the razor blade in it and everything, and he sent me back a picture of him wearing it, which I treasure.”
The Immortal Man is set during World War II, and speaks to some of the character’s trauma from fighting in World War I. Picking a song that represented Tommy’s post-war trauma, he chose ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ by Christina Rosetti. A musical version of the poem the Peaky Blinders say when burying one of their own, he describes it as “so bleak and dark and massive. It’s just beautiful.”
Finally, when choosing a rebel song for the playlist, Murphy selects singer-songwriter Lisa O’Neill’s cover of ‘All The Tired Horses’ by Bob Dylan. “(Creator) Steven Knight specifically requested that the series end with that Bob Dylan tune ‘All The Tired Horses’” he revealed. “We couldn’t get the Dylan version, but that was actually a blessing because we got Lisa O’Neill do do a version of it. It’s one of the most remarkable cover versions I think you’ll ever hear.”
During the series’ run, NME spoke to Murphy about the music for the series, and how a song is selected for the show. “You just know when a song is ‘Peaky’,” he said. “The artists are outsiders. They have resisted the tyranny of the mainstream, shall we say?”
In February, The Immortal Man score composers Martin Slattery and Antony Genntell spoke to us about their indie all-star new soundtrack featuring “edgy fucker” Grian Chatten along with Lankum, Girl In The Year Above, Nick Cave, Amy Taylor and more. “It’s got a lot of guts and the feeling of the human hand,” Genn said of the album, “brought to you by a lot of brilliant human hearts, minds and souls.”
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