What you need to know
- Mick Jagger says he helped with the Slow Horses theme song because he liked the book it's based on.
- Working with the show's composer was hampered by COVID restrictions.
- Jagger ended up recording on his iPhone.
The upcoming Apple TV+ show Slow Horses has Mick Jagger to thank for its theme song, but that might never have happened if the star wasn't already a fan of the book that the show is based on. And he had to use his iPhone to get things moving.
The next big thing to land on Apple TV+ later this week, Slow Horses is based on a book by the same name — and Variety reports that was one of the reasons that Jagger was happy to get involved with writing its theme tune.
"It's a quite popular series of books, so I knew what it was about," the legendary Rolling Stones singer tells Variety. "I knew the vibe really well, so as soon as [composer Daniel Pemberton] sent the track to me, I just dashed off a few pages of notes of what I thought it was about. It came very, very quickly, which is always a good sign."
However, while Pemberton had been working on the show for months, COVID restrictions meant that he and Jagger couldn't get together. The composer ended up playing guitar over a Zoom call before Jagger took matters into his own hands. Literally, because he ended up using his iPhone to get things moving.
"I played him the track on guitar," Pemberton recalls. "I'm not even a good guitarist. That was very weird, playing guitar for Mick Jagger on the Zoom line."Adds Jagger: "I just recorded it on my iPhone and sent it to him, and he loved it. And then we had to do a bit of crafting, trying to get a chorus, calling it 'Strange Game' and trying to get the verses from the point of view of the main character," referring to Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman in the series.
It seems unlikely that anyone will argue with the result, something that will be part of the big reveal when Slow Horses debuts on April 1. Now, if only Apple TV+ had decided to film the whole thing using iPhones, too.
You can read all about how things went down in the original Variety interview, too.
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