This Town cast and crew on how unrest and disruption forges creative genius: 'Music is the heart'

This Town is the ambitious, thrilling new drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. It features social unrest, gangs, violence, conflict and a whole lot of music.

The new BBC One series is set in Coventry and Birmingham in the early 1980s – but it is not hard to see modern-day parallels.

The UK is in the grips of a recession following an energy crisis, and working-class communities are bearing the brunt. Unemployment is rising, tensions are high and the heavy-handed policing of Black communities is triggering violent protest.

The series opens with the 1981 Handsworth riots, which came in the wake of similar protests in Brixton and Toxteth. In the Midlands, the IRA are also readying a new campaign of violence and very visible.

But in the white heat of this social unrest and disruption, creative genius is forged and lives are changed. Because this was also the era of 2 Tone, The Specials and music bridging communities. Across six episodes, This Town shows a band of young soulful rebels coming together to create the music that just might be their escape ticket.

“I’ve always felt that the rise of 2 Tone in Coventry and then Birmingham, which I experienced, would make for a great drama,” says Knight.

“This was a phenomenon that had no architect. It was just the music itself. Black and white kids, skinheads and rude boys, all together in one place dancing to the same music at the same venues at the same time.

“At the same time, Birmingham City had, I think uniquely, a sort of mixed-race football hooligan element called the Zulus. I was by no means part of that because I’m not tough enough or brave enough. But I was a very close observer of what was going on.”

Not for the first time, Knight was able to produce a compelling drama from key moments in the history of the West Midlands.

“I wanted to capture that spirit,” he says. “A bit like with Peaky Blinders, I didn’t want to say, look at these poor working-class people. Isn’t it a shame they’re living in such terrible places?

“I wanted to reflect the joy and the spirit of adventure and people believing they can do things, which was so true of the music culture at the time.”

At the heart of the series are young people whose lives are shaded by violence but whose dreams are undimmed.

“If Peaky Blinders is the story of the gangsters, This Town shows the same strata of society but we’re seeing it through the eyes of the people who dodge and weave around the gangsters, not the gangsters themselves.”

• How The Specials and 2 Tone empowered a generation to believe in a multicultural future
• Peaky Blinders: ‘It’s a sort of working-class revolution within a family’
• Terry Hall: ‘The Specials have always been about protest’

Ahead of the series, music producer extraordinaire Dan Carey welcomes the Big Issue to his Streatham studio, Speedy Wunderground. If these walls could talk, they would sing. And they’d sing songs by Wet Leg, Fontaines DC and Franz Ferdinand that have been recorded here.

Carey was asked to produce songs that would be written by various musicians for the band in the show to perform. He was recording with long-time collaborator Kae Tempest at the time and suggested they write the songs together.

“I was reading scenes of Dante (Williams, played by Levi Brown) and Jeannie (Keefe, played by Austin) in the script, where one writes music and the other writes lyrics and it reminded me of the real-life situation with me and Kae Tempest,” Carey recalls.

“We were writing their next album so I said we should dedicate a day to This Town, to see how it went. I went to a junk shop and picked up a 1970s drum machine, I’ve got an old 1970s tape machine out there anyway, and because Kae is a genius, they read the script and managed to identify what Dante’s voice would be.”

Tempest sees commonalities between the time and place depicted in This Town and their own early days in South-East London. They could also relate to lead character Dante, a young poet whose beautiful words emerge through the cracks in a hard society.

“I felt real kinship,” says Tempest. “I recognised a lot of the turmoil and unrest and also the joy of being in bands and singing lyrics in the face of the chaos all around you. It’s testament to Steven Knight’s writing how well he writes about now by writing about then.”

Tempest found all the material they needed in Knight’s scripts, creating the songs this fledgling fictional band would write – and the real-life actors would learn and perform – in a frenzied burst of creativity.

“Writing in character takes all the pressure off,” says Tempest. “Being given the purpose of a song before you start is amazing. All the hard work’s done for you!  

“Dante has got all these words in him bursting to come out. I know how that feels. He’s written a song about his auntie, she’s called Estella, she drinks too much, he loves her? Got it. And off I went!”

After writing the three songs in one productive morning at Speedy Wunderground, Carey and Tempest met with producers, who promptly asked for one more. What followed was in the time-honoured tradition of musicians from any era.

“We went to the pub and wrote the last one over a Guinness,” says Tempest. “The brief for the last song was it should be inspired by a moment when Dante’s watching a nature documentary about pelicans and relating to them because they don’t fit in.

“At first I didn’t know how to approach it, but I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t fit in. So I dug into that and had fun with it. I never would have written a song for myself about pelicans. But it turned out one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. When it flows like that, writing lyrics is honestly the best thing in the world to do.”

Eve Austin plays Jeannie Keefe. We meet her in the middle of the riots – looting or liberating for her community, depending on your point of view, dressed in eye-catching skinhead regalia. She commandeers idealistic Dante to help her hide from the police. The duo connect. But not in the cliched way of most TV drama. There is no romance here, but something far deeper.

“I love that it is this completely platonic, eternal love they have for each other,” says Austin. “Their friendship forming is like this explosion within the explosion of the riots. And it dictates where their lives go next.

“Jeannie is a bit younger than me and has all this energy and hope. The running joke when we were filming is that she is never still. She is always carrying something heavy, pushing a sofa, driving a van, climbing over a wall. She is a total badass!”

While violence erupts all around them, including within their families, poet Dante, keyboard player Jeannie, singer-guitarist Bardon Quinn (Ben Rose), bass playing record shop worker Fiona (Freya Parks) and drummer Matty (Shyvonne Ahmmad) forge their own path.

“Music is the heart of the show,” says Austin, who learned keyboards for the drama.

“I didn’t grow up with ska music, but I did grow up with reggae, which is the undertone to that music. So it linked back to my childhood so much with its mixture of punk and reggae.

“We did a big scene at the end where we performed a song live in front of 200 supporting artists and Dan Carey and Kae Tempest! To see them both up there – and they were going mad and cheering – it was one of those moments I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

Austin is a graduate of the Nottingham Television Workshop – the incredible drama group for aspiring actors in the East Midlands that has produced Samantha Morton, Vicky McClure, Jack O’Connell and Bella Ramsey. She knows the importance of young people having a creative outlet.

“It’s pot luck that I was born in Nottingham so I could go there,” says Austin. “It was originally totally free of cost, which meant it was a really accessible place for kids from all backgrounds.

“It wasn’t so much escapism for me, but it was a safe place to play and to grow and to learn. It didn’t matter what was going on at home or how much your parents had in the bank. If you were good at what you did, it was an equal opportunity, which is so rare.”

The irony of Knight making This Town, which highlights the importance of creativity, at a time when the chronically underfunded Birmingham City Council is cutting arts funding by 100%, is not lost on the writer. 

“A town or a city without art and culture is like a room without windows. No light gets in,” says Knight.

“And it’s so short sighted, because the arts generate money and the film and television industry generates lots of money. It’s one of the few growth industries in the UK. The idea that the arts are a luxury or flippant or peripheral is so wrong.”

But Knight is leading a fightback. This is the first major production to be filmed at his new film and television studios at Digbeth Lock.

“There’s a lot of work still to do. I can’t stand the word local – it’s got to be an international film studio. But it’s growing exponentially as we speak,” he says.

“I want it to be all the creative arts – artists, musicians, poets as well as film and TV. UB40 are building a recording studio there and making fantastic new music.”

The proud West Midlander is building a creative zone that will represent the city he loves on the global stage while providing local jobs in the creative industries. Next up is a certain movie, starring a certain Oscar winner.

“Cillian Murphy’s Oscar [as Best Actor for Oppenheimer] was so well deserved. He is so brilliant, such a great bloke, so down-to-earth and leads the line so well,” says Knight of his leading man.

“We’ll be shooting the Peaky Blinders film at Digbeth Lock in September.”

With This Town likely to return for more, and Peaky Blinders movies in the offering, there’s no chance of Birmingham coming like a Ghost Town for the arts while Steven Knight is around.

This Town airs on BBC One on Sunday nights and is available as a boxset on iPlayer.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

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