The Gold’s Soundtrack: All About the Show’s ‘80s Tracks
The high-octane crime series The Gold doesn’t just boast a gripping, inspired-by-real-events story and a who’s-who of British acting stars; it also lays out a soundtrack of true ‘80s bangers from The Cure, The Smiths, New Order, and more. MASTERPIECE spoke to The Gold’s writer and executive producer, Neil Forsyth, about the tracks themselves and the punk ethos they came out of. Get his insights below and listen to the music from The Gold with a Spotify playlist compiling all the songs from all six episodes, as seen on MASTERPIECE on PBS.
Listen to the music of The Gold on Spotify.
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Neil Forsyth on the ‘80s Music of The Gold
The thing about the early ’80s—and it sounds kind of ludicrously obvious—is that it was very close to the late ’70s, so there was still a big element of punk, not necessarily musically, but certainly in terms of ethos. And this was before ’80s music became very stylized and as much about the clothes and the haircuts as the music.
It was a far more guttural sort of sense of music that we leant into with The Gold, at both ends of the spectrum, really—the uplifting songs that we used were viscerally, aggressively uplifting, and the music that was more somber was very somber and very bleak. It was a time of musical extremes, but I think the biggest thing is the belief that went into the tracks and the bands at the time, they were smashing through into the 1980s, but still taking a lot of the 1970s punk approach, and there was sort of a dirtiness to the sound with some of the music we use, the sort of unrefined nature of it. And that’s really what The Gold is all about: taking something beautiful and making it ugly.
A lot of the bands we chose were working class bands, and The Gold is a very working-class story. Although we go into every area social strata, I think we largely do so as an outsider. When we’re in the rooms with the establishment, we’re going through outsider’s eyes. And I think that’s the spirit of much of our music—being outsiders looking in or trying to break their way in, and dissatisfaction with their lot.
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Episode 1: “Never Stop” by Echo & the Bunnymen
With “Never Stop” at the end of Episode 1, that’s our determination, and the promise that we’re not sure where this story’s going to go, but it’s going to go somewhere. There’s a restlessness to the song that is very prevalent with a lot of our characters—that restless energy and ambition and over-ambition and the hubris run through a lot of our tracks.
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Episode 2: “2x4” by The Fall
In Episode 2, “2×4” goes out right at the end of the big breakdown of how the laundering program’s working. With The Fall—again, the griminess of it, the dirtiness of it, the kind of DIY nature of it—it always feels like they wrote the song 10 minutes before they recorded it, and I think that is really what The Gold is as well, the DIY nature of it. It was people smelting millions of pounds worth of gold in the garden shed. There were people driving around the Southeast of England with bags full of hundreds of thousands of pounds. The earthiness of the story is reflected very much in bands like The Fall.
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Episode 3: “The Beast in Me” by Nick Lowe
It’s nice to give Nick Lowe his position as a great English songwriter at the end of Episode 3. It’s an introverted, internal episode—it becomes very deep within the characters, and it’s a story point where you’re playing off an event rather than a more theoretical or thematic note. And trying to find a song that matched the bleakness and the darkness and the tragedy of that moment was very important. I think John Fordham’s death is without doubt the tragedy at the heart of the story of The Gold, so finding a song that enveloped that moment and gave it and matched its voice and tone was challenging. But I think we probably got it right with that one.
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Episode 4: “Paralyzed” by Gang of Four
Episode 4 marks a point where the tides are turning [against the villains] and I was trying to find something that reflected that. And consequences. The gallery owner, Keith, getting caught with the cash at the Lichtenstein border—his episodic journey is a microcosm of so many characters in the show that will often play out over longer and more complex arcs, but boiled down to the same thing of a hubristic arc of the rise and fall. His arc was wrapped up in half an episode, whereas others were over a series and ultimately two series. I think that song was both about consequences and hubris, but it definitely has an energy that makes you feel that things are turning and the ground’s shifting under our criminal’s feet.
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Episode 5: “I Know It’s Over” by The Smiths
At the end of Episode 5 with “I Know It’s Over,” and Edwin Cooper arrested and being driven away from his mother and the home he’d left behind, I think that was an opportunity for us to play something a little bit more ethereal, to take a step back from the overarching story and signify the nadir or the apex dramatically. And also, what I’m trying to talk about there beyond the Cooper character, was the tragedy of so many of our characters. The inherent tragedy of them is that they bought into the Thatcherite promise that you could be whoever you wanted to be, and you could move cleanly between these now redundant social classes if you just had the money and the gumption.
And really what we show in our show is the complete fallacy of that Thatcherite belief, and that the English societal system was very much alive and well. And it’s not about money—it’s about much more than that; it’s about centuries and centuries of the institutionalism of people within the sectors of society that they should belong in. So we were trying to do something without sounding overly grandiose about the fallacy of the Thatcherite system through the eyes of this one guy.
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Episode 6: “Atmosphere” by Joy Division
Using “Atmosphere” in Episode 6, it was the end of an epic story, so I think it needed to sound epic, to feel deep and significant so that we were recognizing the severity and the significance of some of the crimes involved. It was the biggest robbery in world history at the time—it remains biggest bullion robbery, and Britain’s biggest robbery for many decades until recently. So recognizing the stakes of the crimes, and of the guilty or not guilty verdicts, and the differences those make to the lives of the people involved—not least the family of John Fordham—and recognizing the epicness, it is a purely dramatic moment. It’s serious and there’s a gravity to it. And also finding something with the right pace that you’re not trying to inject these things with any flippancy or even a piece it doesn’t deserve. So, it was a great decision to use that track. I should say, my wife Rhiannon [Forsyth] is my script editor, and using “Atmosphere” was her suggestion.
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Episode 6: “A Forest” by The Cure
With writing, I always think very specifically about a forest and the idea that you shouldn’t take the viewer into the forest and go with them and hold their hand—you should give them a rough map and kick them into the forest and wish them all the best. That’s always my approach to storytelling. And I think the opaqueness and mysteriousness of a forest, and all the different paths you can take through your forest and all the different stories it can contain, it just thematically very much ties in.
But then the song itself really does reflect that. It’s not a clear-cut song—there’s a lot going on, a lot of nuance and depth to it, and it feels ongoing in an interesting way, that track. We don’t go out in a nice tonal resolution, a narrative resolution when we’re still within script, and the music needs to reflect that. So, it’s open-ended. That’s very much how we leave the story at the end of Episode 6.
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Teasing the Music of The Gold Season 2
The exciting thing about Series 1 was, the show moving into the late ’80s, early ’90s, so it opens up a new wave of British music which on a personal level was very exciting, because I started being able to use music that I bought at the time as a kid. That wasn’t the case with Series 1—it was music that I’ve known and loved, but it was before my time. But Series 2 gets into some of the really great early ’90s bands—the Stone Roses and Oasis are two that that we managed to use, and Primal Scream as well—all bands that meant a lot to me as a teenager. So putting in tracks that I bought from the record store in Scotland when I was 13, 14 years old with my paper-earned money, being able to put them into the show was very exciting.
