“Yeah, baby, she’s got it ….”
Except, no. She doesn’t. When Anya Taylor-Joy’s chess prodigy goes through her self-destructive spiral in the sixth episode, it’s set to these lines from Shocking Blue’s “Venus.” What she’s actually got is a bad pill and alcohol problem that’s preventing her from being on top of her game. But the music gives her crisis a good beat. She can dance to it.
Randall Poster, Hollywood’s go-to source for compiling movie music, received his first Emmy nomination this year, in the still relatively new music supervision category, for his work on this episode, “Adjournment.” It finds the volatile chess prodigy falling off the sobriety wagon, going on a bender in Paris during a whirlwind night with an alluring model, then painfully losing her match against the Soviet champion the next day.
Poster walks us through the music for this episode, and how he worked with writer-director Scott Frank to select just the right numbers.
“Stop Your Sobbing,” The Kinks
This upbeat tune plays while Beth (Taylor-Joy) and Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) are on a road trip in his VW bug, playing chess—verbally. She’s just had a flashback memory of her mother warning her about men trying to teach her things.
Things are looking up, and she is on the move.
Randall Poster: “You can’t really beat that one. This one was about trying to bring the culture of the British invasion to the story. ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ is not really overused, so it has that ability to place you in a time, but also give you a little bit of that excitement you get when you hear something new. With a lot of period pieces that are overused, they feel routine. And when this music was born into the world, it was kind of shocking. So how do you find creative music that somehow can communicate both the past, but also give you that shock of when you first heard it?”
This bluesy 1964 number starts playing when Beth has her first intoxicating encounter with the fashion model Chloe (Alice Harmon) while practicing her chess game at Benny’s New York apartment.
Randall Poster: “This is the same sort of thing: How do you bring some novelty to period pieces? I’ve got that album. It’s just something that I go back to and listen to, and it dawned on us that it might be something to use. There’s a little bit of the British dance hall element to it. It’s a little bit kitschy.”
This jumpy, confident song plays while Beth rapidly plays three games of chess at once. They’re still in Benny’s apartment as this record spins from his turntable, so it’s safe to assume he’s big into Georgie Fame. Otherwise, why double up with same artist on the soundtrack?
Randall Poster: “People like to play records! Georgie Fame was a big pop star in England, and later in his career, Georgie Fame led Van Morrison’s band. Look on YouTube for when Van Morrison plays a song called ‘Days Like This’ on Letterman. Georgie Fame is in the band playing with Paul Shaffer. It’s super cool.”
This French pop hit with the monosyllabic refrain is a translation of The Lollipops’ “Busy Signal.” (For the cell-phone generation: It simulates the repetitive beat that phones used to make when you called someone who was already talking to someone else.) After Beth’s unsuccessful Paris journey, this song is part of a montage in which she buys her mother’s home from her father then clears it out to redecorate in her own style.
Randall Poster: “This young girl from Kentucky is becoming an international celebrity. We wanted at that point to allude to her growing sophistication. It’s a super cool kind of novelty song, and that was one scene where we tried a bunch of things. Then that one really, really felt right.”
Probably the best known song in the episode. This one plays on television as Beth spirals—smoking, guzzling a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and dancing around her newly redecorated home in her underclothes.
Randall Poster: “Scott deserves full credit for that, because it was written into the script. ‘Venus’ has a bit of a novelty sound to it as well, so I think that his commitment to ‘Venus’ kind of informed some of the other musical choices. It was really good foundation to build on.”
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