Switched on Pop - How To Soundtrack A Villain: Killing Eve

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

When BBC America reached out to do a piece about the music of Killing Eve, we jumped at the opportunity. The series antagonist, Villanelle, is an unpredictable assassin. On a dime she shifts from cold and calculating to child-like and jocular. Her personality swings are accompanied by a captivating psychedelic pop soundtrack. Whether you are familiar with the series or not, this no spoilers episode breaks down music from the 1960s that has earned its place on primetime.  SPONSORED BY BBC AMERICA Songs Discussed Unloved - We Are Unloved  Psychotic Beats - Killer Shangri-:ah The Ronettes - Walking In The rain The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Brigitte Bardot - Contact Betty Hutton - It’s Oh So Quiet Björk - It’s Oh So Quiet Jo Stafford - Some Enchanted Evening Duke Ellington - Skin Deep Roxette - Listen To Your Heart Jacqueline Taieb - La Plus Belle Chanson The Beatles - Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Support explainer journalism — all things pop included — by making a contribution to Vox today: Visit bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, check out this song. It's from the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Oh. That's a lot happening there.

Choirs, organs, plucked bass, a wandering chord progression. What does it all mean? We're going to get into it. and it's going to be a fun adventure. BBC America reached out to us to see if we wanted to do a piece on the music of Killing Eve, and I enthusiastically said yes. If you haven't seen the show,

Killing Eve is this spy murder mystery romance comedy. Comedy. Ostensibly a cat and mouse between Detective Eve and killer Villanelle. even for people who haven't watched the show yet, this is some fascinating music. We're going to dig into the multinational European spy thriller sound that has Europe, French pop, Italian pop, British dance music, all kinds of really cool sounds,

some psychedelic stuff I'd never heard before from the 60s. And what I wanted to think about today was how can the music of a show establish the emotion of a given character In this case, we're going to be talking about the character Villanelle. She's the antagonist. She is a killer, an assassin, supported by the music. She is psychopathic. You should never tell a psychopathy or a psychopath.

I obsessive. Desirous. You like me too much. Detached. Most days, I feel nothing. Erratic. You want to have dinner with you. Passionate.

You're mine. And deranged. I'm going to kill you nicely. But then I'm going to make a mess of your body afterwards. So it looks worse than it is. And we have a song for each of those qualities. So let's jump right into the first. If there were just one song that captured her character,

it would be Killer Shangri-La by psychotic beats. The song is important because, it's what we hear when we see the first live kill by Villanelle. She rides on a motorcycle into Tuscany and is hunting down a sort of mob boss. The scene actually echoes the godfather. It's a party. Everyone's outside having a good time. And she seduces the older patriarch into a bedroom.

and she kills him gruesomely with a hairpin. So imagine you hadn't heard any of the words. How would you describe the musical textures of what's going on here? Yeah, it's like a 1950s duop track or something. Yeah, definitely. And you would think the theme would be about romantic love, kissing under the stars, taking your sweetheart out for a drive in your Oldsmobile. Maybe even walking in the rain.

Whoa, let's not go too crazy, Charles. And there is the or text. What is that? That's the Renettes walking in the rain. The Renettes. Produced by Phil Spector, also a convicted killer, like Philanelle. It kind of makes sense that we might reference this material. Huh.

But what psychotic beats do with the source. materials, they take this 1964 track and take what is about desire for romance, these singers who want to go walking in the rain with their potential love and flip it on its head.

It's like, I love you so much that I had to kill you. And so it is inherently psychopathic and I think we can even hear it in the way in which the piece is sung. Here's Patty Armour, the vocalist. The voice is monotone, right? There is

Really no emotion, right? And I think part of the reason why that Phil Spector Wall of Sound character works is that the voice is distant. It feels like it's placed in this giant echoey chamber It doesn't feel directed in your face. It almost feels like it's haunting you We even get the same thunder in the very beginning of the song kind of like we hear and walking in the rain Yeah, it's almost like killer Shangri-La finds this discontent that is buried in those 1960s girl groups and really brings it to the surface and shows it to you. It's like it wasn't as rosy as we thought back then.

Here's all the emotions and fear and anger coming to the surface. Everything that was buried in the 1960s is now coming to light. Yeah. And that piece sort of sets the tone for the rest of the show and the rest of the stuff that we're going to hear today. So if the first quality is about a psychopathic killer, the next quality that we see in Villanelle and in the music is desire. It's the song We Are Unloved, an instrumental by the band Unloved. This song We Are Unloved by Unloved is sort of like the undergirding scoring of the show. It comes back again and again and informs all of the other scored material.

Yeah. I get this sense of like it has this like lusting desire in it. I want to break this down because I think as the piece builds, as does that sort of like that strong want that's going on. Yeah. The song begins with a bell and an ambulance like siren almost like a death now

but it's also sort of like that desire strikes and that it's building and building and building and then the music comes in. We have bass and guitars and melitron the 60s sounds that we heard in the killer shingrelah piece Yeah, Melotron. You can't just drop Melotron and not pause for a moment to explain what that magical instrument is.

Yeah, that's a beautiful one. Melotron is one of the first sampled instruments. It was a keyboard that you could play strings, organ, flutes, and other sounds, choirs. It's probably most famously used by the Beatles on a track like Strawberry Fields Forever. I want to stress that the way this keyboard samples these sounds is by actually having pieces of cassette tape inside the device that are triggered every time you play a key. Yeah. It is extraordinary and incredibly fragile, as you might imagine. So not a lot of these have survived from the 1960s to now. Yeah, there's very few left. There are, of course, people who have created emulations of them.

So we don't know this is the original or the emulation that we're hearing. And we are unloved. But what it's doing is it's definitely putting us in that sort of 60s soundscape, psychedelic, kind of woozy, uncertain. Like, it's hallucinatory, right? Yeah, a little psychedelic, yeah. And it's because that tape machine is a little wobbly. Yeah, it's got a little warp, warp and woof to it. Whatever sound is being approximated here,

some kind of wind ensemble in the Beatles, doesn't really sound like a wind ensemble. It just sounds like its own thing. It sounds like a melaton. What about that plucked bass? It's got some kind of reverb or something on it. It's like you hear the note and then you hear this like crackle afterwards or something.

Yeah, so that for me is not unlike what we heard in the rennets or killer Shangri-la, right? It's that big reverbering, wet, wall of sound kind of thing, very, very 60s-esque. And the melaton and bass together, oh, it's unsettling, only further emphasized by the fact what they're playing is this ascending chromatic line. Oh, it just keeps going up and up and up.

Note by note. then it goes back down again and then tries to climb up right i see this is like thwarted desire it's frustrated desire and that's why it sounds a little unhealthy perhaps because it's it's desire without an outlet it climbs up chromatically and then it drops back down and it does it over and over again it's not in a good place later on we get wild thrashing drums and these dark vocal ooze that for me, I think as you kind of point, I was like, there is some frustration. Like, I know what I want,

and maybe I'm not getting it. So we've got psychopathic and desirous. The third quality that I get from Villanelle and from the music finally takes us back to an old song because the first two tracks are actually contemporary songs that have been reimagined

in their production to be from the past. Let's go back to the real 1960s, 1968, to be precise. This is Bridget Bardot's contact. Well, that's absurdly fun. I mean, I was this year's old when I found out that Brigitte Bardot,

in addition to being an internationally known actress and sex symbol, was also a musical artist. I might not describe that as singing per se As much as Spoken Word over a Like total space age beat or something You got it all right Because again with the quality we're hearing here is detachment

In fact when we hear this song in the show It's at a moment where the killer Villanelle Is preparing a deadly perfume For someone that she's going to assassinate with it It's a very loaded mode of killing. A perfume is a special present. It's lustrous. Well, it's like so many of these songs we've listened to take something kind of that we associate with lightness and femininity and introduce this darkness and danger to it.

Yeah. Yeah. Is this Serge Gainsburg production by any chance? It absolutely is. How did you know that? I got a few tricks at my sleeve. You know, when I think of Gainsburg, I think of songs like Bonnie and Clyde. Which also have this mix of romance and danger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All smashed together. You had pointed out that our vocalist isn't quite singing, that there's something a little bit amiss in this track. How is your French? I just can't I'm a bit of French if necessary

but it's not not the wrong. Yeah, yeah. My French is bad. I dropped out of my French classes very early on. Oh, don't pique.

But with a little translation help from our mutual friend Victoire, I was able to discern these lyrics. So, Ah,

so Vittorra. So Bardot is actually singing from the character of an alien landing on Earth crying for medical attention because she's been hit by a meteorite

and needs like a mercury transplant or something. That was perfectly clear. I think everyone understood that, you know, immediately after hearing that clip. So, kind of redundant, Charlie, but, you know, please continue. Okay. My point being, actually,

your point, which is that she's not really singing. She's kind of just talking through it. It has that quality of like, hi, I am alien person Charlie Harding and I know how to speak with emotion. Right. It doesn't actually

translate as human. It's clearly kind of alien and other and detached that quality that we're getting from our character Villanelle. And as she cries out for help, she's saying like, I want to make contact.

I love what she gets in response. Nothing. Just echoing out into space. Whoa. Nobody is responding to her. There is just this ticking along guitar, this very high guitar note.

Tip, Tip, Tick, Tup. Almost like a clock. She's waiting. Trying to connect with people. Nobody can connect with her.

Screaming into the void. Nate, the next song on our list is one of my all-time favorite song. It is totally erratic and wild. We're going to listen to it after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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who's this erratic character. I love this song, though, because I actually had never heard this version of the piece. I was more familiar with a middle school favorite of mine, Bjork's cover of It's So So Quiet. You want to love, you want to cry, you cross your heart and hope to die. Till it's over. And I was introduced to that Bjurk version when we recorded our,

podcast about her many moons ago so this is really cool to hear the original and once again we have like this kind of nice side and this dark side right you're absolutely right about the light and the dark

I want to talk about that in just a second but I was surprised to hear that Bjork is not the only cover in fact this Betty Hutton version is also a cover what the real song is actually a German song from the 40s called Ungeist

East Estil Uh Inshugugung What What just came out of your mouth Okay Nate You

You studied German Yeah A bit in Dutch Yeah I can So nay In your best German What is the name

Of the song And yet Is Stil By Harry Horst Winter Yeah Yeah

Yeah Yeah Yeah Very Very Very Fascinating, yeah. So I love that this song has gone through multiple versions and eras and nationalities

because the show does the same sort of thing, right? We have this sort of pan-European spy thriller. We have to jump between all of these different places. The musical insight, though, that you were pointing to is that this track has a dual personality. What's going on here in the verse? How would you describe it? It's oh so quiet. Yeah.

It's oh so quiet. We have this whispered ASMR-like kind of shh refrain, sparse instrumental textures, and then crash bang boom. An entire big band shows up to the party out of nowhere. The vocalist escalates their singing by about 50 decibels. And we're in a whole new musical world. Totally.

I think we can even think about the quiet part and the loud part, as you pointed out, as almost having two distinct genres. The first is like 1950s Schmaltz. It reminds me of one of Roger and Hammerstein's most famous works, Some Enchanted Evening. And here's a version by Joe Stafford. Some enchanted evening may see a stranger. It's old.

So so quiet. Shh. Oh, so still. Knock, knock. Who's there? Sam and Janet. Who's Sam and Janet? Sam and Janet evening.

You may meet a stranger. So you know this one. Yeah. Well, you know what Cole Porter said after he heard it for the first time. What's that? Took a long drag of a cigarette and said, can you believe it took two people to write a song? I thought it took like 10.

5.2 is the average. Is the average right now in pop music? That's funny. Cole would not approve. Okay, back to our point. Okay, fine. Verse, quiet, 50 schmaltz, chorus, frenetic, wild, big band. For me, it's like, this is like Duke Ellington's band. It's skin deep.

That checks out. I like the compositional trick of using two wholly different genres to say something about the dual nature of this person's love and it fits perfectly with the character that is trying to both be a dangerous psychopathic killer but also romantically in love with the person that's chasing her. And that brings us to our fifth quality, passion. Villanelle's a passionate character. and there are some music here, which is extremely sentimental and very passionate. In a rare sonic departure from the show, we're going to move very briefly from the 1960s into the 1980s. There's this great scene in the show where she's driving in the car, looking longingly out the window, thinking of her lover, while her driver, this older ex-Soviet spy, Constantine, who's her handler, is trying to connect with her.

and this music is playing on the tape deck or over the radio. And it has this quality of being like, hey, check it out on this ex-Soviet spy. This is the music of my youth, how cool am I? The song is entirely not cool. It is all just cheese. It's all sentiment. We get it through digital keyboards, strings, and a chorus that is the name of the song. Listen to your heart.

It gets wild and over the top with metal guitars and 80s gated drums. Do you know the song by a rock set? Yeah, I know the song by rock set. I've never considered it being used as the soundtrack for a professional assassin's reverie. but that's a cool dissonance, I think. Like even assassins have feelings. Yeah, and yet, I think sort of as you're pointing to some of the other songs we've discussed, like there is this dual nature where even though this is a song about following your heart,

I think we listen to the timbers in today's context, they feel cold. calculated, unnatural. Oh, interesting. Right? Like when you hear that digital keyboard and those fake strings at the top of the song, it doesn't feel quite right. It's off-kilter. It's not played by someone with real emotion in a certain way.

So even though the antagonist Villanelle is passionate, she's ultimately quite deranged. she is an untrustworthy character even though we sort of fall in love with her as much as she is the enemy of the show she's ultimately unreliable one of my favorite songs in the whole playlist

is another French piece that our friend Victoror helped me translate La Ploubele Chanson by Jacqueline Taibbe Back to the 60s Yeah This song like The yurk, Betty Hutton.

Harry Horse Winter. Yes. Just like it's so quiet, this song too has sort of multiple personalities going on here, and it sounds quite deranged. Let's get into it. So in the verse, we've got this dark, minor thing going on. This song is playing in the background when the antagonist is actually at a weak point, kind of is injured and stumbling through the streets of Paris.

And the lyrics are a rainy day and a sleepy city. It's winter. It's cold for good. And in the streets, the wind howls to death. What a funny idea to make a song of it. That's in the lyrics you're saying. You're not commenting on that. That is the translation from the French.

So it's kind of this meta-like reflection on... making a song Wait, okay, help me out here. What? You're exactly right. This is like basically someone writing a song from the perspective of I'm going to write a song. Here's what I'm writing about. I'm writing about what's happening out in the streets. It's dreary. It's cold as death. It's wind is howling and I'm going to try to write a song. How funny is it to make a song about this? It's like this eternal artistic conundrum. You know, how do you take what is happening in the world around you and filter it through the sieve of your brain into sound.

That is a perpetual challenge, especially in trying to figure out what part of reality do you want to represent. And when we get into the chorus of La Plou Bastanson Sans Sans, things take a really different turn. I don't know if you caught any of the French, but we can get a sense that the song has turned in a different direction.

I mean, I understood every word, but for the listeners, maybe you should offer Victoese translation. She's saying, the most beautiful song in the world. I'm not the one who will write it. The most beautiful song in the world. I know it. Interesting. So is this back to our unreliable narrator a little bit? I think so.

Because I feel like I don't trust the author of this song. Exactly. she's not telling us the whole story or we're getting part of it. She's trying to say like, I'm writing the most beautiful song in the world. I know the song, but I also, I can't write it because life is terrible. Everything around me is crap. And yet maybe that will inspire the most beautiful song in the world. To your point about the unreliable narrator, like I actually think that this isn't so much about being unreliable.

I really think it's about being deranged and not knowing oneself, like being totally lost. Okay, yeah, yeah. Right? It's like, I'm trying on lots of different things and I'm not even sure where I'm going. And I actually think the music is what gives us that clue. For me, the music sounds deranged because of what happens, not just in what she's saying, but in this instrumental moment, this little interlude. You're losing it.

Did you hear any other reference here? Let me think we've got that 60s for Fiso, Oregon, that three, four time signal. Not no, no, no. I'm not going to shame myself. It's a sort of musical style that immediately connected to another song for me. Like, I've only ever heard this sound in a pop song in one other track. Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite by The Beatles, which are both maybe reaching back towards like this.

music hall circus kind of vibe yeah okay exactly okay it has this feeling of a like really poorly performed DIY circus where the musicians are drunk and the animals didn't show up and you're being tricked by some huckster or circus leader that it is that that triple meter kind of feel. It's the percussion. But above all, for me, it's those wild, downward, chromatic

moving lines. Just this like, meh- What was that? I have no idea what is happening right now, unless you're doing like whale calls. Above all, those sounds

kind of wraps us back up. the beginning of the show where we had heard that soundtrack piece, we are unloved, where the bass guitar was ascending chromatically and was sort of like this unresolved desire. Here, that desire is just unwinding and falling down. That's what happens to thwarted desire. It comes crashing down. Yeah.

So to wrap things up here, as much as the brilliant performances in Killing Eve, help establish our characters with micro facial movements and strong motions conveying emotion. For me, the music sets a backdrop for that whole mood. We have this multifaceted killer who's not just cold, she's also passionate and ultimately, as we establish, unreliable and unpredictable. This discussion makes me think about how even though I'm someone who is over-analizing music constantly, when I'm watching a movie or a TV show, I'm not actually thinking about the music. It's just kind of washing over me and I'm really focused on the narrative and the characters.

Sort of pulling focus from the overall story to just think about the music makes me appreciate how, the music directors behind these shows are putting so much thought and sophistication into every one of these decisions and in a way I wonder if that's kind of a thankless job because it's one of those roles where if you're doing it well no one's gonna notice because it's just gonna be so seamless and every one of those musical cues will tell you something about a character that never has to be put into words. So I wanted to take this discussion and apply it to the other shows and films I watch

and think about how are these musical choices changing my understanding of what's happening? I love it, Nate. Music builds a whole world, things that we might not even notice that are telling us essential emotional cues about television and ourselves. Switch on Pop is produced by Bridgett. Armstrong, Megan Lubin, Nishot Kerwah, Liz Nelson, Nate Sloan, and meet Charlie Harding. Our illustrations are by Iris Gottlieb and community engagement by Abby Barr. We're mixed, mastered, and engineered by the fabulous Brandon McFarland.

You can find more episodes wherever you get podcasts. Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, we're out there. And we're a proud member of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll see you in a week with a piping hot. fresh new episode. And until then, thanks for listening.