When Danny Boyle was announced as the series director for Pistol, which depicts the rise and fall of the iconic British band the Sex Pistols, he was such a natural fit that it was surprising he hadn’t made anything about them before now. Over the past three decades, Boyle has cast an irreverent eye on British culture, showing his home country from the perspective of seemingly marginal figures like the buskers, bike couriers, drug addicts, and cute kids you might pass on the streets. His visually engaging style—which encompasses shaky camera movement and stroboscopic editing—combined with his frequent casting of character actors gives his films a compelling quality. Even if you don’t like the characters, you’re definitely curious about what happens to them.
Boyle frequently uses pop music not only to set a mood, but also to locate the film in a specific place and time. His soundtracks draw on British bands, solo artists, and DJs beloved by discerning audiences, and his incorporation of trendy groups and genres speaks to both the era in which he made his films and to contemporary audiences. How has Boyle’s handle on pop music evolved since the release of Trainspotting, and what can we expect from the upcoming release of Pistol?
Trainspotting marked Boyle’s critical and commercial breakthrough. Adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel, the film depicted a ragtag group of junkies led by Mark “Rent Boy” Renton (Ewen McGregor) as they grapple with their heroin addictions, attempt to kick, and engage in criminal activity. Unlike previous films about drug abuse, like 1995’s The Basketball Diaries, that Welsh dismissed as “po-faced piece(s) of social realism”, Trainspotting has a giddy tone that allows viewers to understand the appeal of addiction as well as the toll it takes on those in its thrall. Boyle’s sensory-overloaded visuals, editor Masahiro Hirakubo’s fast cutting, and the occasionally surreal imagery—like Renton levitating after a potent fix—bring the viewer inside the mind of the addict without judging the characters. You can practically imagine Renton turning to the camera and saying “can you believe they let us get away with this?” in his Glaswegian drawl.
Britpop was gaining popularity in the early months of 1996, and the soundtrack for Trainspotting reflected the cultural shift happening among British Gen-Xers. Boyle and music consultant Allen Dam placed needle drops by up-and-coming bands like Blur, Elastica, Pulp, and Sleeper in key scenes. References to druggy musicians like David Bowie and Lou Reed dapple Irvine Welsh’s prose like blood splatters on a shooting gallery wall, but Boyle’s use of the music—in addition to Renton and Sick Boy’s discussions about Lou Reed’s solo career—feel like a metacommentary on the nature of addiction and survival. Listening to the strings from the beginning of “Perfect Day” swell as Renton sinks into a shag rug during an overdose reinforces the cocoon-like comfort of opiates, just as Reed’s own cycles of addiction and recovery suggest one potential fate awaiting our hapless cast.
As Trainspotting came to a close, the final credits rolled to the pulsating strains of “Born Slippy” by Underworld. While the popularity of electronica happened concurrently with Britpop, using a drum-and-bass track under the closing credits sounded futuristic after a movie filled with guitar-based rock music. It also offered a way forward for Boyle, who would collaborate with Underworld on the score for Sunshine.
Boyle returned to England for 28 Days Later, a zombie movie that contrasted sharply with the flashier style of Trainspotting. Gone were the color-saturated, deliberately composed frames, the shuddering edits, the endlessly quotable script. In its place were wide, washed-out shots of deserted London streets. When an animal rights group liberates a monkey with the violence-inducing virus Rage, they set off a global pandemic and a societal collapse. Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bike messenger who suffered a concussion at the start of the film, awakens from a coma 28 days after the start of the pandemic, dodging fast-moving zombies in search of uninfected potential allies.
A hush falls over the film throughout the first act, mirroring the main characters’ cautious movements. John Murphy’s score has a strong sense of volume, slowly building from muted cymbal rolls to serrated guitar crescendos that mirror the protagonists’ increasing sense of dread. His use of techniques that mimic diegetic sound—like the two-note piano riff at the start of “In This House–In a Heartbeat” that sounds like an emergency alarm—allows the score to build from the echoing soundscape of the film in an organic way. While Murphy’s score works the way a standard film score does, his spare arrangements, looped percussion, and clean, somewhat atonal guitar parts are in conversation with Radiohead’s groundbreaking Kid A album, which explored a similarly dystopian mood to 28 Days Later.
Murphy would collaborate with Boyle again on his next film, Millions, a fairy tale about a well-meaning little boy who finds a duffle bag full of pound notes in the days before England switched from the pound to the Euro. His twinkly score, with its harp motifs and subtle brass charts, emphasizes the fabulist tone of the film and plays upon the religious preoccupations of its angelic protagonist, Damian (Alex Etel).
Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon), Damian’s older brother, has less charitable plans for the money Damian has discovered, which the music in his key scenes reflects. When Anthony tells his friends about his brother’s windfall and promises to cut them in on it, the boys strut across the playground in matching Oakley sunglasses to the tune of “Hitsville UK” by the Clash. The contrast between the boys’ enthusiasm about their ill-gotten gains and the song’s lyrics—about an indie band gradually surrendering to the evils of the record industry—serves as a subtle warning for what Anthony could become. In a later scene, one of Anthony’s friends takes Damian aside to explain to him how he probably ended up with the money and why it could be risky for the brothers to keep it. A color-saturated, speedily edited robbery sequence unfolds to the tune “Hysteria”, which had been a hit for long-running Britpop band Muse in the year when Millions was ostensibly set.
Millions would become the first film Boyle directed that was included on the Disney+ streaming service. The streaming giant would not pick up the broadcast rights for T2 Trainspotting, his next pop music-infused film set in England and Scotland. The sequel to Trainspotting picks up at midlife for Renton and his gang, who are experiencing the kind of midlife struggles you’d expect from the previous film. The opening scene, in which now-46-year-old Renton suffers a heart attack while running on a treadmill to High Contrast’s Underworld-influenced song “Shotgun Mouthwash”, establishes an accurate tone for the rest of the film.
Boyle’s visual approach for the film reflects the way life has passed his protagonists by. The colors are a little more washed out, the framing a little more standard, the editing a bit slower. This middle-aged hipster quality extends to the soundtrack. A few songs and bands from Trainspotting carry over into the sequel, underscoring the film’s feeling of sour nostalgia and lost time. In one poignant shot, Renton visits his childhood bedroom and drops the needle on a vinyl copy of Lust for Life, only to remove it in seeming disgust. When he returns to his father’s home at the end of the film, he listens to the song all the way through, dancing in his bedroom and seeming to make peace with his past.
The soundtrack for Trainspotting reinforced Britpop’s image as a genre predominantly made by white men. Public perception of England has become more diverse since the mid-1990s, and Boyle’s use of music reflects this shift. In addition to the proto-punk bands like Blondie and Iggy and the Stooges that appeared on the soundtrack to the first Trainspotting, archival acts like the ska trio Fun Boy Three get prominent placement in the film. The all-female quartet Wolf Alice and the multiracial Edinburgh band Young Fathers also pop up at key moments.
After working with cult bands and musicians on his soundtracks, Boyle took on the most iconic British band of all time in his most recent feature film, Yesterday. Working from a simple concept—what if the Beatles had been almost entirely forgotten in our time?—scenarist Richard Curtis tells the story of struggling singer/songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who comes out of a worldwide blackout/power failure to find out that the Beatles have been wiped from popular memory. As one of three people who remembers the Fab Four, Jack begins passing off some of their songs as his originals, swiftly rocketing to fame after Ed Sheeran (playing himself in a mumbly, charisma-free performance) sees him playing on local TV.
The idea for Yesterday has some interesting implications that Curtis’s screenplay picks up only to immediately dismiss, like Jack’s bout with impostor syndrome in a nightmare on the set of The Late Late Show with James Corden. It also establishes a major ground rule (imagining a world in which the Beatles don’t exist) only to contradict itself by featuring music that couldn’t have been made without the Beatles setting the precedent (as with the grade-school talent show in which Jack plays “Wonderwall”). Instead, the story settles into the squeaky-cleanest rise and fall of an up-and-coming talent, complete with the kind of romcom plot Curtis could write in his sleep.
While Boyle has depicted the bands in his movies in a critical light—as with Renton and Sick Boy’s discussion of Lou Reed’s solo career in Trainspotting—he seems to fawn over his musical subjects. This is somewhat understandable with the Beatles, who wrote some great songs outside of their larger-than-life cultural footprint, but his inability to depict the sensitive-yet-sexed up dude with an acoustic guitar trend of the 2000s and 2010s in even the most slightly satirical light becomes a bit hard to take as the movie goes on. Then again, with the frequent needle drops of Sheeran’s “Shape of You”, he has finally found something more unpleasant than Trainspotting’s Worst Toilet in Scotland.
The impending release of Pistol finds Boyle coming full circle with his career. Like Trainspotting, the series focuses on a scruffy group of antiheroes operating at the edges of proper society, and, judging by the trailer, its giddy, loose-limbed energy matches that of his earlier work. His deliberate balance of empathy and irreverence will serve the Pistols well: “I love (John) Lydon for what he does and I don’t want him to like (the series)—I want him to attack it,” the filmmaker told The Guardian in a recent interview. This could be a return to form for Boyle, and an opportunity to revisit an iconic band in a contemporary light.