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Why Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is The Drug’ was a eureka moment for ‘Baby Reindeer’ sound supervisor

Before April 2024, anyone hearing the words ‘baby reindeer’ would likely only conjure up vague notions of cutesy, festive deer. That all changed once Netflix’s hit miniseries hit the small screen, where Richard Gadd explored his real-life experiences of dealing with a female stalker whilst grappling with a dark, buried trauma.

A self-confessed “sticking plaster for all life's weirdos”, Baby Reindeer sees Gadd play Donny, a struggling comedian who shows an act of kindness to a vulnerable woman (played by Jessica Gunning), sparking a suffocating obsession which threatens to wreck both their lives.

Brutal, poignant, disturbing and moving, the oddly-named miniseries became an overnight sensation, was declared a must-see show, and was Netflix’s most-watched programme for three weeks running. An immediate hit with critics and viewers alike, Baby Reindeer went on to win six Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Outstanding Writing for Gadd, Outstanding Lead Actor for Gadd, and Outstanding Supporting Actress for Gunning.

Fresh off the back of its two Golden Globe Awards in January 2025 for Best Limited or Anthology Series and Best Supporting Actress for Gunning, award-winning and EMMY-nominated music supervisor, Catherine Grieves – best known for her work on Killing Eve and Slow Horses – delves into her song choices for the multiple award winning Netflix miniseries.

Netflix realised the budget that we had wasn't going to allow us to do what we wanted creatively.

Before we dive into your work on Baby Reindeer, are there any common misconceptions about your job that you often come across?

There's sometimes the perception that, as a music supervisor, you get given your film or episode of television and no one else has had a single thought, and that you just go, ‘Don't worry, guys; I'll make you a playlist’. It would be nice if that was the case, but it is a very collaborative job and it involves a lot of creative input. You'll be working with your directors, your editors, and executive producers. 

Everybody has a say on the music, particularly with commercial music. Everyone has their favourite artists. Everyone normally has a thought, especially on what they like, and you can have a lot of people's opinions. 

So a lot of the time, it's not only making the right creative suggestions for the show itself, it's also listening to all those voices and making sure that the people who are creating the whole thing are aligned with those ideas, and that you're taking on their opinions. A lot of the job is the politics and managing that, and making sure that you know you're delivering creatively for them.

There were songs that were very personal and important for Richard to have in the show.

How much do you have to factor in budgets for a show like this?

Part of the music supervisor's job is to do the negotiations for each song, and we have to license every single piece of music in there, so that involves getting the rights from every single party involved in a song. So that would be from the songwriters through to the artists. 

Sometimes there might be a number of songwriters and they all have to agree to the same deal, so it's getting everybody on board and really selling a project to certain artists.

Certain artists are more into the idea of having their music used in film and TV than others, and every one costs a different amount. So if I get a budget at the beginning of a production, I have to make sure that that budget covers everything that we need. That might be that we have really famous, expensive songs, and we have one or two of them per episode, or it might mean that we're finding smaller artists so that we can have more music. 

It's always a bit of a balancing act, especially on a multi-episodic series – you've got a pot of money and you've got to cover everything from episode one to the last episode in the series. You might be making decisions early on, but you'll need to save the budget for later on. It's a big old balancing act of making sure that you're servicing the best creative for the production.

Certain artists are more into the idea of having their music used in film and TV than others, and every one costs a different amount.

A Netflix budget implies it was high. What kind of budget did you have to play with for Baby Reindeer?

It was quite interesting with Baby Reindeer. It started off as a pretty low music budget. It was generally a low-budget TV production, and the music budget reflected that. So at first, it didn't allow for much commercial music. It progressed when we realised that, actually, commercial music was a real help with the show. The show is so dark, but also a dark comedy, and there's a lot of trauma that it deals with. 

The commercial music that we used helps push it on and give it that lift. We're using songs that are quite melancholic in themselves and in their lyrics, or a lot of the songs that we used have an energy to them, and that really helped set the tone for the show as a whole. Netflix were great because they realised that the budget that we had wasn't going to allow us to do what we wanted creatively. 

Further on into the process, they did increase our budget for music, which was brilliant because that suddenly allowed us to consider those bigger artists and those more heritage artists, rather than me having to try and find artists we could strike cheaper deals with. It allowed us to pick out the Bee Gees and go, ‘We can do that’. 

That very rarely happens; normally music is the last thing to go on a film or TV show, and often the music budget has been cut from the beginning because it's had to go on something else during the shoot. We were really lucky that we got that support to allow us to create the soundtrack that we wanted.

How much does personal preference, or the opposite, if you don’t like a song or artist, come into play with a project like this?

Sometimes I have to take my personal taste out of something. If I know that there's something that somebody really wants to include, if it's just my taste that I don't agree with, I might suggest other ideas just to see if we can do better and find something that everybody likes. But I very much take my ego out of those decisions. 

I try to only pitch ideas that I think are really good, and songs that I think are really good or that really work for that particular scene. 

There's definitely music out there that I have cleared and has been included on shows that I've worked on that I've been strongly against. Sometimes I will really fight my corner and say, ‘I really disagree with this song’, if that feels right in the room at the time.

Baby Reindeer is a deeply personal story for Gadd, being adapted from his one-man show and based on his real experiences. With this being so close to him, did he have any song requests or suggestions?

Richard Gadd had written a couple of songs in the script as ideas. One of those was Dusty Springfield, and another one was Angel Of The Morning. That was a really good jumping-off point in terms of the overall aesthetic of what he was envisaging with more ‘60s and ‘70s music. Once we had that to start, I started to pull very specific ideas together.

Richard was heavily involved throughout the whole process. He absolutely was across every decision as we went through the show. He was in every music meeting. He was an executive producer. It was very much his story. There were songs that were very personal and important for Richard to have in the show, or certainly ones that he really wanted us to fight for. 

He helped us out and wrote some letters to some artists. He was such a collaborator. I think we managed to get the majority of the artists that he really wanted. There were a few situations where we couldn't get them over the line for various reasons. 

Sometimes there would be situations where Richard really liked a particular track and the director would like something else and we'd be making those decisions about which one right up until the final mix of that episode. He was very much an integral part of the whole process.

There was a breakthrough where we used Love Is The Drug for the sequence; it all suddenly came together.

The very first song used in the show is Love Is The Drug by Roxy Music, which you hear playing in the background of the bar when they first meet. It kicks in a lot louder after Martha's first manic laugh as Donny’s fate is sealed. How did you come to choose this song and how did it set the tone for the series?

It's an amazing track – what a bassline! Interestingly, that is the first song, yet it was one of the last songs that we made a decision on. Episode one's title sequence was really difficult. We went through God knows how many ideas for that. We had a brilliant music editor on the show called Jack Sugden and he was just laying out different option after option. 

We tried Roxy Music really early on when our budget was small, and we were like, ‘We can't afford Roxy Music’. Then everything changed and also they were much more into the project once we'd got rolling a little bit, and it suddenly clicked.

It was one of those ones where we originally had a different song in the scene after the titles, and that was our sticking point where we were going, ‘How is this going to work? This isn't working over the titles, because then we're going into The Kinks afterwards’, – we had this back and forth. 

There was a breakthrough where we decided to use Love Is The Drug for the whole sequence and then it all suddenly came together. We did have to do quite a crafty edit on that song that I had to get Roxy Music to sign off on because it was definitely chopping and changing and moving things around.

The tricky thing with Baby Reindeer is there is a lot of voiceover, and when having lyrics in songs – especially with songs that we all know – it's really important that you don't have the audience just going, ‘Great! Love Is The Drug!’ – and then not listening to the dialogue. 

We had to make it fit the pace of the scene and the mix and make sure that the audience could take in all that information. We felt that with Love Is The Drug, we’d finally sorted this out. At that point, we’d pretty much finished most of the first five episodes, and we were still stuck on the beginning of episode one. But these things always come together in the end.

What other songs did you consider for that scene and first song before Love Is The Drug?

Initially, we had I Put A Spell On You for that scene, and it was never quite right. There was something in that it had that very strong, specific lyric, but there was something that just wasn't fitting. We were saying, ‘We need something that does what I Put A Spell On You does, but it just needs to have more vibe. 

It needs to be slightly less ‘on the nose’. It was definitely a eureka moment when we landed on Love Is The Drug and got that in.

we have to be really explicit in terms of what the show is about and what's happening in each scene, so it wasn't the easiest sell.

What was the easiest song choice for Baby Reindeer?

There are a couple of standout songs. The song that changed the direction and opened up the conversation with Netflix was I Started A Joke by the Bee Gees, which plays at the end of episode five. The Bee Gees are not an easy artist to clear. When we license music and clear music, we have to be really explicit in terms of what the show is about and what's happening in each scene, so it wasn't necessarily the easiest sell. 

A lot of heritage artists in particular want their music used on very positive, nice, easygoing shows and films. Whenever there's anything that is more difficult in terms of the content, there's no guarantee that we'll get that approval. But I Started A Joke was such a perfect song. Lyrically, Donny is a comedian who is having a very difficult time, so the lyrics of that were so relevant, and it fitted so brilliantly. We just knew that we needed to get that song. Once we got it, everything else started to fall into place.

Also, at the end of episode one, Happy Together by The Turtles is a really brilliant sync. It's quite a complicated scene in terms of using music, because we have a Donny voiceover, and he's also reading emails from Martha on his laptop. So we've got a voiceover to pay attention to, we've got to read the emails, and we've got a song playing in the background, so there's a lot of information going on in that scene, but I think it works really well.

That song is really brilliant because it has a darker verse, there's a minor key in the verse, and then it has this absolute euphoric explosion with the chorus, and Jack, our music editor, did a brilliant edit. 

Donny shuts his laptop and the music cuts out for a second; we hear a bit of dialogue, then he opens the laptop, and as he opens it, the chorus kicks in. The edit is brilliant, dramatic and really touches on the impact of what's about to happen with Martha's behavior. It's when we really establish that she is stalking him, and it sets the rest of the series up.

What was the hardest scene to get the right approach for?

In episode four, which is one of the most hard-hitting episodes of television made, Donny meets this writer who starts helping him with his slightly fledgling career. He gives him advice and opportunities, but at the same time, is completely grooming him. He gets him into drugs, and there's a lot of drug taking, and then he sexually assaults him over a long period of time.

There's so much to unpack with that episode, and it's done in such an incredible way. Richard's such a brave person to tell that story. There was one particular scene where he is being groomed into taking a concoction of drugs. We see Donny taking drugs, then losing it and checking out. That was a really difficult scene to get the tone right for. We tried to clear a number of songs over that scene, and we did get quite a few rejections because of the content.

It was quite tricky; we were trying quite dark, psychedelic tracks for a while over that, and I don't think we'd landed on the perfect song, but we were also getting nos. It ended up being Wilco’s How To Fight Loneliness, which is such a beautiful song. It's incredibly simple. There's a guitar and vocal, and it's a very simple sound, but there's a relative positivity or ‘getting on with it’ vibe, musically, and the lyrics are really powerful. They're so relevant to that scene.

One of the lyrics in it is, ‘How to fight loneliness. You laugh at every joke,’ which has so many links to Donny. That was a real find, and really helped that sequence where the music tells Donny's inner monologue. That helps with such a dark and heavy episode.

We tried to clear a number of songs over that scene, and we did get quite a few rejections because of the content.

Given the sensitive and dark subject matter, could you ever have predicted that Baby Reindeer would go on to achieve the success and praise that it has?

What was so interesting with Baby Reindeer was how big it was, so quickly. It was one of those shows that from the very beginning was so special, unique and brave. To be on that journey and be part of that is a real honour. 

The success of it is completely deserved. Richard is such a brilliant talent and the takeaway from it is, that by him telling that story, the number of people, and in particular men, that have reached out about their own experiences of sexual assault has risen. 

Richard talked about how people have been helped by it. To work on something that is so great on a creative level, but to have that extra element too is really incredible. Even to be a part of that in a tiny way is amazing. I'm very honoured.

Image credits:

Ed Miller/Netflix