In the opening titles of Slow Horses – the Apple TV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb novels, starring Gary Oldman in the central role – you’ll hear a very familiar voice, one of the most famous in all rock and roll history. The majority of the show’s music comes via composer Daniel Pemberton, but when the time came to deliver a theme tune for the series, he knew just the guy to ask: Rolling Stones legend Mick Jagger.
As it turned out, Jagger was already a fan of the Jackson Lamb series, and had ideas of how to channel the murky, espionage world of the show into jangly, eerie tune ‘Strange Game’. “I had read some of the books,” Jagger tells Empire. “So when Daniel emailed me, I didn’t have to do homework. I knew what it was about, I knew the milieu, and the main character’s irascible nature.” It didn’t take long for the iconic musician to come up with something that encapsulated the tone and themes of the show. “I just wrote it really quick,” he says. “I said to Dan, ‘So, you want this to be called ‘Slow Horses’? He said, ‘I don’t want another variant of your horse songs.’” Soon, Jagger hit upon a phrase that worked: “I started playing guitar and tried to come up with a bit of a chorus, and came up with this ‘strange game’ thing. That became the title.”
Check out the full song above, and hear it in the first two episodes of Slow Horses, streaming now on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes arriving on Fridays. Read more from Empire’s interview with Mick Jagger in the next issue of the magazine.