FIRST LOOK: Daisy Jones & the Six Is Getting the Band Back Together in a New Series

[Celerity]

Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, and more discuss the new miniseries based on the best-selling book.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/daisy-jones-and-the-six-exclusive-first-look

https://archive.ph/xiSH7





It’s that age-old answer we’ve heard from countless rock stars. They do what they do “for the fans.” So you’ll just have to call the cast and crew of the upcoming TV series adaptation of Daisy Jones & the Six, premiering on Amazon Prime Video on March 3, rock stars. Based on the wildly popular Taylor Jenkins Reid novel of the same name, an oral history of a fictional band in the ’70s with a Fleetwood Mac–like sound (and the attendant backstage drama to match), the show’s team is studded with people who are just as obsessed with the source material as the bestseller’s many readers. That starts with husband-and-wife executive producers Scott Neustadter and Lauren Levy Neustadter. He’s the screenwriter and producer behind such successful adaptations as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and The Spectacular Now, and she’s head of film and TV at Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s hit parade of a production shingle, recently of Little Fires Everywhere, Where the Crawdads Sing, and The Morning Show. Scott got a prepublication manuscript of the book in 2017, at the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. “I flipped for it, and really just sort of fell in love with the whole thing,” he tells Vanity Fair. “Transporting to the 1970s Laurel Canyon music scene was, like, the greatest gift I could imagine.”







Lauren was equally enthused, and the duo signed on for their first project together, throwing work-life balance out the window to immerse themselves in the series. With Reid’s blessing, Scott set to work adapting the story with Michael H. Weber, with the goal of “figuring out how to make the experience of watching it the same as we had when we read it.” To that end, he retained the structure of the story, with the characters looking back on a long-passed era, but shortened that time span to about 20 years.







Just like the meteoric rise of the band at the center of Daisy Jones, nobody could have predicted the journey that the show would go on. Riley Keough plays Daisy, with Sam Claflin as tortured rock star Billy Dunne, who’s torn between his passion for his art and the man he wants to be for his wife (Camila Morrone) and children. The cast is rounded out by Suki Waterhouse as Karen, Sebastian Chacon as Warren, Josh Whitehouse as Eddie, and Will Harrison as Graham. Timothy Olyphant plays Rod Reyes, Tom Wright is Teddy Price, and Nabiyah Be plays Simone Jackson. The players also portray their aged-up characters in documentary-style shots set 20 years after the band’s heyday. Shooting was set to begin in 2020, just before the COVID-19 epidemic shut down the world.

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“We had all just got to LA and we all had our first sort of get-together,” Claflin says. The cast’s next in-person bonding session wouldn’t be for more than a year. “We went out to dinner and then we all went home and disappeared for like a year and a half. It was quite frustrating.” Despite the time and the distance, the cast became a band through music lessons and weekly Zoom catch-ups, immersion into the music and fashion of the era, and a peculiar emotional connection that came from being part of something they all wanted very, very badly to happen, but couldn’t control. In hindsight, Claflin says, the extended production freeze was to their advantage: “By the time we got back out to Los Angeles June of last year, I think we were all so pumped and so excited to see one another—and we’d all improved so massively musically—that we then immediately just sort of gelled as a band,” he says. Read on to find out how the production brought Sunset Strip 50 years back in time in service of the story.

snip

[Yavin4]

1. I miss this era

Especially the London side of it. I call it the Nigel Era. Every third British rock band had a Nigel in it or as a producer.

[Celerity]

2. The Snivelling Shits - I Can't Come + Crossroads (1977, London)

no Nigel, though

Crossroads

Very limited band-only acetate 45rpm. Less than 5 copies were made. No sleeve, generic "Master Room" labels with hand-written track titles.
"Crossroads" is a homage to a British day-time TV soap

Giovanni Dadomo (vocals)
Dave Fudger (bass)
Steve Nicol (drums)
Pete Makowski (guitar)

Dadomo, Fudger, Makowski and Nicol were journalists for the (now defunct) British music weekly "Sounds". Dadomo also wrote for "Zig Zag" magazine and managed to fool the NME (a rival magazine to Sounds) into giving their first record the much coveted "single of the week" accolade. The band played live only a few times (usually billed as "The Snivelling Hits" or just "The Hits" ) and featured different line-ups to that appearing on their debut record. They also recorded a session for John Peel (BBC Radio 1). They disbanded in 1978.

Label: Ghetto Rockers – Pre 2
Format:
Vinyl, 7", Single, 45 RPM, Paper label
Country: UK
Released: 1977
Genre: Rock
Style: Art Rock, Punk





Label: Not On Label – none
Format:
Acetate, 7", 45 RPM
Country: UK
Released: 1977
Genre: Rock
Style: Punk