Michael Taylor presents Music Therapy on Sunday nights on Tameside Radio with Neil Summers. Here, Michael writes about discovering new music in the form of soundtracks on Netflix...

The relatively new Netflix series Stay Close was filmed all over the North West of England.

Many viewers will have spotted Ashton town centre as the location of a lawyer played by Eddie Izzard.

Some of the other locations left viewers a bit confused. Characters would drive across the Runcorn bridge, end up in Blackpool, or Morecambe, then have a row at a statue near St Helens, before rushing back to a nightclub in Formby, with the interiors of a club in Manchester.

I can live with all of that, it’s not meant to be real. But there’s clearly now a formula for this kind of drama, adapted from the best selling author Harlan Coben.

Maybe I’ve reached an age where I find my willingness to try new things tested. 

Yes, I say I want to find new music, new films to watch, new books to read, and TV series to bury myself in, ones that bust a genre and redefine culture. 

But let’s face it, most stuff is made precisely because it has a guaranteed audience of people who liked one thing, and who will also like another. People like me.

When I’ve run out of new things to watch, I often fall back on the tried and tested mental formula of my own: British gangster films and zombie apocalypse series. However, I think they’ve both ceased to bring me anything new.

I’ve been stuck in a loop of the American series The Walking Dead for years and I’ve even gone down the rabbit hole of the spin-off series Fear The Walking Dead. 

Despite a powerful lead role from British actor Lennie James it has run out of ideas and purpose. I’m out.

I reached gangster/hooligan nadir with ID2: Shadwell Army. A truly awful film. Unless it has Craig Fairbrass in it, I’m out, maybe Rise of the Footsoldier Five will be just one last job.

Netflix and Spotify have a finely tuned algorithm that keeps suggesting the same things at the same people. If you like this, try this. 

Underneath nearly every single playlist for our Music Therapy show, which I keep on Spotify, is a list of suggestions. At the top of the list, most weeks, is Lost in Music by The Fall and Visions of You by Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, featuring Sinead O’Connor. 

Annoyingly, they are indeed two fantastic songs that we’ve played on our show. There is a genius to it.

Personally, though, I don’t like being predictable, I like to discover new things to explore and we like to surprise listeners of Music Therapy, as well as ourselves from time to time.

One of my sources of discovering new music is the soundtracks of some of the better series on Netflix.

I’ve recently finished the fourth series of Ozark, which for anyone out there who enjoyed Breaking Bad, it also features a regular guy who gets in over his head with Mexican drug cartels and organised crime. Maybe it’s also one of the formulas that the makers of these series also build into the creative process, but it also has absolutely fantastic music. 

On this weekend’s show I’ll share a couple of tracks from the series, one that was new to me, and the other a rediscovered classic.

You can listen to Michael Taylor and Neil Summers on Music Therapy on Tameside Radio 103.6FM on Sunday evenings from 9pm to 11pm. Click here to subscribe and catch up on previous shows.

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