Adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel of the same name, Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & The Six blurs the lines between fiction and reality. Although not a real band, the relationships between members of the eponymous rock outfit are loosely based on those in Fleetwood Mac, and a Daisy Jones & The Six album, Aurora, has actually been released.
Produced by Blake Mills and featuring input (some seemingly uncredited) from the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Jackson Browne, this 11-track record is performed by the Daisy Jones & The Six cast members, with Riley Keough (Daisy Jones) and Sam Clafin (Billy Dunne) featuring particularly prominently.
But these people are actors, not musicians, so how did they pull it off? Unsurprisingly, the answer is lot of hard work.
"It's pretty amazing,” Keough told Entertainment Tonight. “I think we really came from not being able to play anything on a guitar or sing really, to having a full record going out which is like… it's crazy to us I think. We had months of jam sessions, so we had months of rehearsals, so we were basically in band practice for, I don't know, a year."
Sam Clafin, meanwhile, had to deal with a problem that confronted many a rock star down the years: "It was not only playing the guitar but singing whilst I'm playing the guitar,” he explains, adding that he was “also trying to move like I know what I'm doing and I've been doing this my entire life whilst also singing in an American accent, whilst also running on no food because I was trying to lose weight for the part.”
The fictional/real band also features WIll Harrison as guitarist Graham Dunne, Suki Waterhouse as keyboard player Karen Sirko, Sebastian Chacon as drummer Warren Rojas, Josh Whitehouse as rhythm guitarist Eddie Roundtree, and Jack Romano as bassist Chuck Loving. And, to prepare them for filming, the band were made to play a gig together to prove their chops.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Scott Neustadter said: "A week before we started shooting, my wife [producer Lauren Neustadter] was like, 'They're very comfortable, but they've never performed for a group, for a crowd. And I need to know that they can do that. Because if they can do it, they'll be fine into a camera,'" he recalls. "We wanted to seem as authentic as we could, so we made them do a concert."
And so a crowd of Amazon Prime Video staff and their families was assembled and the band performed. "They had a set list and there was no help," says Neustadter. "It was them and the instruments and they had to sing and they had to perform and they killed it."
Suki Waterhouse, meanwhile - who’d had little keyboard playing experience prior to the show - told Entertainment Weekly of the concert: "It was honestly way more nerve-wracking than any show I've ever done. We were absolutely terrified. I got to my piano and someone hadn't switched on an amp, so there was nothing."
The first three episodes of Daisy Jones & The Six are available on Prime Video now.
