Having their song used as the opening theme in the first season of James Gunn’s superhero caper Peacemaker single-handedly revived the career of Norwegian glam-metallers Wig Wam and now another set of rockers are set for their own boon with the launch of season two.
The second series premiered last night (August 21) with the dance routine updated to accommodate new cast members (and to fill in for those unfortunate souls who didn’t make it to the end of the first season) and with a brand new song, Wig Wam’s Do Ya Wanna Taste It replaced by Oh Lord, a bombastic glam-pop number by Foxy Shazam.
The Cincinnati crew aren’t quite in the dire straits that Wig Wam were at the time their song was thrust into the spotlight – at the time, Wig Wam had just been dropped by their agent due to a lack of interest – but it will undoubtedly give the six-piece’s streaming numbers a huge boost.
Speaking to The Wrap about reworking Peacemaker’s opening credits, Gunn said he knew the choreography would need to be done again but was unsure about switching up the music. “I wasn’t sure whether I was going to change the song or keep the song the same and do a different dance,” he said. “After listening to a lot of things, and just going walking through my imagination, I eventually hit upon Oh Lord, which I thought was great. They have a great music video which has dancing in it, and I thought that was a good inspiration for Season Two.”
Check out the original video for Oh Lord here:
Foxy Shazam, who Gunn said are “literally my favourite band”, introduced themselves with a swagger with their 2005 debut The Flamingo Trigger, mostly flying under the radar until they signed a major label deal to Sire in 2010, upping the flamboyance and showmanship for that year’s self-titled third album – the record that Oh Lord is taken from. Crucially, they brought the songs as well as the attitude, mixing soul, rock’n’roll, funk and bluesy grooves – think The Darkness if they’d been brought up in New Orleans instead of Lowestoft.
They went on a hiatus after the release of 2014’s Steve Albini-produced Gonzo but were back in action by 2020 and haven’t looked back since, releasing four more albums, the most recent being this year’s Animality Opera.
Gunn has long been a diehard of the band he introduced at San Diego Comic Con’s Peacefest event, where they performed Oh Lord, by describing them as “objectively the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”. In a recent interview with their local radio station Cincinnati Public Radio, Foxy Shazam said their relationship with the director goes back to the first season of Peacemaker.
“It came out and I started getting 50 texts being like, ‘Your song is in the show!’,” said frontman Eric Nally, referring to when Gunn used their song Welcome To The Church Of Rock And Roll in the series. “That was out of the blue so I hit him up on social media and send him a message and then a year went by and I didn’t hear anything and then randomly out of nowhere he responded back. He’s really embraced us and given us an amazing platform that he showcases our music on. We’re very grateful for that. To reach the amount of eyes and ears is so awesome for an independent artist.”
The band’s involvement with Gunn isn’t limited to Peacemaker, with the group also getting involved in the director’s reboot of Superman, which came out earlier this summer. They recorded The Mighty Crabjoys Theme by the fictional band of the same name for use in the film’s end credits and Nally also made a cameo. “It was filmed in Cleveland so I went up there, got to visit the set, got to meet Superman,” Nally said. “There was a wardrobe department and [Gunn} said, ‘Why don’t you go and get dressed’, so I went and put on a cool outfit and went and stood in the movie. You have to be really quick but you can catch me three different times in the movie, I’m floating in and out of the viewer’s subconscious, like, ‘Was that just Eric Nally? It couldn’t be…’.”
Gunn said he went with Oh Lord as this season’s theme because it chimed with the themes of the show. “The lyrics are very much about what happens in Season Two,” he explained. “In the same way that Do Ya Wanna Taste It really captured the flavour, both the light and the dark sides of Season One, the same is true of Oh Lord.”
Watch the opening credits for the new season of Peacemaker below:
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