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‘I thought it was a speech by Kurt Vonnegut’: Baz Luhrmann on making Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

‘Some kid had credited a column of life advice in the Chicago Tribune to the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five. It then spread on a new invention called the world wide web. I thought it would make a great spoken word song’

I was working on a new version of Rozalla’s rave banger Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) that, for , we had turned into an ecclesiastical song with vocals from Quindon Tarver and King’s College Choir. We found a voiceover artist, Lee Perry, to impersonate an imagined Vonnegut and spent a great deal of time getting it right, so that it felt naturally spoken and rhythmic. I remember being in a hotel in Texas and handing my credit card over to the kid at the desk and he went: “Oh, aren’t you that rock star, the one with the record that speaks?” Another time, I was in the gym and there was a MTV show about one-hit wonders playing.

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