LIFE OF A SONG – ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ – Financial Times, 29 March 2026
Most musicians become one hit wonders against their will. Who doesn’t want a second hit? For Wally De Backer, however, the Belgium-born Australian musician with the stage name Gotye, it seems like one hit was more than enough. For starters, “Somebody That I Used to Know” was truly massive across 2011 and 2012, reaching number one in two dozen countries and eventually going five times platinum in the UK, 14 times platinum in the US and a frankly ridiculous 26 times platinum in Australia. Prince presented Gotye and his duet partner, Kimbra Johnson, with the Grammy for Record of the Year in 2013. Today it is one of fewer than 250 singles with more than 2 billion streams on Spotify, plus another 2.6 billion on YouTube, where its memorable body paint video first gained virality.
Gotye was a minor independent artist, fond of sampling and inspired by the trip hop scene for his solo work, while also drumming and singing in a rock and roll trio called The Basics. One previous solo single had become a cult favourite in Australia in 2007 – the spooky, organ-led ballad “Hearts a Mess” – but by 2011 expectations remained low for his third album, Making Mirrors.
On paper, “Somebody That I Used to Know” doesn’t look like a smash hit, especially at a time when the charts were dominated by the glitzy pop of Katy Perry and Rihanna and the bombastic dance music of David Guetta and Calvin Harris. It’s in no rush, centred on a looped bossa nova guitar line lifted from the late Brazilian Luiz Bonfá, and the first chorus takes a minute and a half to arrive – an epoch to the TikTokkers of today. Kimbra doesn’t materialise for her verse until after two and a half minutes. Meanwhile the other consistent melody, sampled from a 1961 album titled A Child’s Introduction to the Instruments of the Orchestra, ran a strong risk of being overfamiliar: it’s “Baa Baa Black Sheep”.
Break-up songs are standard fare, too, but there was a surprising extra intimacy from hearing both the male and female perspective, like a more anguished version of The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me. They recorded Kimbra’s vocals in her bedroom. The vulnerability of the video was remarkable, with Goyte and Kimbra’s naked bodies being painted and erased in stop-motion animation to illustrate their separation.
The song succeeded in a way uniquely characteristic to the turn of that decade, when YouTube was big but Spotify was not yet, and only digital downloads and physical product counted towards chart placings. Katy Perry tweeted about it. It climbed to number one in America once it had been covered on the TV shows Glee and American Idol. The speed of its YouTube success meant that Gotye couldn’t get it on sale in some countries fast enough. A second viral video, of the Canadian band Walk Off the Earth covering the song while all five of them played a single guitar, was released so quickly in early 2012 that it briefly began to outsell the original in Canada.
Gotye seemed somewhat shellshocked by the way his song was outrunning him around the world. “There was a feeling that it wasn’t me who was shoving the song in everyone’s face, it was the rest of the world, and I was kind of like, ‘It’s okay! You don’t have to play my song so much! Play some other songs! We can listen to different music!’” he said.
Nor did he capitalise financially to the extent that he might have. He chose not to make extra money by adding adverts to the YouTube video until much more recently, and when he did, it was to help to fund a much more esoteric project.
Almost 15 years on, he still hasn’t followed up the Making Mirrors album. There have been two barely noticed albums with The Basics, and his big song reappeared as “Somebody (2024)”, a dance remix by the producers Fisher and Chris Lake. Mainly De Backer has been working on preserving the legacy of the late French musician Jean-Jacques Perrey, a pioneer of electronic music who died aged 87 in 2016. With the help of Perrey’s daughter Patricia he has been setting up an archive of old recordings, releasing a rarities album, Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline, on a record label he set up for the purpose, buying and restoring vintage Ondiolines to perform the music, and running the website ondioline.com. The Ondioline, a French analogue synthesizer first built in the 1940s, never took off, but Perrey was its virtuoso.
So he’s well shot of the pop treadmill, immersed in vintage electronica. It’s been left to the Florida rapper Doechii to carry on the Gotye legacy. Her song “Anxiety” samples “Somebody That I Used to Know” extensively, won a Grammy this year and sent the tune to number one in Australia once again. If that doesn’t strictly make him a two-hit wonder, he probably won’t mind.
