Somebody That I Used To Know - The Best of Gotye (feat. Kimbra)
The list of break-up duets is, as you might expect, pretty short. Break-up songs? Ten a penny. Duets? Where to start! But break-up duets? Not so many. Don’t You Want Me by The Human League; Broken Strings by James Morrison & Nelly Furtado; Fairytale of New York at a push. But the break-up duet to end all break-up duets? Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye featuring Kimbra.
Let’s get the joke about Gotye being “somebody that we used to know” out of the way right at the start, because the Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter – real name Wouter Andre “Wally” De Backer – appears to have been quite deliberate about disappearing from the limelight. Unlike most artists scrambling to follow up an unexpected global smash, Gotye hasn’t released a new album since 2011’s Making Mirrors, the LP that spawned breakout break-up hit Somebody That I Used To Know.
You might be forgiven for thinking that Gotye (pronounced ‘Go-Tee-Yay’, like the surname of the French fashion designer Jean-Paul) is hidden away on his private island counting his millions. STIUTK became the biggest-selling single of 2012, reaching number one in thirty countries including the UK, US, Australia and Canada, and going top ten in thirty more. Its iconic music video has been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube:
But cashing in isn’t Wally’s style. Those two billion YouTube views have earned him precisely zero dollars, on account of his steadfast refusal to place pre-roll ads alongside the video. He just doesn’t want to use his art to sell stuff. (Korean one-hit wonder PSY reportedly made $10m in YouTube payments when Gangnam Stylepassed two billion streams.)
Even more admirably, De Backer agreed up front to give nearly half of the song’s royalties to the estate of Brazilian guitarist Luis Bonfa, whose 1967 instrumental song Seville is sampled on STIUTK. Bonfa died in 2001, ten years before the song was released. Gotye may or may not be counting his millions, but somewhere in South America some lucky Brazilian beneficiaries are counting theirs.
