A three-year hunt to identify a lost ‘80s song ended when one of the tens of thousands of people involved in the search found it in an adult movie soundtrack.
The “lostwave” hobby involves trying to locate details of music created before the internet era. In 2021, an extremely low-quality 17-second clip was uploaded to the WatZatSong community by a user who said they couldn’t remember where they’d got it from, guessing it was an early attempt to digitize music from an analog medium.
The clip became known as “Everyone Knows That” and also “Ulterior Motives,” based on the lyrics people thought they could hear. Speculators suggested the ‘80s-sounding soft rock / new wave piece was a lost demo by Roxette or Savage Garden, among other ideas.
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Redditor south_pole_ball – one of nearly 50,000 members of an “Everyone Knows That” subreddit – discovered the name Christopher Saint Booth attached to a list of vague credits from the ‘80s, and discovered he’d been involved in writing music for adult movies.
After spending an unreported amount of time watching such productions, they eventually found the song. “I went through each video… until I found Angels of Passion (1986),” they reported. “I got to 1:07:31 and I found ‘EKT’.”
The evidence is complete with the kind of sounds to be expected from an adult movie. Another user posted a “family version,” although it’s still very poor quality (listen below); while many involved in the search have called for Booth and his co-writer brother Philip Adrian – wherever they are – to release a full-quality version.
“All this work and it’s something you can’t brag to your parents about, lol,” one redditor wrote. “But so many parents said it sounded familiar…” said another.
Was the Truth About ‘Everyone Knows That’ Always Known?
Some comments used the known lyrics to accuse carl92, who posted the first clip and has since disappeared, of having always known where it came from: “Cause everyone knows it /(You’ve got) ulterior motives, tell me the truth … I got it from your eyes that you’re telling lies…”
“We live in a time when knowledge is freely available to us and we can consume music without much restriction,” one of the “Everyone Knows That” subreddit mods told the Guardian. “Music that is lost in pre-internet times is likely very interesting to younger people… it’s such a foreign thing to them, to not be able to simply look up the song.”
Listen to the Cleaned-Up Version of ‘Everyone Knows That’
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Watch a Censored Version of ‘Angels of Passion’
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