Baz Luhrmann, director and song producer
In 1997, my music supervisor Anton Monsted and I decided to make a charity album with remixes of songs from my films. I was working on a new version of Rozalla’s rave banger Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) that, for Romeo + Juliet, we had turned into an ecclesiastical song with vocals from Quindon Tarver and King’s College Choir.
Around this time, a graduation speech apparently by Kurt Vonnegut offering life advice was spreading on a new invention called the world wide web. It was what we would now call viral – but it was also a hoax. Some kid had taken a column by a smart, respected columnist called Mary Schmich, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and instead credited it to the Slaughterhouse-Five author.
We thought it would make a great spoken word song. 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.
We submitted it to the local radio station, trying to get Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) heard, but they said it was too long. I thought: ‘Well, they’ll let me on the late-night arts show.’ So I said: ‘I’ll talk about whatever you want as long as you play it.’ Two minutes into the track, the guy in the booth was tapping on the glass pointing because, literally like a movie, the lights on the switchboard were going crazy. The next day, it was the biggest record in Australia.
In the US, I followed the same playbook, getting it played on college radio when the big stations wouldn’t touch it, and it was a breakout smash. Jay Leno even flew out the choir and Lee Perry to perform it on his show and Danny DeVito asked to use it for The Big Kahuna. In the UK, I got word it was going to be No 1 before it was even officially released.
It was one of those things that just struck a chord. When we recorded the track, we thought there might be a chance they’d be playing it next year, or even the year after, so we recorded alternate openings for the Class of ’98, ’99 and then 2000, but we never believed we’d run out of years, that we’d be recording it in other languages, or still be talking about it in 2024.
A lot of people thought I was the voice. It still happens. 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. The voiceover went: “What Aussie film director had a one hit wonder in 1997? Find out when we come back!”
I thought to myself: “I wonder who that could be?”
I didn’t write the words but I recognised their value. There’s a personal element too: my father died from melanoma and it’s a huge issue in Australia. For a world obsessed with skincare, there’s only one truly great skin product – and it’s called sunscreen. Maybe a young person will reimagine the song soon. It’s probably a good time.
Mary Schmich, writer
I was a columnist at the Chicago Tribune for many years. One Friday morning in May 1997, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write about. As I walked to work from my home along Lake Michigan, I saw a young woman sunbathing and I thought: “I hope she’s wearing sunscreen.” I hadn’t at her age and I really regretted it. I had reached a point in my life where I was ready to give out advice.
Graduation speeches in the US are a big deal so I thought it would be fun to write a fake one. I got some M&Ms, grabbed a cappuccino and started writing. I finished it and felt pretty good about it. It went in print the next day. I got a few nice letters and people seemed to like it, but that was it. Then I started getting emails from people saying that something strange was happening, that their cousin or whoever had sent them Kurt Vonnegut’s graduation address to Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and it was my column. I laughed out loud, but then began to panic that I had somehow subconsciously plagiarised Vonnegut.
Of course, I hadn’t. Vonnegut was not and had never has been MIT’s commencement speaker. I managed to track down his phone number. He picked up and said: “Oh, that was you!” He’d been getting calls about it and said he wished he’d written it. So I got another column out of that! I figured that, this time, it really was it.
But over in Australia, Baz and Anton had seen the email and thought it would now be fun to put the words to music. Baz left an unassuming voicemail: “I’m Baz Luhrmann, a movie-maker in Australia,” it said. “I have an idea for the material.” I’ve never forgotten it, because that’s not how newspaper people talk.
I said yes and Baz created the Sunscreen Song. I loved it. It was startling at first to hear it spoken by a man, but it totally works and I don’t think it would have been so widely heard in that era, sadly, if spoken by a woman.
There are a couple of things in there that are a little outdated, like the line about paper bank statements; but I did hear my own voice telling me to keep my love letters when clearing out my closet a couple of years ago. Advice, after all, as the column notes, is a form of nostalgia and when you give advice you are really talking to yourself.
A big skincare company wanted to use it for a sunscreen advert. I’m glad I said no. It’s very personal to me. I was going through a very hard time in my life when I wrote it. I think somehow people sense that between the lines. Saying yes to Baz was a whole different thing as his song captured its spirit. It’s still deeply moving that it has affected so many people. I’m incredibly grateful this thing came out of my mind and heart and fingers on an afternoon and endured. And my friends still ask me: “Are you wearing sunscreen?”
