Good grief! How do you narrow down just one Died Pretty song as special? It’s like trying to name your ten favourite all time songs and ending up with twenty! I can relate songs to many times in my life – some good, some bad, some happy, some sad. But the song that means probably the most, in terms of experience – its mood, its sentiments – would be Everybody Moves. Why? When? Where? Well, in no particular order, the melancholic feel of the song, for starters. It’s a song you listen to while driving on the freeway at night, illuminated only by fast lights; or seated in front of a fire on a winter’s evening – the haunting rhythms accompany the ghosts of once friends as they wander, the cold and the shadows as they disappear. At points in my life, everybody did move, everybody did change. Best friends move interstate and get married; romantic ones that got away move to other places and other lovers. They were all moving and changing – not just from me, but all the time I was staying the same. I decided it was time for me to move and change. I went to England for two years; I needed to live on the other side of the world. Not to “find myself”, but just to see what happened. They were the best two years of my life. Of course, I took my Died Pretty collection with me; the music reminded me of home, not the land down under of vegemite sandwiches and kangaroos hopping down the street – Died Pretty has never been so gaudily Australian as that – but a link to the place I come from. Living in another country, I enjoyed being in a foreign land, but still needed a sense of place; while I had changed and moved away, I could not do without a connection to my roots. So now I could hum Everybody Moves in my head while walking through the brightly lit streets and chaos of bitterly cold London, as the rain fizzed against streetlights, as the freezing mist rose up from the Thames. I could feel sorry for those poor people who had never heard of Died Pretty. I could help a few – I made tape collections for friends (guys, please don’t sue me for copyright breaches – how else will they hear you?). Flatmates would say “Hey I really like that Died Pretty!” as I blasted songs in my portable stereo in the living room, the volume turned up to 11! Everybody Moves was a much played song, and seemed to feature on every collection I made. Like a lot of Died Pretty songs, it made me happy and sad at the same time. A sense of loneliness, isolation and homesickness coupled with the euphoric joy that wanderlust can bring. I had finally moved and changed. Maybe someone else could relate to the song; maybe I could pass it on. And now I’m back home. After making lots of friends, after making memories of what would be two of the best years of my life, it’s time to move and change again. In Sydney, in a melancholy mood, with a few drinks under my belt (not a whole bottle of port, mind you), I listen to the song while studying an atlas map of London and Europe – places where I met great people, places where they were born; or I gaze at photos of them, or my house, or the street in the town I lived. Once again, Everybody Moves is there to haunt me; it makes me laugh, it makes me cry. It brings a wistful, bittersweet rush to my head, but it also reassures me. After all, we’re all moving and changing, aren’t we? Brian May |
