Their Song Spawned an Internet Mystery. Now They’re Ready to Tell Their Story
It took years of searching and too many false leads to count, but the musicians behind the mysterious 1980s pop tune commonly referred to as “Everyone Knows That” or “EKT” — the real title is “Ulterior Motives” — have been identified: Christopher Saint Booth sang the vocals on the beguiling track, while his identical twin brother Philip Adrian Booth played the guitar. It was originally part of the soundtrack on the 1986 adult film Angels of Passion, one of several porn flicks the pair scored in their youth before embarking on long and fruitful moviemaking careers of their own.
Ever since an anonymous person with the handle “carl92” uploaded a low-quality, 17-second sample of it to WatZatSong in 2021, “Ulterior Motives” has fascinated the forensic audio detectives of the “lostwave” community, hobbyists who track down the source of compelling music snippets that have survived outside their original context and without credits. Thanks to its infectious hook and a sound that tapped into a deep well of nostalgia, it became one of the most highly sought sonic artifacts in this online world, with tens of thousands collaborating on a subreddit to figure out who had made it and, just as importantly, how to track down a complete recording.
The Booth brothers had long forgotten the track and, until a few days ago, remained completely unaware that a fragment of it lived on as a viral hit. Once a couple of redditors cracked the case and named them as the musicians behind it, they were deluged with phone messages and comments on social media they couldn’t quite understand at first. After this outreach by fans and friends, the siblings began to grasp the impact of their lost work and appreciate the lengths people had gone to recover it. Here, they speak to Rolling Stone about how “Ulterior Motives” came into existence, the pleasure of having it salvaged from the sands of time, and plans to release a polished version of the single as a way of saying thanks — along with more of the glitzy pop music they wrote back then.
So, how are you?
Christopher: I’m fabulous! Just swamped and blown away by this situation, never even knew about it till two days ago.
Philip: We were just flabbergasted. I mean, we had no idea this was going back to 2021, to be honest.
How did you find out?
Christopher: We used to work for SyFy channel for like 10 years, doing paranormal documentaries, and we did horror movies for Sony and stuff. We did [a documentary called The Exorcist File, about the case that inspired the novel The Exorcist]. And I was posting promo for that, then people started writing “release EKT” or “Ulterior Motives,” and I’m going, “What’s that?” I didn’t remember the song at all, that’s 40 years ago. And then it got crazy. Someone sent me a link to your article [about lostwave sleuths looking for the complete song]. And then I went, “Oh, yeah.” Then I heard the song and I went “Oh yeah, that’s us.” That’s how we found out.
Philip: I have to tell you, on a human level, it really brought deep emotion and tears to our eyes to see so many kids singing the song, saying how great the song was. There’s just no better feeling as a musician to see such gratification for something. They discovered our names, our phones started blowing up, social media started blowing up. You know, we’re not big TikTok followers — my daughter wrote me and said, “Dad, I’m so proud of you. You’re all over TikTok. And we’re all singing the song.” I thought, “Oh my God, what’s happening?”
That’s an amazing moment. And this song was so early in your careers, you were just getting started, right?
Christopher: We were in a very successful rock and roll band called Sweeney Todd, which was out of Canada, they did a big hit song called “Roxy Roller.” Bryan Adams replaced [original lead vocalist] Nick Gilder, and then Bryan Adams actually was fired. I was hired as a singer and Phil played guitar. [Another Booth brother, John, played drums.] We made our way to America, and started playing [L.A. venues] the Rainbow [Bar], the Whiskey [a Go Go]. Mötley Crüe backed us up, because we were a very heavy rock band.
Philip: This was the very early Eighties.
Christopher: So “Ulterior Motives” was recorded around 1986, it was recorded as a pop song, and then to make money — we were just doing anything to make money, because we were musicians. Even worse today, trying to make any money. We took jobs working on movies like as production assistants, in the art department, we did some really big films. And then there was a friend of ours that was doing adult movies and they needed somebody to do craft services and move stuff around.
Philip: We were in our early twenties.
Christopher: And we knew the producers, who were very nice, and they needed music. They gave us quite a bit of money just to give them some music to use behind the scenes. And of course we needed the money. So that’s how that happened. Despite some people saying was never written for an adult film. It was actually written as a pop song and we just used it in there.
I think there were a lot of people who didn’t think it could be from an adult film because nobody making adult films today really bothers with that stuff anymore.
Philip: Honestly, back then, the industry was completely different. They were making actual films and stories and shooting on film.
Christopher: Their budgets were like 10 or 15 grand back then.
Philip: Nowadays, it’s just, you know, a camcorder or phone or whatever, but back then it was a huge industry. And we learned, actually, from licensing music for them to use, working on the sets. We learned how to shoot film, and we got the bug, and that’s how we ended up wanting to make movies, not adult movies, but movies. By seeing how exciting that was, with film cameras and lights. We were produced by Smokey Robinson’s producer, Gary Goetzman, back in the Eighties, who did Stop Making Sense with David Byrne. He heard the songs that were coming out, and he loved it. He took us in to get a record deal and we released a couple of songs. But all these other songs [including “Ulterior Motives”] were lost songs. We had a whole album of this Eighties stuff. You know, that music back then just had such fun about it. It had such melody and innocence, so to see people nowadays singing it and what they’re saying about it, we’re just blown away.
You recorded this 40 years ago — what was it like to listen to it again?
Philip: The first thing was said was, “What are we going to do? They want a new version, a clean version, a remastered version… ”
Christopher: It actually put tears in our eyes. It was so beautiful. Music is a very touching thing. I’ve always been a musician, I still do music for films, and music is my life. I own a very big studio, Pro Tools, the whole thing. I do nothing but Atmos surround sound for films, but I’ve always written pop songs. Philip and I liked George Michael and Culture Club back then. And then Nine Inch Nails and Peter Gabriel influenced us. To go back [to the song] felt like we were 20 again.
Philip: I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see so many young people singing that song, going out their way to record those songs. There is no greater high for a musician than to see that it stands the test of time. So what we decided is we’ve got to go in the studio and start figuring out what we’re going to do now.
It would be amazing if you could perform it live at one of those old clubs on the Sunset Strip.
Philip: Is the Viper Room dead now? Is it closed?
No, it’s still around! I saw a heavy metal show there not long ago. They’re still rocking.
Philip: We remember going to see the Babys at the Roxy [Theatre]. When we were playing, we played the Troubadour.
Christopher: This was a little after the writing of that song, because we were into synthwave back then. We were moving into heavy rock at that point, because we’ve gone through every genre of music — except for country, of course. Music is probably the best fountain of youth ever.
Do you remember what inspired the lyrics for “Ulterior Motives”?
Christopher: Yeah, it was a girl that cheated. She was saying one thing and you found out that she did another thing.
Philip: It went viral as “EKT,” for “everyone knows that.” We posted the lyrics and the fans said, “Oh my god, it’s ‘everyone knows it,’ not ‘everyone knows that.’”
Christopher: We’ve go to go through 40 years of tapes to see if we can find it, and if we can’t find it, we’re gonna go ahead and re-record it. I might have to squeeze my balls to sing that high now. We have been able to find the rhythm track, and we’re looking for the vocal track right now. If not, we’re very prepared to go in and redo it and do it as close as possible to the original but with a modern recording sound, so the quality is right up to par with today’s sound. I’m gonna take it in there and give everybody what they want. Whether it bombs or not, I don’t know, but I don’t think we can not do it.
Philip: It’s like being Peter Gabriel or Guns N’ Roses, anybody who writes new material, but they all want to hear that old song from 40 years ago! I think you have to please your fans. You can’t be so self-absorbed. I have to say, I didn’t realize how catchy this song is. And now it’s like, I can’t stop singing it. The beauty of it is we’re starting to go through the music and have discovered a whole album’s worth of music written back then that sounds like that. And everybody’s saying, “You need to put that album out.” It’s changed our life.
Christopher: It’s extra energy to get you out of bed, it really is.
Philip: We just don’t want to pass up this thing. It’s bigger than us now.
Have you checked out other stuff in the lostwave scene?
Christopher: I haven’t had chance to, because it’s still been very overwhelming. I did read the articles and Reddit, tried to follow a lot of TikTok stories and YouTube videos to understand what the whole community’s about.
Philip: I heard that carl92 went into hiding because he couldn’t admit he heard [the song] in an adult film. [Editor’s note: It’s not clear how the anonymous poster, who later disappeared from WatZatSong, obtained the recording he shared in 2021, claiming he had found it on a “DVD backup” from when he was learning to capture audio.] Well, I think we owe a really big thank you to carl92. We had to call our brother who was in Sweeney Todd with us, Johnny B., we had to tell him, “You remember that song?” He says “Yeah.” I tell him I just saw an article in Rolling Stone and had to send it to him. He’s a diehard musician from the day, and we always had huge respect for Rolling Stone. We said to Johnny B., the three of us gotta get these tracks back. This kind of stuff just doesn’t happen. There’s got to be a bigger picture behind why this happened. And so we’re thrilled, and we want to thank everybody, and we want to share the excitement.
What can you tell the fans about that other unreleased material?
Christopher: We have found a lot of tracks that we worked on with a producer that used to do Tiffany and New Edition. That’s what they were trying to make us sound like back then, and they produced it really well. We even did covers, like “Just My Imagination,” which is actually a beautiful cover of the Temptations song. They’re in studio quality and I can remaster them. As far as “Ulterior Motives,” we have the rhythm track and we’re going to throw the guitar track back on there, it’s an Eighties synthesizer guitar.
Philip: Everybody was asking, “How’d you get that guitar sound?” Back then there used to be something called a MIDI guitar. And what you do with a MIDI guitar is you have two feeds: one puts the distortion of guitar sound out of the jack and the other triggers a keyboard. So when you’re playing, it’s playing keyboard sounds at the same time.
Christopher: I’m gonna redo the vocals and I can pretty much do it, even though I sounded like a 13-year-old girl back then. But that’s the sound they were going for, New Edition.
Philip: We had some people on TikTok and YouTube dissecting it, filtering it.
Christopher: Yeah, apparently I’m a Japanese girl.
Philip: [Imitating a lostwave sleuth] “At first I thought it was a male, but after my detective work I can hear by the accent that it’s a Japanese girl.” We’re just laughing like, “Oh, god.”
Christopher: So what we’re gonna do is release the song, and if people like it and they want to hear more, we’re prepared to release a whole album of tracks that sound a lot like that — Culture Club, Depeche Mode, George Michael, ABC, everyone in the Eighties we were influenced by. We actually went to England to do a record deal, we were signed to Capitol Records for that kind of stuff. For whatever reason, there was something that just didn’t work out with the deal. So we ended up making movies instead. Still doing music, but movies were making more money at the time.
Do you still have all that old tech you used?
Philip: I still have the MIDI guitar, I brushed the dust off it yesterday. We’re gonna make a couple of videos.
Christopher: You put things out in the universe — recently I just got into this thought of getting all these old Seventies synthesizers back. I don’t know why. I’ve just been obsessed with bringing them back, you know, the Moog. I used to work for Keith Emerson as a as a keyboard tech. I just started bringing all these keyboards into my studio and I think it channeled the universe.
Philip: We still have a lot of that oldest gear, the old classic LinnDrum machine. The detectors were saying, “We found that it was a LinnDrum machine.” And it’s so cool, how deep they get into this stuff. But I think they want that Eighties sound anyway. If we have to recreate anything, we’ll use the original equipment.
What will your band name be when you release this material?
Philip: I don’t know, you might need to help us on that. We were trying to figure out what we were going by back then. And because we’re identical twin brothers. We had a band called Who’s Who? Everybody used to come up to us and say, “Who’s who?” You should see some of the promo stuff we had. The pictures are amazing, with the hair and everything.
Christopher: Maybe a can of hairspray would be a good cover.
I mean, even “Ulterior Motives” would be a great name. You’ve got options.
Christopher: Maybe the fans can help us figure that out. What we didn’t want to do was let anybody down. I know a lot of people spent a lot of time and [showed a lot of] support for many to be involved in all this. So we’re gonna go ahead and release it, and hopefully, they’ll dig it. But we love it and we appreciate them.
It’s really special, and it speaks to the power of art — that people found this snippet and said, “It’s not right that I can’t hear the rest of this song. This song deserves to be known, and the people who made it deserve to be known.”
Philip: And it was only a 17-second snippet.
Christopher: We’re pretty excited about it. We do movies and TV shows, we do very well doing that. And I do soundtracks for movies and my own albums as well, I have one out now called SkyPolar, which is reminiscent of old synthesizers, like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Pink Floyd, mixing Hans Zimmer with Nine Inch Nails-type stuff. So we didn’t really need to [revisit “Ulterior Motives”], but we feel like we need to do it as a thank you to everyone who took their time over the years of looking for it. We need to do that for them.
