Kevin Bacon may not dance much to “Footloose” any more — but he’s more than happy to sing it.
Bacon channeled his inner Kenny Loggins and gave the crowd a thrill on April 27 when he joined his brother Michael in singing the classic 1984 song at this year’s Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California.
The Bacon Brothers, who have been formally playing in their band together since the 1990s, put their own soulful, country-style twist on the title track from the iconic “Footloose” movie starring Bacon.
Kevin Bacon, 66, gave a little shimmy as he sang the lyrics, in a slight nod to his electric dance moves as Ren McCormack in the 1984 movie.
While Bacon still loves the song and film, he shared in March that his worst nightmare is being asked to pull out his old dance movies when “Footloose” comes on at any wedding he’s attending. He even makes a point to ask wedding DJs not to play it.
“They always start out being about the bride, and then there’s alcohol involved,” he said during a retrospective of his career at SXSW in Austin, Texas. “And by about 10:30, the song comes on, and suddenly the wedding becomes about me getting out and dancing. People will literally form a circle around me and clap their hands like I’m a trained monkey.”
Bacon added that despite his prowess on the dance floor in a movie that became one of his signature films, he went into it as a novice.
“I was not a trained dancer,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he won’t break out the dance for a special occasion. In 2023, he re-created a dance scene in an abandoned warehouse in celebration of the end of the strike by SAG-AFTRA against the Hollywood studios.
Surprisingly, he said he’s only seen the movie “three or four times,” while his two adult kids with wife Kyra Sedgwick have never seen it.
However, he still maintains a connection to the film.
“I love it,” Bacon said during a 2022 Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist. “I think it’s great. It’s like all of those things that you think ‘Oh my gosh, is it ever going to go away?’ At a certain point, you have to embrace the beast.”
“I think that it was a great gift to be part of that movie,” he continued. “I certainly took it very seriously when I was doing it, and I love that people will still come up and say that they just showed it to their kids.”
Bacon even made a trip in 2024 to the Utah high school where the movie was shot. His visit came 40 years after “Footloose” was released in theaters.
“Things look a little different around here,” he joked in a clip shared by TODAY. “I’d say the thing that looks the most different is me.”
