Dance Monkey takes Tones and I from the streets of Byron Bay to the world
Toni Watson’s songs were too popular for Byron Bay, then the rest of the world found out.
It is No 1 in 18 countries, including Britain, where for the past six weeks it has seen off stiff competition from such gold-plated pop stars as Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa. It is, at 16 weeks, the longest-running Australian No 1.
Dance Monkey is a bouncy electro-pop tune about the frustrations of being a street performer by Tones and I, an Australian busker who this time last year was living in a hostel in Byron Bay and wondering if she made the right decision to give up her job in a clothes shop in Melbourne to sing for spare change full-time.
“Last night I was at the (French radio) NRJ awards in France, and they put me in the presidential suite,” says Tones and I, aka Toni Watson of Mornington Peninsula.
“My friend Abbie and I were looking out of the window, down on the red carpet below, and I said to her, ‘do you remember when I told you I wanted to busk full-time, but I was nervous about giving up my job?’ That was a year and a half ago,” she says.
“Last year we were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, scraping up enough change to buy a packet of tobacco, and now we’re meeting Lewis Capaldi,” says Abbie, who did indeed meet the Scottish pop star at the awards show, having taken a few days off from her job as a care worker for the elderly in Sheffield to join her friend on tour. Abbie was travelling around Australia in a van when she met Watson at the hostel in 2017, and encouraged her to give up her job and busk full-time.
Watson and Abbie — “I’m a bogan, she’s a ratchet, that’s why we get on so well,” Watson says, using self-mocking slang to describe unsophisticated people — are in the graffiti-strewn back room of the Rotown in Rotterdam, which is exactly the kind of narrow, black-walled bar you would expect someone on her first tour of Europe to play, but perhaps not someone who has been at No 1 for weeks.
Wearing a baseball cap pulled so low that it shadows her face, Watson is engaged but tentative, as a teenager not used to being the centre of attention might be.
The success of Dance Monkey, one of those naggingly simple songs that, with a chorus that drops rather than rises and a melody that sounds as if it has been around for ever, has taken everyone by surprise. Most of all its creator. Watson doesn’t have much in common with the Dua Lipas of this world. In a body warmer and sweatpants she looks more like the teenage basketball enthusiast she once was, or the busker she became after getting a Casio keyboard at the age of 16, than a pop sensation at the top of the charts the world over. It has certainly happened fast.
READ MORE Dance Monkey most successful song ever in Australian charts | Tones and I scores eight nominations in ARIA Awards
“I worked in retail for a bit and then I busked for two years,” she says. “As soon as I started, I thought, ‘I’ll do busking until I’m 50 because this is the best job in the world.’ ”
It was also hard. Watson played on the street through two rain-soaked winters in Byron Bay while living in a hostel-cum-venue called the Arts Factory Lodge and found that a young woman with a keyboard was not entirely welcome in a community made up chiefly of guitar-wielding surfer dudes.
Dealing with drunken crowds demanding to be entertained or filming her on their phones before wandering off proved a challenge too, hence the bittersweet message of her breakout hit.
“Dance Monkey is about the bad side of busking,” Watson says. “I was getting a little bit bullied by guys who thought I was taking their customers, and it got to the point where I was anxious every time I set up my keyboard. Drunk people came past and yelled profanities at me. The negative was outweighing the positive, but I didn’t want to stop just because people were being horrible.”
In Australia it wasn’t Dance Monkey that got Tones and I noticed, but her first single, a coming-out anthem called Johnny Run Away. A music lawyer named Jackson Walkden-Brown spotted Walker on a night out with his wife in 2017 and introduced her to the management company Lemon Tree Music, which represents another former busker done good, Tash Sultana. Then, on February 15 this year, Watson uploaded Johnny Run Away to Triple J Unearthed, the music discovery initiative run by the national youth radio station. Within a few hours it was getting radio plays; two weeks later it was at No 12 in the chart.
“That was a problem because the other buskers would say, ‘Get off the street, you’re too big now’,” Watson says. “Just because my song was being played on the radio didn’t mean I had a load of money. You don’t get royalties overnight. I was getting recognised all the time, but I still lived at the hostel, and the bullying meant I didn’t busk for a month so I had no money at all. Around that time my co-manager Regan (Lethbridge, from Lemon Tree) told me he was taking me out for lunch. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re paying? Because I have $30 to my name.’ ”
That, we can safely assume, is no longer the case. Watson began to think she might have something special when she played Dance Monkey at a talent show at the Arts Factory this year. People were sitting on the floor or eating on the balcony, and as soon as the chorus hit everyone jumped up and started dancing.
“For the next three months I performed that song each week. When I busked on the street the crowds were getting so big, the police took away my permit. Dance Monkey was a phenomenon in Byron Bay and the rest of the world had no idea.”
After its official release in May the rest of the world found out. At next week’s ARIA Awards in her home country, Dance Monkey has been nominated for song of the year and best pop release, and Tones and I is up for awards including best female artist, breakthrough artist and best independent release.
You have to wonder how Watson has coped with going from being a virtual unknown to having the biggest song in the world in the space of a few months.
“I’m scared of being a one-hit wonder because my second single has set the bar too high,” she says. “I’ve been at the top of the charts for over three months in Australia, and not even the biggest artists in the world have done that. I don’t want my career to fall if my next release doesn’t break my own record because I have a load of tracks I’m proud of.
“And the other thing is that when you’re busking, if people don’t like your music they just don’t stop walking, but now I’m being bullied online and it sucks. The world is telling me I have a weird voice, which nobody ever said before. You get pulled apart.”
Watson is dealing with her change in circumstances by carrying on as if it hasn’t happened, hence the tour of European dive bars, which also marks her first time in Europe. At the concert she replicates her busking set-up — two keyboards and a drum pad — and sings Never Seen the Rain, a sweet, simple ballad about being scared to take chances, and a generational empowerment anthem called The Kids Are Coming.
The Dutch all-ages crowd sings along, the merchandise stall at the back does a brisk trade in T-shirts, and it all feels like an early gig by an artist on the up. Then she does Dance Monkey and the place erupts.
Tones and I is so far outside the music industry’s pop model, with none of the usual army of co- writers and stylists and until recently no home beyond a bed in a Byron Bay hostel, that it is hard to say where she will go from here.
She makes her own videos — the one for Dance Monkey features her dressed as an old man running amok on a golf course — and is planning to stage a theatrical show. In the meantime, she and Abbie have a few days off in Amsterdam.
Watson says in a tone of adolescent sarcasm: “People keep saying to me, ‘God, it must be great. Don’t you feel so amazing?’ Actually, it’s hard to go from zero to a hundred. I want a normal life too. I want to be fit and healthy. I want to love and be loved. I want to play basketball again. But then, for the longest time I was just coasting because I was too scared to try anything, and now I know there is a different kind of happiness that comes from really working hard on something, being knocked back and putting everything into something you really want.”
And if it all ends tomorrow, at least she got to meet Lewis Capaldi.
The Times