Life can go crazy sometimes. One minute Toni Watson was playing on the sidewalk with a keyboard and a hat for the coins, the next she was penning ‘Dance Monkey’ about the monkey life of street musicians and the rest is history. The streaming counter now stands at 2.5 billion. That song dates from 2019, but because a pandemic beeps in between and Tones and I released another album in between, she can still come and do her monkey dance at Pinkpop. In a decor, yes. A bright green haunted house. In the front garden the band is playing behind purple fences.
From busker to streaming cannon, it’s really a beautiful from rags to riches story. Find them herself. Tones and I is preparing for a life as a one hit wonder. She has already captured exactly how famous she is in a minute-long montage in the middle of the show. Mighty beautiful, those images of packed houses, newspaper headlines, spectacular arena shows with pyrotechnics, wow, the successes keep piling up. Then ‘she takes us back to how it all started’. The band resigns, Tones and I takes a seat on the roof of the haunted house, where there is a lonely keyboard, and starts to cover ‘Forever Young’ to a very silly house beat. The audience starts clapping so hard that they start to cry, and that is also very beautiful. More Instagram wisdom is spilling over the screen, because you too can become a success story, Tones And I is living proof of it. ‘We were all meant to shine, not just one of us, everybody’. Really inspiring, also for her future self.
Tones and I plays it smart. She plays ‘Dance Monkey’ at the end, which is why most people stop. They are all very simple electro-pop songs according to the recipe of ‘Dance Monkey’, one more successful than the other. The keyboard goes from pling-plong, there is a very simple bass run with an electronic drum kick, and then Tones and I opens her throat. And shrill, too. She sounds a bit like Sia with laryngitis, and she sings-clears her throat as if there’s a solid rattle stuck in it. Then she coughs up ‘Dance Monkey’, and that sounds exactly as anti-climactic as you expect after three quarters of an hour of Tones And I.
THE MOMENT:
At the start of her set, she puts a pink Pinkpop hat on top of her own cap, and keeps it on for the entire show, even though it’s 35 degrees. Really sweet, the enormous gratitude with which she showers Pinkpop. But yeah. Even if a monkey wears a pink hat, it is and remains a one-hit wonder.
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