The Underthinkers: How Allday And Toby & Pete Made Their Careers Happen
Beer. Vodka. Watermelon. #UnderthinkIt
Six years ago, Tom Gaynor was an art school dropout. The 20-year-old student by day, stand-up comic slash ‘aspiring creative’ by night had just moved to Melbourne alone and was waiting for his Centrelink payment to come through.
“I couldn’t work a job because I was doing a comedy festival and going to uni at the same time. That’d finish at 11pm every night… and then I’d come home and have to steal food from Woolworths.”
Gaynor’s tone is soft, his posture unassuming. He’s just released his second full-length record as acclaimed Aussie rapper Allday.
“That was a time when, even in any time I got off, I would write so much music. And I recorded so quickly because there’s just desperation, you know?”
We are seated on a lounge in the Sydney studio of design mavericks Toby & Pete.
If there’s anyone in this room that empathises with the tireless hustle of the artist, it’s these two: it was around the time Gaynor was pocketing packets of Woolies rice that Toby and Pete had just opened their first design studio. Now their installations are keystones in the live performances of artists like RUFUS, Flight Facilities and Flume.
“You’ve got to be really motivated,” says Toby of the road to artistic success. “Even beyond getting your education, or lack of education, it’s all about just trying new things and picking up new skills and getting inspiration from wherever you can.”
Like most slices of advice for the creatively inclined, it sounds a tad easier said than done. But there is more to it than just bright eyes, elbow grease, and a whole lot of luck if you want to make your artistic dreams a feasible reality: the right attitude helps, too.
Get Your Priorities In Order
Ask any creative and they’ll already know that sacrifice is written in the fine print. The real life of the struggling artist is less a starry-eyed Kerouac jaunt than it is a Courtney Barnett ballad, littered with Mi Goreng scraps and unpaid bills. What really separates the ‘dreamers’ from the ‘doers’, though, is the ability to prioritise what’s important.
“You have to know what you’re willing to give up,” says Allday. “Unfortunately a lot of people like talking about dreams but they’re not willing to give up friendships or extra time at work so you can be a bit poorer and spend time on doing what you’re doing.”
Toby explains that he and Pete have had to scale back their business model several times in order to refocus their energies toward more meaningful projects.
“If you’ve got too many overheads then you can’t actually take on the fun jobs that you really want to be able to.”
“You get a lot of people fresh out of uni expecting to achieve all these goals straight off,” says Pete. “The one thing they don’t teach you in creative schools is that boring side of ‘keeping the doors open’… For us I think that’s the struggle: of paying the bills [as well as] doing the personal work.”
Stop Thinking, Start Doing
For an aspiring creative, the weight of indecision can be crippling. The blank white page is a terrifying thing, and an artist could spend their entire life trying to figure out the perfect place to start.
“There is such a thing as overthinking an idea,” stresses Allday. Fortune favours the bold, and it’s important to embrace an element of spontaneity if you’re ever going to move forward – to underthink things, so to speak, and just get on with it.
“You have to know the processes back to front, and then just do it,” he says. “The perfect time to start is whenever you’re inspired, and when you get the wave do it as quickly as possible. Fix it later. But also know when to say ‘This is done’”.
Toby agrees there are advantages to the ‘underthinking’ approach, and suggests that building too many preconceptions around an idea can suffocate it rather than let it germinate and grow.
“I think you have to let something evolve naturally,” he says. “If you start putting up your own… barriers you can make things a bit difficult for yourself.”
Carpe Diem
While Allday and Toby & Pete are candid about the role good fortune has played in their success, it was through discipline and a willingness to take risks that they were able to capitalise on every opportunity.
“To this day I think it was kind of by mistake,” says Pete. “An agency came to us and said ‘Hey, do you guys do installations?’ and we were like ‘Yeah of course we do!’”
“We’ve worked really hard when those opportunities have come up,” continues Toby. “We just go ‘How do you make an installation?’ quickly on Google… I think there’s been this misunderstanding of exactly what it was that we did so people just go ‘Oh yeah cool, you guys can do this right?’ and we’re like ‘Fuck yeah, of course, we can do that!’ Then stay up late at night trying to figure out how the hell to do it.”
Seize the moment and get on with it, in other words. As Allday puts it, the opportunity to practice art in the first place might be the luckiest break you could ask for.
“We live in a privileged country… If you live in the first world and you have the opportunity to make music or art or anything creative then you can… That’s a lucky situation… So if you have the chance to do it, then do it.”
_
Feature image: Allday/Jo Duck
_
Roam is all about celebrating Australian creatives who spend their time making great things, rather than overthinking. Join them at exclusive events in Adelaide and Perth this June.