Allday: Australia’s cult-rap leader – Part One
Photography Credit: Ken Leanfore
“He was initially hesitant because at that point I don’t think he really understood what a manager did. He was like, ‘Do you get gigs? How does this work?’”
Tom Gaynor – the 23-year-old who records genre-oscillating hip hop under the moniker Allday – wasn’t exactly frothing at the mouth when Jim McKinnon approached him on Facebook.
McKinnon – head of artist management firm and label teamtrick – had come across Gaynor’s music on triple j Unearthed in late 2010, namely because of a track called Try Again, which Gaynor says not even he has anymore. McKinnon initiated an informal relationship with the Adelaide musician, and when Gaynor expressed his interest in a screen writing course in McKinnon’s hometown of Melbourne, set about convincing him to relocate.
“I really wanted to get him in the same state,” McKinnon laughs, “and I just had a good feeling that Melbourne would be a really nice place for him to meet with likeminded people.”
In February of 2012 Gaynor made the leap and teamtrick turned him from mixtape-dabbler to signed artist when he released his first single, So Good. The track, an unassuming, low-end homage to elementary ‘90s hip hop, was picked up by triple j Unearthed and as if charming the likes of Dave Ruby Howe was a pivotal motive, Gaynor ditched the screen writing course and wholly focused on Allday.
Gaynor speaks to TMN over the phone while in Sydney recording with producer JordLevus; he says although he did take meetings with other managers – “I still feel really bad about that. That’s a dark time that we don’t talk about” – he’d always been confident about signing with McKinnon.
“I feel like it’s easy for people to jump on board once you have buzz or whatever, but Jim pretty much believed in what I was doing before I believed in it.”
McKinnon used his existing relationship with independent booking agency New World Artists to get Gaynor’s foot in the door a few months later. McKinnon managed NWA signing Dead Letter Circus and showed the team, including booking agent Edwin Tehrani, Gaynor’s track Girls In Jeans.
“We didn’t think it was the best song in the world,” remembers Tehrani. “But we thought it was good and he had a lot of potential. So we signed him off that.”
Tehrani later booked in a show in Sydney at the Oxford Arts Factory Gallery and the entire NWA staff went to see him. “We went from seeing the potential and begging for him to be on shows, well not begging, asking nicely for him to be on shows,” Tehrani laughs, “to now, where everyone’s asking for him to be on shows.”
Gaynor independently released mixtape A Skateboard Soiree in July 2012 and whilst it didn’t chart, it did place him on the industry’s radar and proved he was game enough to spit rhymes like: “Put apples in the bucket so we bob like Dylan.” That month he landed a support tour with Grey Ghost, in September he was one of six triple j Unearthed NIDA Competition winners, and the following January had So Good place in triple j’s 2012 Hottest 100 at #91.
When Gaynor released his debut EP Loners Are Cool in April 2013, he reaffirmed the potency of his out-of-the-boxsound. Tracks like Otto and Breathe Slow veered so far from what we deemed as Australian hip hop that year that he picked up fans of ethereal pop. Tehrani describes it best: “He’s got a unique thing going. He doesn’t have the stigma of Aussie hip hop behind him,” he says. “He’s hip hop but not. His fanbase are probably a Jungle Giants fanbase, not a Bliss N Eso, Hilltop Hoods fanbase.”
The EP debuted at #18 on the Albums chart, went to #3 on the Urban Chart and hit the top of the iTunes hip hop chart. Oddly, triple j’s support had gone stale at this point. “We didn’t get a whole lot of support [from triple j], which is funny,” remembers manager Jim McKinnon. “Perhaps it was a sound they weren’t quite ready for or didn’t expect to hear after having So Good be such a feel-good, fun track.”
It didn’t matter however, in July 2013, coinciding with the release of Gaynor’s mixtape Songs I Don’t Hate, he performed the Come Together Festival and signed to Illy and Unified’s label venture OneTwo. With Warner already on board as distributor and UNFD’s label manager Maya Janeska handling promotions, the label’s first signing (sans Illy himself) split the direction between international and local as they started putting together the content of a debut album.
Though Illy, aka Al Murray now has a stake in the ascent of Allday – and you’d be hard-pressed to find him denigrating any of his peers – his stamp of approval gives authority to the changing face of surface-level local hip hop: “He was the standout Australian hip hop artist of his generation. The success he's had since speaks volumes, especially when contrasted with his peers.”
A little-known fact about Gaynor is that in 2011 he was runner-up in the RAW Comedy NationalFinal. One of Tehrani’s first impressions of Gaynor was that “he had a lot of potential and could break into the comedy world”, but it’s not as if Gaynor’s comedic dabbling died a slow death similar to that of his screen writing (he sent a film script to Will Ferrell’s LA office and it was rejected) he’s very much exercising that muscle every day through his interaction with fans.
“Early on he was posting witty and clever posts on social media that were cleverly devised to get a reaction from people, positive or negative,” McKinnon sees Gaynor’s social media presence as one of the integral elements of his success. “It was the combination with the music he was putting out that was resonating with people,” he continues. “[…] That conditioning means that regardless of what a label does or doesn’t do, it gives the artist the strength and flexibility to control their output.
“I guess it’s the same as putting together a really strong email list or whatever, but if you’ve got a really strong social media following with that kind of rabid attention on there, it really does fool proof your campaign.”
He’s right, Gaynor prefers the slow burning grind of online networking, and consequentially,hisfans feel a sense of entitlement to his fame. One fan had his single title tattooed on his inner lip and Gaynor used it as the single artwork for Right Now; another started a Facebook page called ‘Add Allday to Groovin The Moo 2014 lineup’. The page accrued over 6,000 likes at one point and yes, Allday did tour with the regional festival in 2014.
There was one point though, not too long ago, when McKinnon forced Gaynor to distance himself from the insatiable fervency that is his fanbase: “He would respond to every single message he received on Facebook, until it pushed him to a point where it kind of, almost lead to a nervous breakdown.”
“I get thousands and thousands of messages and I just can’t do it,” says Gaynor. “There aren’t enough hours in the day. It hurts in two ways, because it hurts that I can’t reply to people and then it hurts because people hit me up and they’re like ‘oh you think you’re too good now.’ That’s totally not it.
“The label has offered to reply for me but I’m not really down with the whole ‘pretend you’re me’ thing.”
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