Tones And I stood on the Splendour In The Grass stage in 2019 and, before a single note of ‘Dance Monkey’ rang out, she told the crowd something she had once told her friends as a dream out loud. ‘I said to my friends, I was like: I’m going to play here one day,’ she told them. ‘And now I’m fucking here.’ That gap between the declaration and the moment, between the busker’s ambition and the festival stage, is the whole story of what made this performance matter.
A song that started as a conversation with a crowd
‘Dance Monkey’ is built on a dynamic that Tones And I knew firsthand before she ever wrote it down: the experience of being watched and asked to perform, again and again, on someone else’s terms. The lyric ‘just like a monkey, I’ve been dancin’ my whole life’ is not metaphor for its own sake. It comes from years of street performance, of playing for whoever stopped long enough to listen, of being the person on the pavement trying to turn a passing stranger into someone who cared. At Splendour, that relationship flipped. The crowd that filled the field already knew every word.
The performance itself moved through the song’s familiar architecture: the quiet, almost conversational opening verse, the building repetition of the chorus, and the stripped-back vocal control that became the track’s signature. No elaborate production propped it up. The song held on the strength of her voice and the crowd’s willingness to meet it.
What she asked the audience to carry home
Before introducing ‘Dance Monkey,’ Tones And I paused to address the room in plain terms. ‘There’s a lot of bullshit happening in the world right now,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to talk about that. All I’m going to say is you guys are the exception. Just love and be loved and be happy and support others and be supportive.’ It was not a political speech and she did not frame it as one. It was closer to a housekeeping note from someone who had spent enough time alone on a street corner to know that a crowd willing to show up for music is not something to take for granted.
The song then did what it has always done: it gave the audience something to do with the feeling. The chorus’s instruction to ‘dance for me, move for me’ landed differently in a field of people who had chosen to be exactly there than it does through headphones on a commute. The repetition, which on record can feel hypnotic and slightly unsettling, became at Splendour something closer to a shared joke that everyone was in on.
The friend she told before any of this existed
Somewhere in the crowd or back home watching later is the friend Tones And I made that original promise to, the unnamed person who heard a young musician say she would one day play Splendour In The Grass and presumably said something encouraging or something skeptical, and either way was there at the beginning of the claim.
She had been dancing her whole life, she sang. At Splendour In The Grass in 2019, so had everyone else, just one more time.
