Tommy Franklin – Byron Bay’s very own Dancing Man busts out
You can’t be in Byron for long before you run into Tommy Franklin, the bearded mover and shaker who made it into the Grand Final of Australia’s Got Talent. He’s changing the world ‘one smile at a time’, and he flashed his pearly whites at Verandah Magazine down at one of his favourite Byron cafes, Belongil Bistro…
Tommy Franklin can still remember with utmost clarity, the moment that a miracle saved his life.
“I was still living with my parents on the Central Coast, at Green Point, and I was not in a good way,” he says. “I’d had a tough time growing up – I was bullied in school, and I’d turned to drink and drugs as a way out, and they’d made me aggressive and suicidal. I really didn’t care if I lived or died. In fact I wanted to die. At the time I was into skateboarding, and of course I never wore a helmet, but this particular day, just as I was leaving the house, I noticed my helmet and it was covered with all these skull and cross-bones motifs. I thought, ‘wow that’s actually how I feel’, and I put it on.”
Moments later Franklin (aka Dancing Tommy, The Dancing Man and #saltyrain), was heading down the road at 30kmh when a car came at him in the opposite direction at 80kmh. “I knew in that instant I was going to die,” he says. “My life literally flashed in front of my eyes and as the car hit me I said goodbye to myself.” The impact shattered his right kneecap, broke ribs that almost punctured his left lung, and left him bruised, broken but alive. “My helmet was split apart in pieces,” he says. “If I hadn’t put it on, I’d have been dead, for sure.”
But his salvation from the life he was leading to the carefree, joy-filled dancing days he has now, was by no means instantaneous. First of all he was confined to a wheelchair for months, with doctors not even sure if he would ever walk again, and worse, the call of the drugs was too strong to resist.
“It was easy to pity myself, to get into that dark space of why did this happen to me, and I struggled. I lashed out at the people closest to me, especially my mum and dad – the very people who were looking after me – and even though I’d had a glimpse of how precious life is, I hadn’t really taken it on board.”
Down at the Belongil Bistro, where Franklin is tucking into a large coffee, a muffin and the biggest sandwich I’ve ever seen, (a lot of which is making its way into his beard) and having dancing the night away until 4.00am at Woody’s Surf Shack, Franklin is in a revelatory mood. He was 21, he says, when his parents decided to give him some tough love. He had to shape up or ship, they told him, and Franklin, sobered by the idea that his loved ones were ready to desert him, decided to get clean. He joined a local youth club, and made his way to the local church – where the music literally moved him.
“It was unbelievable,” he says. “I was at the back of the church, and the music was playing, and I just suddenly found myself moving to the beat, and I couldn’t stop – and I haven’t stopped since.” He gives a large warm-hearted laugh and throws his head back. “I’ve been high on endorphins for 11 years,” he says. “The best feeling ever.”
For Franklin, discovering dance was the pivotal moment when he fully realised what a miracle his survival had been. “I was a bit of a non-stop preacher after that,” he says. “I would tell people how my life had been changed by God and I would talk about God, until I realised that a lot of people have walls up against the church, and I decided to back off. I can’t change what I believe, because what I believe changed me, but I’ve learned to just be around people, to suspend that judgment I used to get and hated so much. The thing with the church that people forget is that the church is full of humans, and humans make mistakes.”
In 2007, Franklin decided it was time to fly the nest, and moved up to Byron Bay, where, as he says, he discovered his: “peaceful, happy place.” Surrounded for the first time by people who also perhaps did not exactly fit ‘normal’, he embraced the freedom, and the opportunity of dancing. In fact, by then he was leaving behind a successful career as a strait-laced clean-shaven suit seller: “I was immaculate,” he says, “but it always felt unnatural, I felt people were talking to my exterior, but when I came to Byron I shed all of that and began to discover who I really am.”
“You don’t have to wait for a DJ to play some funky cheese, lift your head up, look at the sky, put down the technology and move to the beat.”
Sometimes, it seems, strange synchronicities come into play when destiny comes knocking. Some years ago in Sydney Franklin was down at the Darling Harbour for an event, when a sun shower happened. “Suddenly I was surrounded by all these dancing people he says, and I welcomed the rain – I just wanted to hug the rain.” Years later, up here, he was working in the chicken factory and life wasn’t quite panning out. “Things weren’t happening as I’d planned,” he says, “and I was a bit down. Then this friend told me how she’d seen the girl with huge headphones, just walking and grooving down the street and how happy it had made her to see this girl, and something about it just made me think, wow, I want to do that. So I bought an iPod and headphones, put some tracks on, and started dancing. I wasn’t doing it to get famous or make money. I was doing it because I had to.” Then in 2011, wearing a fancy Christian Dior suit he’d bought from a roadside sale for $20, on a wet rainy day, the Dancing Man let loose – first at the Beach Hotel and then into the street, and the inevitable You Tube hits went truly viral.
Some dancing gigs followed, but his rent was paid by shifts in the local chicken factory, and it wasn’t until his manager persuaded him to audition for the 2013 Australia’s Got Talent, that the dancing became not just an obsession but an obsession with an income. Initially Franklin was extremely resistant to the idea of appearing on TV: “Someone from the show, who had seen me dance, told my manager to get me to audition, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to audition. I’ve never had a dance class in my life, I’ll be standing in front of these four judges, literally ‘judging’ me. You want me to stand there and be vulnerable in front of millions of people when they could pull me apart? No way.”
Fortunately for Franklin, and for Australia’s TV audiences, his manager persuaded him, and the rest, as they say, is history. “It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” Franklin says of his first appearance. “It was very much an affirmation, it was wild…thousands of people going back as far as you could see, thousands of lightbulbs behind me, the judges sitting there. And then at the end they all went ballistic.”
Australia embraced him, and Franklin found himself in a whole new world – one of love, acceptance and openness. “People just come up to me all the time and open themselves up,” he says, “and it’s beautiful. I’ve realised that people just want to be entertained but what I want to say is learn to entertain yourself. I don’t sit around and wait for someone to come along. I dress myself up – because faaarshion is my paaarshion too – I chuck on my headphones, I thump, wiggle and giggle. You don’t have to wait all week for a DJ to play some funky cheese, just lift your head up, look at the sky, put down the technology and move to the beat – or do whatever your thing is.”
And now the world is discovering Byron Bay’s Dancing Man. He’s off to his first international gig – the Squamish international music festival in British Columbia, Canada. On their site there’s a warning to watch out for bears – I think if a grizzly saw the tall bearded dancing man, even it would be likely to give into the beat – I know I did, and it was FUN.
Candida Baker
