So it is with a mixture of pride and amusement that Totally Unicorn singer Drew Gardner concedes that the story of the Totally Unicorn beetroot cake in former MasterChef contestant Poh Ling Yeoh’s Same But Different cookbook is actually true.
“Poh was married to our drummer’s brother,” says Gardner. “She used to make the cake for us every time we came to Adelaide and leave it out for us on the bench when we got home from playing the show.”
Despite being celebrated in such culinary form, Gardner hasn’t managed to learn how to make the cake yet. “I’m a terrible cook,” he laughs.
Totally Unicorn was formed from the ashes of two Wollongong bands, Ohana and Gardner’s Hospital the Musical. The original idea was simple: start a band, stop worrying about success and have a good time. “We’d given up on taking music too seriously, especially touring,” Gardner says. “So we thought we’d start a band and have fun with it and not try and make anything too serious, just play a couple of shows here and there. That snowballed and it went a lot better than the previous bands we had.”
The band’s name derives from a story told by Totally Unicorn’s original guitarist, Clancy Tucker, about his time at Byron Bay Blues Festival. Tucker was walking across a field on his way home when he spotted what he thought was a horse lying down in the grass. Tucker felt a strange affinity with this horse and decided to lie down and embrace it. Upon waking up he was surprised to discover his arm immersed in a discarded bath full of green slime, and no magical horse to be seen. “He said he had to hitchhike home the next day when he woke up, and he had a whole green arm. So there’s a guy walking down the road with no shoes or shirt and a green arm,” Gardner laughs.
Totally Unicorn’s commitment to enjoying its time onstage includes in-your-face interaction with its audiences, and Gardner prancing about the stage in tie-dyed underpants. (“My hands are still stained from tie-dye at the moment,” Gardner says.) Some audiences are easier than others to interact with, and the challenge is always to elicit a reaction. “The festivals are always really good because we play to a lot of people who have never heard us before – there’s lots of bewildered faces and people smiling,” Gardner says.
At the other end of the fun spectrum was Totally Unicorn’s experience with its first record, Horse Hugger (again, inspired by that fateful non-encounter with the horse). A distribution deal with distributor Six Nightmares went south when Totally Unicorn and Brisbane band Ironhide discovered they were out thousands of dollars. It was an event that hardened Totally Unicorn’s personal and business resolve.
“Dealing with anyone in the music industry you have to take everything with a grain of salt and not believe when people promise you the world, then fuck you over,” Gardner says. “For the longest time after that we did stuff on our own because we didn’t trust anyone. We’re now with the Farmer and Owl guys and sitting down and connecting with them as people and trying to see what they’re about.”
Having impressed Cherry Bar owner James Young at Yah Yah’s last year, Totally Unicorn will grace the Cherry Rock stage for the first time before returning to the studio with a new drummer to record their second album.
Despite their underpanted stage antics and metal-math musical assault, Totally Unicorn still has the support of the band members’ parents. “Our song Cool Dads, Cool Sons was inspired by our own dads who are still accepting us for getting older and still being stupid and wearing our underpants in front of people and playing music. I don’t know how I’d feel about my son doing that. Probably alright, now that I’ve been doing it,” Gardner says.
By Patrick Emery
