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YORKSHIRE POST 5.4.2020

Toyah Willcox has forged a reputation as a talented actress, singer/songwriter, producer, storyteller, television presenter and author during a career that spans four decades.

Arguably one of the most prolific artists of her generation, her creativity remains undimmed. And now, in homage to post-punk and new wave music, the star has teamed up with Hazel O’Connor for a new show, aptly named Electric Ladies Of the Eighties, due in Yorkshire later this year, all things being well by then.

So where did the idea for the show come from? “This is something Hazel and I have been planning for 40 years. Ironically, we’d both been too busy doing other things so this is the first time we’ve ever actually toured together in this way, so we’re both very excited,” says Willcox.

“Hazel will be performing Breaking Glass and I’ll do Quadrophenia so there’s a lot of material that the audience will be very familiar with. We’ll be inviting everyone to join in and sing along with their favourite songs. It’s going to be one of those shows that is warm, welcoming with lots of great music and a real feel good factor.”

At a time when the music industry was jaded by repetition, Toyah’s unique sound, high energy and stunning visual imagery was like a breath of fresh air for a whole generation of rebellious teenagers. Four decades later, her concerts are still a magnet for youth.

“I look out at my audiences and I’m delighted to see so many young people,” she tells me. “A little while back I was doing a concert and I noticed an older couple sitting at the back wrapped in blankets. All around them, younger men and women were singing and dancing, having a great time. Then further down, all the 20-year-olds were sitting in the front rows.

"The diversity is amazing. I think it’s all down to YouTube and the internet. I mean whenever I do a show, everyone is standing up, holding their phones, filming the entire performance. It’s very strange and I often wonder why they just don’t sit down and watch it.

"But the thing is, five minutes after I’ve left the stage, all that material is up online and is watched around the world. I think that young people see it and hear the music and discover something they really like.” Technology is one of society’s most valuable tools but for young artists hoping to find fame through social media, Toyah has a few words of advice.

“Don’t look to the internet for verification,” she cautions. “What I’d say to young people is, know yourself. If you go onto social media looking for support or strength you’ll realise that you can only find these things within yourself.” Citing the tragic case of Caroline Flack as an example, she points out the psychological harm social media can inflict. “She was made to feel so alone in the world and it appears to be related to social media.

"I think that the years of having to be an artist through that medium chipped away at her and so, what I’d say to young people is, know yourself, be yourself. That way, if there’s a keyboard warrior who is attacking you, you will know it means nothing, the world still goes on.”

Whatever the merits of social media platforms, Toyah says it’s hard to beat a live, on stage performance. “That’s how you hone your craft. It’s nothing to do with fame. When you’re performing live you’re learning to become a better musician, a better singer and a better writer.

"I mean it may sound silly after 40 years in the business, but I am constantly learning, getting to know more about my music and my audiences.” Over the years, Toyah has developed a special bond with her fans affectionately referring to them as her ‘exclusive club’. “I have people who have followed and supported me for over 40 years now. My audiences are extremely friendly and they feel like a community.

"I always want to give them my very best. You know, I don’t go to a concert to have a jolly or a party. I live for that moment on stage. It’s the most important part of that day for me.”

Well-known for challenging artistic boundaries, at 61, Toyah is currently exploding a few myths, including the one that says as we get older we must slow down. “As you get older you have to tell your body what you want it to do. That means a lot of stretching, lots of exercises to maximise joint movement. I think yoga is best for that. I do physio every day.

"I’ve been taught a special routine that helps me do posture realignment, which sounds a lot grander than it actually is. I never do anything that hurts me, there’s just no point. On the day of a concert, I treat myself like a sport’s person – eat well, move, stretch and don’t do what your body really doesn’t want to do.”

Born with some serious health issues, including a twisted spine, no hip sockets, complex foot problems and one leg shorter than the other, Toyah’s early years were marred by pain. At school, her battle with dyslexia, a relatively unknown condition at the time, left her academically short-changed and she finished her education with just one O-level in music.

Nowadays, dyslexia is better understood but Toyah believes the education system could do better. “I agree there is more understanding today and people who are dyslexic are no longer considered dumb. I was actually quite lucky that, in my school, I had two teachers who saw that I was exceptional, one was my art teacher the other (taught) English.

"The problem with school is that it is part of a system and it is very hard to step outside that, so if you have someone who has a super IQ but cannot perform well in exams, then that person is in big trouble. I think the most important thing we can do is to encourage individuality.

"Parents need to be involved with the development of their child’s individuality. I mean, If children can’t excel at school because of dyslexia, parents need to give them the confidence to be the individual they are. You can’t hold someone back simply because they don’t fit the system.”

To describe the singer’s schedule as busy would be an understatement. She is the first to admit that work is her raison d’etre. It seems, a strong work ethic is a family trait. “My grandfather was a Lincolnshire man and I was told that, at 19, he walked from Lincoln to Birmingham, pushing a wheelbarrow full of tools, to find work. Whether or not he made a detour to Yorkshire, I’m not sure.”

Her versatility means she is not short of job offers. “I’ve been asked to be part of a major ballet company, but I try to choose things my audience would like to see.” That said, don’t be surprised to see the high priestess of punk doing opera one day. “Well, I could break my own boundaries and surprise people. I never say ‘no’ to anything.”


THE GUARDIAN 3.7.2020

Toyah Willcox, the thinking man's punkette

From the Archive: 3 July 1980: “No one can rip me off. I’m too much of a bitch,” the self-confessed megalomaniac tells Robin Denselow

Four years ago, Toyah Willcox left a “very boring all-girls public school” in Birmingham with only one O level, in music, and a whole heap of bad reports. At 14 she’d been banned from art, her favourite subject because her paintings were too erotic. She got into fights, confused the teachers by making her own clothes and “by wearing a Dr Spock haircut with the back of my head shaved. I was a very paranoid kid and I hated every minute of it.”

Today, at 22, Toyah is being hailed as a sort of Thinking Man’s Punk, and is certainly the most impressive female all-rounder to have emerged in the latter days of the new wave. Earlier this year she won considerable acclaim for her part as Miranda in Derek Jarman’s exquisite film version of The Tempest. Her acting career had already included everything from Jarman’s punk celebration Jubilee, to Quatermass, and Quadrophenia.

Now her rock band, simply called Toyah, have released their first “proper album,” The Blue Meaning (Safari, IEYA666), and the lady with the shock of bright red and ginger hair has jumped straight into the album charts.

I suspect her potential as an actress is even greater than that as a singer, but this is still an impressive, enjoyable album that manages to be both declamatory and accessible. In her first compilation, the quaintly titled Sheep Farming In Barnet (which she now hates), she admits she was “well over the top,” but here her tendency to over-do things is tempered, and matched with strong playing from her band.

The set ranges from driving improvised rockers like Ieya to the title track, a chilling description of her days with the rich school girls (“big grey buildings, satanic mills, conceptive pills”), to a manic chant of sexual hatred. She explained that as being “about my experience on the road with groupies, I hate them. I’m very moralistic and emotional – I can’t stand that sort of person.”

Toyah’s success sounds like a result of both lucky breaks and her own forceful personality. “No one can rip me off,” she announced, I’m too much of a bitch, I haven’t been hyped. I sell myself, I create what I wear, and I boss the band about.” I believe her.

When she left school, she studied drama in Birmingham, keeping herself by working in a cafe, then doing wardrobe at a theatre, then dancing in a nightclub, I had four hours’ sleep a night and was very happy.” She was approached in the street by a man who asked if she could act. “I thought he must be a pervert because I looked so strange that there was no other reason that he’d have kept following me.”

In fact he was a director at BBC Pebble Mill, who offered her a part in one of the Second City First plays, Glitter. That was seen by Kate Nelligan, who helped her get a place at the National Theatre, and a part in Vienna Woods.

While she was at the National, Toyah met Derek Jarman. “He is the sort of man you can just sit and talk to. I picked up a script that was under a settee and started looking through it. Then I told him I wanted to play the part of Mad.” That’s how Toyah was cast in Jubilee. Later, he asked her to play Miranda in The Tempest “and of course I said yes. I respect him more than any other director and would do anything he asked.”

Toyah’s portrayal of Miranda as both knowing and naive was influenced by Jarman “not telling me what to do, just guiding, and helping so subtly that you don’t see what he’s putting into a performance. He told me he wanted Miranda to have been raped by Caliban, so not a virgin and not innocent. But also to remember that she’d been brought up by her father. So I made her boyish and a completely tribal child.” She added that all her rock fans liked The Tempest “just because it was visually gorgeous, even if they didn’t understand it. They should have been given Valium as they went in.”

Toyah doesn’t yet know if she’ll be in the next Jarman film, Neutron, but she should be the star of the one after that which is supposed to be about a singer turned prostitute. But I’m sure it will become more advanced than that. I don’t like that idea because there are too many films about singers at the moment.”

Before either of those she will play the lead in Nigel Williams’s Sugar And Spice, which opens at the Royal Court later this summer. “And that’s a really brilliant comedy about a butch woman and her mates.”

With her album now a best-seller, Toyah also has her band to look after. They formed after she met guitarist Joel Bogen at a party “where apparently, I had two bottles of whisky in me, and was hanging from a shower unit trying to strangle people. I’ve always written poems and had a mental tune for them, but I’d never met anyone who could create that tune for me before.”

She’s confident enough now to say, “It’s easy doing both music and acting because people now plan their productions around my spare time. So the first half of the year was music, and the second half will be acting, but with two more British tours.

Toyah agrees she is a bit of a megalomaniac. “I want to be a great actress and a great singer. But I’m not doing it for money – I love insulting money. Do you know I’ve spent over £10,000 on shoes?

She doesn’t drink, or take drugs, or holidays, and currently lives in a warehouse in Battersea where she practises dance, designs clothes and jewellery.

Next, she wants an even bigger warehouse where she can combine film, live music, and acting projects, and also run “a 24-hour psychedelic nightclub, with films projected all over the place, where people can live out their fantasies. I don’t take drugs, but I think people should take certain drugs just to escape inside themselves for entertainment.” She has already tried to buy several disused cinemas “but the government bought them first. I think it’s a plot. 

 
HMV LONDON 7.10.2020

My Record Collection by Toyah Willcox - A National Album Day Special

In My Record Collection, we dig down to the bottom of musicians' souls to find out what the most treasured parts of their record collection are. This week, we're counting down to National Album Day.

This year, the organisers are taking us back to the 1980s, to a time when nu-romantics, big hair, arena rock and electronics ruled the chart. Each day this week, we'll be showing off the record collections from an ambassador, as they count down their memories of the 1980s, as they lived it, or just as they wished they had.

We continue today with Toyah Willcox...

The record that made me want to make music was …

"For me, it's David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. It is almost impossible to pinpoint one Bowie album that made me want to write music because they all did, but the unique thing Bowie achieved above all other artists was to have a burst of creativity that lasted a whole decade from the early ’70s into the ’80s."

"Bowie surfed the Zeitgeist effortlessly like a Pied Pipper and lead a generation into the brilliant unknown with each album release. Ziggy was my first discovery of Bowie's genius and thereafter he awed me with everything he ever did."

The record I played throughout the 1980s was ...

"It was Roxy Music's Avalon. I have loved Roxy Music since their first album. Their sound is utterly unique, but tricks you into thinking that it is familiar, it isn't, they are one of the cleverest bands of all time, creating a whole movement of stylish cool and smooth dance-inducing music. AVALON is a super commercial album but it hasn't sold out in any way. It is the definition of lounge cool."

The record that takes me back to the 1980s was …

"It's Tears For Fears and their album Songs From The Big Chair. There are easily three albums that define the 80’s Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love, Peter Gabriel's So and Songs From The Big Chair."

"Songs From The Big Chair has a wealth of classics that have inspired so many who followed. 'Shout' is an all-time anthemic great and 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World' must be one of the cleverest songs of the ’80s, a decade often associated with greed."

The record with the best cover art in the 1980s was …

"It's Talking Heads' Remain In Light. Like Bowie, the Talking Heads became cultural leaders, not simply songwriters and musicians, they were great all-round artists. The videos are sublime as is their album cover artwork."

The 1980s record I love, but didn’t get the credit it deserved, was...

"Fad Gadget's Fireside Favourite. Frances (Frank) John Tovey is Fad Gadget, he was a friend, an inspiration and a brave groundbreaking soul. I discovered him through his first single, the astonishingly good 'Back To Nature' and thereafter he opened the show on many Toyah concerts. He had a strong loyal following. In my eyes, he deserved the same success as early Joy Division."

The best music video of the 1980s was ...

"Blancmange's Living On The Ceiling. It's also one of the best songs of the ’80s. Blancmange created fabulous pop with huge credibility attached to it. Their songs were groundbreaking, as where their videos, they always achieved a dry commentary on life. It was delicious."

The best song of the 1980s was ...

"It has to be Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This'. This song was an instant hit. A rare song you only needed to hear the first 20 seconds of to be completely and utterly hooked forever. The song still appears everywhere, it's a timeless classic. I believe it was written and sung at the mixing desk . . . revolutionary for the time."

The best album of the 1980s was ...

"I'd have to choose Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love. This album shook the world, because Kate made a huge transition between this album and her last. It has an incredible mastery of the voice and maturity in the songwriting. The vocal sound, the songwriting, the videos are all complete perfection. This album made Kate a worldwide superstar."


iNEWS 9.10.2020

Toyah Willcox, a National Album Day 80s ambassador, has copywritten her name to stop copycat artists from emerging

“I gave girls the right to believe in themselves. I was getting 10,000 letters a week, most of them starting with ‘I’ve just been expelled from school for dyeing my hair pink,’” reflects Toyah Willcox, the singer and actress whose electric hair and rebellious anthems lit up the charts in the 1980s.

A Top of the Pops fixture with hits like It’s A Mystery, I Want To Be Free and Thunder In The Mountains, accompanied by a video of Toyah thundering across a barren landscape on a chariot, the empowered image portrayed by the Birmingham-born singer directly inspired Shirley Manson and other singers who adapted her punk style.

The only pop star to have acted opposite Laurence Olivier and appeared in two films directed by arthouse auteur Derek Jarman, before going on to narrate the BBC’s Teletubbies, Toyah, 62, has now trademarked herself as a one-word “brand.”

“We had a huge international female star who literally did something that was an exact copy of me. We realised she didn’t know I existed but her stylist had researched me on the internet,” says the singer from the Worcestershire home she shares with husband Robert Fripp, founder of prog rock band King Crimson.

“I’ve copyrighted my name. I’ve worked with the single name Toyah for 42 years. I now have a right to tell other Toyahs they can’t go under a single name. There are quite a lot of Toyahs in Australia who are singers but I’m still selling a lot of albums. Even Coronation Street had to ask my permission for the character Toyah Battersby.”

Toyah’s rise to fame has more twists and turns than any soap character. She overcame serious childhood health issues, including a twisted spine and struggled at school with dyslexia and the lisp which became part of her stage persona.

“I went to a very conservative religious school where women were either going to have lots of babies or become lawyers and I didn’t fit either of those categories. The punk movement was so important because it allowed me to say to thousands of girls, ‘two fingers up to sugar and spice and all things nice.’”

Today, Toyah is an “ambassador” for National Album Day, an event reminding listeners of the value of an artist’s full-length musical vision in a pick-and-mix age. The 80s, a golden age of British pop, is this year’s musical theme but it was also a tough decade for a single-minded young woman seeking to forge a career.

“The sexism was endless. I remember turning up at a club in Leeds in 1980 and the lighting man said, ‘You’re not going anywhere alone. The club owner has said you don’t go on until he’s slept with you.’ I walked back to my digs and I got picked up by a police car. They said, ‘What are you doing alone? The Yorkshire Ripper is around.’”

“I was tomboyish and I didn’t play the sex kitten game. Maybe if I had played the game, then a lot more would’ve happened for us. I was physically small and I had to fight my corner all the time.”

Toyah and her chart-topping contemporaries formed a sisterhood. “I was always competitive but it was mainly us versus the men. There was me, Kate Bush, Kim Wilde and Hazel O’Connor. We made sure we did not release singles in the same week. We were all very conscious of the limited space for women to release.”

“We were all young and we all wanted to rule the world but we were great friends too. When fame hit, it was everything I wanted as a seven year-old but I wasn’t prepared for the intensity. Everyone wanted a piece of you.”

When Toyah tours her new albums along with her old hits, she is delighted to see the daughters of her 80s fan base down at the front.

“When I get a message from someone under 20 saying they’ve discovered my catalogue, out of the context of that decade, it makes everything worthwhile. I don’t think any other artist sounded like me or wrote about the things I wrote about.”

Lockdown has been an “incredibly creative” time for Toyah, who has discovered social media, building a cult audience for the comedic videos of their home-life she and Fripp have produced. “I used to associate being in the kitchen with being out of work but I’ve also cooked every day for six months.”

A new film, To Be Someone, reunites Toyah with Leslie Ash and other cast members of the cult movie Quadrophenia, for a contemporary look at the mod culture of the original. With 25 LPs to her name, Toyah is typically passionate about her Album Day ambassadorial duties. “Sitting down with a great album is like reading a great novel. There is so much beautiful detail and riches on offer.

“I remember listening to T. Rex’s Electric Warrior (1971). We had no alcohol in the room but we girls kept going for hours picking every song apart and loving it all.”

“I definitely made albums to be more than just collections of singles. My songs were autobiographical but also escapism. Then MTV launched and it made my lyrics more visual. My videos had to be three-minute masterpieces and I adored making them.”

Asked to choose her favourite album of the 80s, Toyah opts for the “magnificent” 10m selling Songs From The Big Chair by contemporaries, Tears For Fears. Its signature hits, Shout and Everybody Wants To Rule The World, could have been written for the flame-haired punk princess. 

PUNKTUATION 8.10.2020

Punktuation chats to the high priestess of punk, Toyah Willcox, about the reissue of her debut album, Sheep Farming In Barnet and her extraordinary career

Toyah is quite simply a force of nature. She is a musician and songwriter, she’s a very successful actress, and she’s a producer and storyteller. She’s had eight top 40 hit singles, released 23 albums, written two books and appeared in over 40 stage plays and ten feature films including Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia.

Now 62 years old there’s also no sign that Toyah plans to slow down anytime soon. However, the events of 2020 have forced her, like the rest of us, to readjust to the ‘new reality’.

“Yes, it’s been an extraordinary time, hasn’t it? I don’t think I’ve spent so much time at home as I have this year, ” Toyah says over the phone from her English countryside home that she shares with her husband of over 30 years, guitarist Robert Fripp.

“It’s taken a bit of time to get used to. Here we are at the end of October and Robert and I are just finding our stride. We both believe if we can get through this we can get through anything. The reality for us is that we will have to be in quarantine for a while longer as Robert is now 74 – we have to be careful,” Toyah confides.

Despite the enforced change of pace to her life, Toyah most certainly hasn’t been sitting around twiddling her thumbs. Where does she find all her energy?

“I don’t know where my energy comes from to be honest, but I really can’t stop, I’d get bored if I did,” she chuckles. “During the lockdown, I’ve recorded loads of songs, we are working on a new album, I have done two films, and I’ve been doing lots of art too. It’s been a pretty productive time – it’s been about adjusting to working differently.”

For Toyah, one of the most disappointing consequences of the lockdown was having to postpone her Electric Ladies Of The ’80s tour with friend and fellow ’80s doyenne, Hazel O’Connor.

“Yes, that was hard – so many fans were really looking forward to it, as were we – but we’ve rescheduled it for May 2021. This tour is something Hazel and I have been planning for 40 years,” Toyah continues. “Ironically, we’ve both been planning for 40 years,” Toyah continues. “Ironically, we’ve both been too busy doing other things, so this is the first time we’ve ever actually toured together, so we’re both very excited.” Talking of fans, Toyah’s always had a huge, very loyal fanbase. Even prior to being signed to a record label.

“Yes, I have, I’ve been blessed,” she says. “When I first formed Toyah, we were selling out almost every gig we played. We were selling out the Top Rank in Birmingham, the Old Bull & Bush in Shepperd’s Bush and just about every other gig we did. The venues had the capacity of a few hundred people but there would always be just as many people outside being refused entry – it was incredible – and no one would sign us – I think we were one of the last punk bands without a deal.

“I was filming Quadrophenia at that time, and the cast would often end up back at Sting’s hotel, and we’d sit around drinking, and Sting would teach us the chords to Roxanne and other Police songs. He said to me ‘Why the fuck aren’t you guys signed yet? It’s crazy.’ I had no answer. No one would touch us.”

But, as if by magic, a short while after that ‘pissed-up’ conversation with The Police frontman, Toyah and her band signed a deal with Safari Record, the home of fellow punks Wayne County & the Electric Chairs and The Boys.

“I remember I was so excited. It was a real little family-run record company and for us at the time it was great! I think the early success of the band really took them by surprise,” Toyah admits.

Toyah’s first single Victims of the Riddle spent an amazing 12 months at number one in the UK’s first ‘Alternative’ charts. Sheep Farming In Barnet a 6-track extended EP followed which was expanded into a full album of the same name the following year. The tracks added to the LP version included several songs which did not make the original track listing and the début single Victims of the Riddle. Produced by Steve James and Keith Hale, the album reached number 1 on the UK Independent Album Chart in February 1980.

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary the album has been remastered from the original master tapes and the 2CD+DVD package includes 30 bonus tracks including 20 that are previously unreleased. We asked Toyah what was it like hearing the demos again after so long.

“It was amazing, really was. My archivist Craig Astley, went through all our old tapes, with input from co-writer/guitarist Joel Bogen, and Craig would send me stuff and I would say, ‘this is great…who is it?’ He would say ‘ummm…it’s you!'” Toyah chuckles.

“I don’t remember half of our demos – you have to remember it was over 40 years ago when a lot of these were recorded, and I’ve done over 20 albums since then,” she says as if in her own defence.

“I loved re-listening to the b-sides. These I feel reflect us as more of who we were. Record companies aren’t that bothered about b-side so we could pretty much do what we wanted, we had no commercial constraints put upon us.” It’s clear from listening to the reissued album that the re-mastering has really helped bring the 40-year-old album back to life, and to be honest, it’s really stood the test of time, and many of the tracks are just as, if not more, relevant today as there were in 1980 – Toyah agrees.

“The re-mastering and the compilation of the extra tracks have been a real labour of love and I’m really happy with it. A lot of the tracks really sound as exciting as they did back in the day.

“To be honest, I think Sheep Farming in Barnet is an incredibly important album,” Toyah says. “It’s so original and so quirky, and it still sounds so fresh. I think it deserves to be heard by the younger generation. I think they’re going to like this album.”

And 2021… other than hopefully touring again you mentioned earlier that you were working on a new album. Will that be released next year?

“Yes! It’s called Posh Pop and that’s with myself, Robert and Simon Darlow and should be released at the end of April.”


2021


PEHAL NEWS 6.2.2021

Toyah Willcox: ‘My mother always wanted me altered in some way. I was never right’

Of all of the superstar choices which have come out of the pandemic, the gloriously bizarre movies made by Toyah Willcox and her husband, Robert Fripp, are certainly probably the most compelling. It is feasible, inside every brief clip, to cycle via each feeling from eager to cowl your eyes whereas being unable to look away, to the dawning realisation you could be watching a profound piece of efficiency artwork. Mostly, it’s unattainable to not giggle.

There they’re in their cosy Worcestershire kitchen, maybe with the dishwasher open in the background, with Willcox, accessorised with mouse ears, tap-dancing, bouncing off the Aga. Both dressed in black tutus on the finish of their backyard, the pair dance throughout the display screen to music from Swan Lake. Fripp lies on the ground of the hallway, whereas Willcox – dressed in purple PVC and satan horns – performs the Kinks’ You Really Got Me on the steps. It’s joyous.

Willcox has been importing their Sunday Lockdown Lunch movies since April final 12 months; in addition they do a weekly agony aunt session, and Willcox does her personal Q&A, speaking about her life and lengthy profession as an actor, pop star and common cultural fixture for the previous 40 years. It began, she says, as a option to occupy Fripp, the musician and founding father of the prog rock band King Crimson.

“Here I am in this house with this 74-year-old husband who I really don’t want to live without,” she says. “He was withdrawing, so I thought: ‘I’m going to teach him to dance.’ And it became a challenge.” They posted a video, and it took off. “It was: ‘Wow, I’ve never experienced the power of that connection.’”

She comes up with all of it, guffawing to herself late at night time in mattress. “I do the lighting, the filming, the conceptual side and the persuading Robert to take part,” she says. Getting Fripp – famously self-contained and critical – to bounce in tights and a tutu, she says, made him “fucking furious. He felt he was being mocked.

But the response was so overwhelmingly positive, and now, six months down the line, he can see that it was quite an important thing to do, in that it became a shared experience with an audience that needed to be reminded of the beauty of human laughter.” Since then, she provides: “I’ve not put him in such desperate situations.”

Instead, it’s Willcox who throws herself in, with zero self-consciousness. She will put on an animal-print onesie, or dance round with ribbons, or fake to be in a dungeon in their cellar, or soar on a trampoline whereas dressed as a cheerleader (Fripp, often, is seated, taking part in guitar and dressed in a go well with). One of the funniest, and hottest movies (4.3m views on YouTube), is Willcox performing Metallica’s Enter Sandman on an exercise bike, although it’s honest to say her breasts are the spotlight.

“We did the exercise bike in a rehearsal, and my top was completely see-through, which was a surprise,” she says. “I have a mentor who’s basically my personal trainer and teaches me guitar, and he was born in 1980, he doesn’t know who the hell I am. I said: ‘Can I get away with this as a 62-year-old?’ And he said: ‘Do it.’ And I trusted that response.” I reward Fripp for admirably sustaining eye contact with Willcox, regardless of her nipples being dangerously inside his line of imaginative and prescient, and he or she laughs. “Robert loves his wife. And when I do these things …”

This shouldn’t be displaying off for the digicam; that is how the couple usually behave, she says. “I’m doing this to him all the time to make him laugh, because he needs to laugh. If people saw what we got up to, they’d wonder if we were nine years old.” She likes to cover in his bathe room, as an example. “And he turns the light on and I’m in the corner like a demented child and it just freaks him out. We have had moments where he says: ‘Can this just stop?’”

The previous 12 months has been a take a look at for the couple. It has been the longest stretch they’ve spent collectively in 35 years of marriage – in regular years, each are touring or working away, and so they lived in separate homes till 2001. “We really had to start again, to navigate being together in a confined space, because we have never had that.

We had a very romantic relationship where we’ve always met in hotels around the world and this new life was challenging. I now think we love it so much we’re going to have to really start to embrace the outside world again.” Faced with the prospect of spending too lengthy in the kitchen, she taught Fripp to prepare dinner. “I knew I was not going to survive if the kitchen became a mainstay of this experience, which is why Robert and I are very 50/50 in what we do, and we even do our own laundry. I’m not domesticated.”

She has additionally been extremely busy; Willcox rereleased her first album, Sheep Farming in Barnet, late final 12 months, made a movie, made a TV programme about her mother, and wrote and recorded a solo album, which can be launched in the spring. “I’ve been phenomenally creative and I’ve been trying to understand why,” she says. “I can only put my finger on the fact that at 62, you know time is finite. And I thought: ‘I cannot let 2020 be a year that destroys my career’, so I’ve just been furiously creative.”

She has additionally written some “little nonsense books, with a bee painted like Robert, that is always questioning who and what he is” and is studying to play the guitar. “There’s definitely that thread pulling me towards … I don’t call it the end, but the end of Toyah. Time is so precious and I think that’s why I’ve become ultra-creative. I remember when Derek Jarman was diagnosed with HIV, he said it focused him so much that he did his greatest artwork in that time. I don’t have anything to face like that, but I learned more from that lesson of Derek’s than from anyone else.”

If Willcox solely from her TV presenting in the 90s or the truth reveals she has popped up in over the previous twenty years, you might be glossing over her unbelievable profession. Her first movie was Jarman’s 1978 punk classic Jubilee, and he or she labored with the director once more in The Tempest; she was additionally in Quadrophenia. Her first stage work was on the National Theatre.

She was marketed as a punk pop star in the 80s, although this ended up turning her just about into “a parody of myself”, as she as soon as put it, and he or she remained underrated, regardless of albums such because the extremely experimental Prostitute.

She as soon as stated she refused to be “a rock’n’roll wife”. What did that imply? “Robert would never ever let me live off him or his reputation. He just wouldn’t. We have separate bank accounts. He was so guarded when I first met him and I think why he liked me so much is I was fiercely independent and passionate about my work – he saw someone that wouldn’t cling. I knew I’d never have children, and Robert and I didn’t want family. I have been very passionate about remaining an artist.”

As a toddler, rising up in Birmingham, Willcox was “a show-off. I realised I could entertain people, and it made people like me. I was probably seven when I realised it was the only thing I could do, in that I would not be able to suffer this life unless I was a performer.”

Her early years have been outlined by medical issues – she had been born with a twisted backbone and developmental issues along with her toes and hip sockets, requiring surgical procedure and physiotherapy. There have been different crises – she was bullied at college for her disabilities and her lisp; her father, a manufacturing facility proprietor, went bankrupt; and her relationship along with her mother was troublesome.

“My mother was very complex. She never told the truth of her history to us.” Willcox just lately made a TV present about this, so gained’t go into element, however says she came upon that “my mother experienced something in her life which meant she never experienced happiness again.

None of us understood why she was the way she was. It shattered me, because my mother went through something where she needed love, support and therapy. And she got a daughter like me.” By which she means wilful and nonconformist and with a physique that dissatisfied her mother, who had been an expert dancer. “She was always kind of covering me up, and always wanted me altered in some way. I was never right.”

Willcox was an “obedient child” in this claustrophobic home till she was about 12. Then, she says: “I completely rebelled, ran away from home, I started making my own clothes, I became a hair model where my hair was dyed at the age of 14, and I was touring in hair shows. I just broke every rule.”

In 1982, on the peak of her fame, she gained an award for greatest feminine singer, and phoned her mother from the ceremony. “Her reaction was: ‘Don’t boast about it – it won’t happen again.’” Her mother lived close to Willcox and Fripp close to the top of her life and so they managed to construct a relationship. She has tears in her eyes when she talks about it. “We had two rather fabulous years with her; I still fought with her, but she became the woman that she could have been. She destroyed her life, because she could not talk about one event that happened to her when she was 16.”

But it didn’t destroy Willcox’s life. Even speaking over Zoom, I can virtually really feel her bristling vitality, and he or she appears fearless and intentionally, relentlessly glad. “I am deliberately, relentlessly happy because my mother deliberately, relentlessly tried to stop me being happy,” she says, smiling. “So for me, it’s actually passive-aggression. I am a very positive person and I only like to deal with positivity, but sometimes, it’s passive-aggressive.”

What was it wish to develop into so well-known so rapidly? “It was fabulous!” she shouts. “It was everything I ever wanted. I had five utterly magical years where I felt the universe was placing everything in my hand.” She had been noticed on the streets of Birmingham by a casting director, who put her in a TV play; from that, she was solid in Tales from the Vienna Woods on the National Theatre. “And at the National I found musicians I could work with,” says Willcox.

“People were absolutely gorgeous to me. Ian Charleson [the stage actor] took me to meet Derek Jarman, and I ended up in Jubilee. Everything fell into place. Looking back, I must have been so obnoxiously self-centred, but people saw me as some new generational spark, and doors opened for me.” She makes it sound so passive, however this underplays her personal dedication and charisma.

It should have been powerful to be a younger lady in the music trade in the early 80s. “I was terribly naive,” she says. “I was being called to record meetings in people’s flats and I realised, if you’re called to a meeting at 8pm, you ain’t there because you’re an artist. I realised that this was sex for jobs – and no.” It was extra specific in the movie enterprise, she says. She went for an audition with Russ Meyer, the director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, for “one of his big booby films”, at a flat in Chelsea.

“He said: ‘Can I see your breasts?’ and I went: ‘No.’ He said: ‘Well, you won’t be in this film.’ I said: ‘That’s fine’, even though Jubilee had nudity and the National Theatre had nudity. I just didn’t like the attitude.” It helped her survive, she thinks, that she was fairly androgynous. “I think my boyishness protected me.”

Would she have been seen as extra of an artist, and fewer of a novelty act, if she had been a person? (I assume so.) “I think partly it’s gender,” she says. “I think the sexual appeal of someone is huge. It really helps to have a sexual awareness and I fought that.” Willcox zigzagged from music to theatre to movie and pitched up presenting TV programmes resembling Songs of Praise and Watchdog, then appeared in actuality reveals resembling I’m a Celebrity. In latest years, she has endlessly toured.

What extra does she need to obtain? “Everything,” she shouts. “I’m a megalomaniac!” She is making ready a Jimi Hendrix tune for this weekend’s video. I dread to assume what she has bought deliberate for her husband in the weeks forward, however he’ll play guitar, smile at her indulgently, and Willcox will proceed to look as if she is having the time of her life.


THE QUIETUS 16.2.2021

Couple Goals: Toyah’s Lockdown

Toyah Willcox tells us about her and husband Robert Fripp's bonkers lockdown videos, why she sees herself as honouring Barbara Windsor, how they might influence King Crimson going forward, and how they've inspired a surge of interest in her kitchen cupboards. Plus, tQ's top seven lockdown home broadcasts!

Few artists’ lockdown content has made quite as much impact as the videos Toyah Willcox and her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been putting out since their DIY rendition of Swan Lake last May. From bizarre comedy skits to heartfelt agony aunt segments their broadcasts have become a sensation, particularly the duo’s supercharged performances of classic rock hits like ‘School’s Out’, ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Rebel Yell’, with at least one of them in fancy dress as a cheerleader, unicorn, bee, dinosaur or Father Christmas.

Their views rocketed with their rendition of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’, which featured Toyah performing on an exercise bike – a subliminal message about the joy of fitness, she says – which currently has 4.8 million plays and counting.

Catching up with a buoyant Toyah over the phone from her home by the banks of the river Avon, its clear that for all the videos’ madcap surrealism, she’s taking them completely seriously. For her the project began as a way to get her husband on his feet, concerned at how much of his time he was spending sedentary, and has now evolved into a full-blown cottage industry. By her own admission she was never tech-savvy, but their house is now full of green screens, cameras and costumes, with videos planned and rehearsed days in advance.

The broadcasts are strange, multi-faceted things, but what viewers often pick up on in the comments is their sheer positivity, something Toyah is delighted with. The effect on her husband in particular has been astonishing, she says, who after initially struggling with the daftness of it all has started showing a playful side she’s never seen before. “I’ve been with him for 35 years, and for 34 years of that he’s been how people have seen him in public,” she says. “I think lockdown has allowed him to reconnect with who he was when he was 23 or 24.”

Hi Toyah, how’s everything going?

Toyah Willcox: It’s crazy! The irony was that in 2020 Robert and I were both moving up quite a notch in our careers. I have two movies waiting to hit the cinemas. I had major tours and major venues planned, and Robert was moving into America to play 10,000 capacity venues. So career wise, the last eighteen months we were due probably the halcyon days of our careers!

How have you been coping with the hardships of the last year?

We live bang on a high street, surrounded by shops and businesses. Even in lockdown there’s a lot of activity, we’re on the ambulance run between two hospitals, but on the very first day I looked out of the window and all I saw was a lady in her nineties with her little wheelie trolley standing in the middle of the road just looking around; I don’t think she knew what was going on.

I think at that point I realised that this is a new type of creative experience. How do we work around it? I found the most immediate way of doing it was taking the piss our of ourselves, I suppose. I said, ‘let’s put our tutus on and go and do Swan Lake. I think we realised then that we were making a connection that was very valuable.

Has it been strange not having gigs?

It’s been very strange because the community that a gig involves is enormous. The audience are as vulnerable in this as the stage crew, the caterers, the cleaners, the box office. We play venues where we get to meet those people, we’re not rushed in and rushed out. I always believe you can only work through optimism and hope, but seeing people lose that energy has been quite an eye opener.

That said, our work has so intensified in the last six months in our home. We’ve put in remote cameras, we can work on greenscreen, we can broadcast, we’re working harder now than if we were on the road. We’re working seven days a week. I’m also doing a very small cottage industry where I write lyrics for people as a form of gift. That’s gone through the roof so I have to do that through the night, then we’re filming most daytimes either for terrestrial tv or the internet, and podcasts have taken off too. So we’ve never been busier.

A lot of artists’ ‘lockdown content’ seems hobbyish, but you seem to be taking this intensely seriously!

It’s a new world for me, I’ve always avoided the internet. I’m not tech savvy, but watching the patterns emerge for me has been absolutely fascinating. We posted our first online film around May, and within two minutes we were getting communication from Manila, Australia, India . . . I think it’s taught me something major as a writer, the simpler the communication the more direct and more connected you are to the people who watch it. The whole intention was connection, and just to say ‘We’re in this with you, we’re not detached, we’re not living in a mansion in LA, we’re with you on this.’

Part of it must be to cheer yourselves up too.

I can’t not work. All the dynamics in me function by having deadlines, movements, having to create new shows. If I don’t have that there’s no mental stimulus for me. I don’t get that from watching a screen. So partly it’s been my creative survival, that sounds dramatic, but it really has been my driving force.

I started doing it because my husband was not moving much. He does about five hours guitar practice a day but that doesn’t mean his whole body is moving. So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to teach him to dance to get him active. When I was teaching him the basic jive, I realised he wasn’t as connected to his body sequences as he should be, and I started to film him to show him that there was dyspraxia there. That motivated him.

I’ve read a lot of comments where people say they’d never seen Robert smile before until now. Is this a side to him we don’t otherwise get to experience?

At home he’s a very happy creature, but you’ve got to remember he’s written music that’s almost impossible to play. People challenge themselves to play ‘Fracture’ or ‘THRAK’ or ‘Lark’s Tongues In Aspic’. Even Robert finds it a challenge to play the music he has written. When we started to do the videos, ‘Swan Lake’ was a big problem for him. He felt that he had humiliated himself.

He really reads every comment, and he will brutally address the comments if he thinks they’re unjust, but I think what he saw that started to come through was a genuine appreciation of everything that he was doing and the side he was showing. Reaching out and changing people has helped Robert understand that this huge persona of The Ice King he’s built is not necessarily part of what we’re doing in lockdown.

He loves the films now. He’s rehearsing for them and planning and sharpening it. About six months ago I could only get him to address it once I get the camera in front of him. So in answer to your question, fans have never seen this part of Robert because he’s never allowed it to be seen before.

How much planning goes into the videos?

I’m about a week ahead of what we film. I used to have to get the camera in front of Robert in the spur of the moment or else he wouldn’t do it. For example, I ordered the dinosaur suits, I put the suit on when it arrived, the suit looked phenomenal, I said Robert ‘Don’t you wanna be in one of these?’ and he said ‘Yeah!’ He’s totally up for it now, so we’re planning ahead which songs we’re going to do.

We manage to rehearse the night before. Sometimes I put the camera in front of him and we get it then. ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Enter Sandman’ were rehearsals. He’s becoming much more able to be spontaneous and to improvise which I think is fantastic, I think that will really affect how he sees King Crimson in a really good way.

A lot of the songs he plays are very simple, something that beginners could play . . .

It’s been a major leap for him to understand that classic rock is the huge success it is because it touches people directly in the solar plexus and the heart.

How do you choose the songs?

The lyrics have to be slightly tongue in cheek, in a purely British Carry On sense, because I see myself as honouring Barbara Windsor. I give Robert a whole list of songs that I think will connect, he has to see how it transfers into his standard tuning for the guitar.

You bought the dinosaur outfits especially, what about your other looks?

We did a fabulous version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ when Robert was in a Father Christmas suit which he bought – that’s how enthusiastic he is now – and he bought me a pixie outfit. The tutus I already had because in around 2005 I was doing a lot of punk festivals dressed in a tutu, so I cut one open and sewed Robert into it for Swan Lake. I have a huge costume room here, but we started to get costumes in that we felt people would identify with as archetypes, like the cheerleader.

Do you think the videos have got weirder?

We always load everything we do with subliminal messages. For the last three weeks it’s been gym workouts. All we’re saying in that is that this is a great rock song and keeping fit should be fun, but people are finding it kind of strange. The world has gone mad at the fact that my tops are see-through, but I think I just did that to make Robert laugh. Our hits have gone up by about three million. It just goes to show, it doesn’t matter what age you are! But I think what’s really cute about it, you’ve got a 74 year old and a 62 year old having fun.

I’ve seen the two of you described as ‘couple goals’, how does it feel to be seen that way?

To be honest, it’s really uplifted us! I think this popularity has given us an incredible support in what has been an incredibly frustrating and potentially heart-breaking year. It’s been our positive. For me it just makes me even more determined that when we get out there and play. It just makes me even more determined to be in the workplace, I suppose.

But for people to see us as a lovely open couple, firstly I think it’s really helped Robert be open and embracing and trusting of people’s affections towards him rather than put a barrier up. We take these people passionately and seriously and try and give something back. It’s very nice. We don’t have children, so we’ve never experienced that. It’s heart-warming.

The videos are so completely un-cynical . . .

We’ve had carpenters contact us to say, ‘Can I look at the join between this cupboard and that cupboard?’ Lots of really lovely things like that. Some of the woodwork in this house is 1500s, we’ve just taken our cameras to how the carpenters of those times did the equations and put things together, we filmed it and sent it to these joiners.

It seems anti-climactic to end on the joints of your kitchen cupboards . . .

I think that’s what the year is about, isn’t it?


THE ROLLING STONE 24.3.2021

Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox on Their Viral Quarantine Videos: ‘We’re in This With You’

King Crimson’s guitarist and his pop-star wife on what inspired them to cover everything from “Enter Sandman” to “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and what everyone got wrong about their ‘Swan Lake’ tutu dance

On April 5th, 2020, music fans stuck in their homes and cruising the web for diversions were greeted with one of the most unusual sights in a season filled with them: King Crimson auteur Robert Fripp and his wife, singer and actress Toyah Willcox, both elegantly dressed and dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets’ early rock anthem “Rock Around the Clock.”

Filmed on Willcox’s iPhone in the kitchen of the couple’s home near Birmingham, England, the head-scratching clip launched one of the year’s least likely and most talked-about viral series. Every Sunday since, “Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch” (sometimes called a “Lockdown Lunch”) has presented a new clip of the couple having quick, good-natured fun at home. The ever-upbeat Willcox sings and vamps (while wearing a variety of costumes, from workout suit to cheerleader costume) while a deadpan Fripp accompanies her on electric guitar.

Occasionally, the couple is seen dancing together, as in a minute-long performance to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, where both wear tutus. But in most, they offer up abbreviated, roughly one- to-two-minute takes on songs no one would ever expect King Crimson’s guitarist to cover: classic metal and hard-rock songs, from “Smoke on the Water” to “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, as well as Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (for this past Valentine’s Day), “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Purple Haze” (with Willcox changing the line in the chorus to “excuse me while I kiss this guy”).

And they’re clearly connecting with people: Their tribute to “Enter Sandman” has over 5.7 million views on YouTube, their version of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” nearing 900,000. The song choices reflect Willcox’s back story. Emerging from the Seventies British punk scene, where she made her name as an actress (in projects like the film made of the Who’s Quadrophenia), she fronted her band, Toyah, before going solo in the Eighties; her music integrated punk, hard rock, and goth. She and Fripp married in 1986 and have collaborated in the early-Nineties band Sunday All Over the World and on her own records.

With the first anniversary of the videos approaching — and Willcox preparing a new album of original songs, Posh Pop, out this summer — the couple sat for a Zoom interview in the very kitchen where they’ve become viral stars. “Here’s a couple that love each other having fun,” Fripp says. “Astonishing, isn’t it? At home in their kitchen!”

“What’s the alternative if we weren’t having fun the whole time?” Willcox adds. “It isn’t even worth thinking about.”

Whose idea were these videos to start with?

Fripp: [Points to Willcox.]

Willcox: It started with “Rock Around the Clock.” I wanted to get Robert moving. This whole thing about being in lockdown was people were stopping moving, and our generation must move. So I taught him how to jive to “Rock Around the Clock,” and we filmed it. It’s the first time we’d ever posted anything like it, our first step into that form of social media. And we got a million hits within a couple of hours as far away as the Philippines and Australia. And we thought, “Wow.”

Fripp: Mine is a slightly more nuanced view of this. My wife has been insistent. Performers have a responsibility to perform and at this particular time to keep people’s spirits up. This is a very English cultural tradition. Essentially, when things are really bad in England, what you do is begin laughing and do silly things. A good reference point is the Ministry of Silly Walks on Monty Python. Now it’s, “Robert puts on a tutu and dances to Swan Lake at the river’s edge with his wife.” So I have followed my wife’s sense and vision of these things.

Willcox: The one thing that kept coming back to us was that people were desperately lonely. All these messages were coming back from people going, “Thank you — I was on the brink.” And you say, “Well, the brink of what?” “The brink of not being able to continue.”

And we realized that if we kept posting these with a continuity, we were saying we’re not in some big mansion somewhere, drinking champagne and laughing it off. We’re actually in this with you and we’re sharing this with you. We realized we could still be the performers that connect with our audience. Swan Lake — I’ll let my husband describe that to you because I’ve not really been forgiven for it.

What do you mean?

Willcox: With Swan Lake, it seems so obvious that one of the funniest things we could do not leaving our home was to go to the bottom of the garden and perform Swan Lake. I happen to have two tutus in the house. I cut one up and got Robert in it, and that is literally a couple of takes. No rehearsal. I’m saying, “Robert, just go across camera.” “Robert, mimic me. Follow me.”

I was treating it with this British sense of humor, and Robert was treating it as the best he could do. And that is why it’s such a beautiful, charming piece. When we released it, it got a lot of positive response, but there were a few headlines in Europe saying we were mocking people with our lifestyle.

Fripp: We live in the center of a nice, very traditional, almost modest English country town. We have a very nice traditional English terrace, with the garden, which goes down to the River Rea. We are exceptionally fortunate and we don’t have an attitude of privilege. And there was some commentary, “Look at these rich people showing off their stuff, flaunting it to us.”

But I understand people who are stuck in [apartment buildings] not allowed to go out to the park. I can understand that it might be seen as rich people flaunting their stuff. In fact, it wasn’t like that. It was what the English do. When things get tough, they begin looking ridiculous.

Toyah, I’m going to assume that you chose most of these hard-rock covers.

Willcox: Yes! I give Robert a list and out of that list of six songs Robert chooses which one he feels he can honor, playing in his tuning, and then we take it from there. I choose the songs because I know that visually I can make them work in this space. For instance, with “Girls, Girls, Girls,” I had to erect a screen halfway through the kitchen so I didn’t smash anything with the tennis balls.

What is so extraordinary about the songs in this particular last 12 months is that the lyrics have more meaning than ever before and that could never have been planned. So with “Girls, Girls, Girls,” when a lot was going on between Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and the Royal Family, I decided to do the tennis playing and the to-ing and fro-ing — the whole idea that girls are only one thing. And then you put it with Mötley Crüe, who completely objectified girls as pole dancers. You then just have this phenomenal amount of comment within 90 seconds.

Fripp: It reflects the different cultural conventions, norms and values of L.A. and England. The clues are there, with the volleying between the parties.

What was another song whose lyrics seem relevant now?

Willcox: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was coming up to Christmas and that really was one where we wanted to point out that that spirit of teen spirit is still alive in us, but we’re not encouraged to ever use it once you get over 30 years old. “Rebel Yell” exactly the same, which I think I did on a trampoline. The spirit is still in us. It doesn’t fade. I’m 62 going on 63, and Robert is 73 going on 74. But I think nothing was quite ever as beautifully placed as “Girls, Girls, Girls” the day we did it. That was the sweet spot.

Toyah, were there songs you presented to Robert that took some convincing?

Willcox: Actually, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” for quite a while. But he’s becoming more and more open. He hasn’t actually said no to anything, especially in the context of how popular these songs are with a mass audience. And we realize these songs have formed people’s lives, that these people had discovered these songs when they were in love with someone, when they were getting married. These are really great punctuation songs for people’s lives. [Turns to Fripp] So you don’t really say no anymore, do you? We find a way of doing it.

Fripp: I look at the challenging technical aspects. Can I play it on guitar? Is one guitar sufficient to support my wife? Can I honor the music? If it’s an orchestral ballad, it’s not really going to be a go.

Willcox: Yeah, it’s got to be up. It’s got to get you on your feet.

Fripp: Rockin’ out.

Robert, have you ever played songs like “Smoke on the Water” or “You Really Got Me” before? And what was it like learning them?

Fripp: Essentially no to the first question, although if we go back to 1965 to 1967, I was a hotel musician in Bournemouth [in the south of England]. As the young guitarist in the band, the band used to turn to me and say, “What twists do you have, Bob?” in other words, it’s the guitarist’s responsibility to present the band with the latest hits that young people in the audience would want to hear us play.

Moving forward 50-odd years, nowadays, were I in that position, essentially that of a cover band, you would be expected to know all these tunes — everything from the Eighties forward — and be able to present honorable versions of them. In a sense, that’s what I’m doing today. It’s not a giant leap, although for the past 50 years my primary repertoire has been King Crimson, not other bands.

How did you pick “Enter Sandman,” where Toyah is singing while on a treadmill?

Willcox: “Enter Sandman” came about purely because I wanted to make my husband laugh his head off. So sometimes, you know, you get great commentary. Sometimes you’re just having fun. I just bought the exercise bike because in lockdown, the people who do exercises online are hugely successful. And it was this whole idea of, here we are, all rock entertainers, and we’re doing our exercises and we’re doing what we should be doing onstage, which is playing and singing.

And then there’s also the added element that I went braless to make my husband laugh, which was purely an act of innocence where the lighting really just helped turn it into something else. There was a flurry of sending that particular clip around to my online team, and me saying, “Does this disturb you? Does this look wrong?” And of course, my team are male and they went, “No, we love it.”

Which song made you think, “You know, this is a pretty great tune …”?

Fripp: Well, actually, pretty much all of them. My personal favorite at the moment is “Enter Sandman.”

Willcox: And [Alice Cooper’s] “Poison”! They’re all brilliant songs!

Fripp: I mean, they’re all utterly stunning things. I’m blown away by the original guitarists on these tracks. Phenomenal development and playing primarily since the late Seventies and early Eighties, Van Halen onwards. Steve Vai, Satriani, the Metallica boys … The originators of the riffs are phenomenal players. I go back, listen to the original versions on record, see live performances, look at different interpretations and guitar covers on YouTube. Then I have to honor the spirit of the music while making it my own.

Robert, how did you decide to perform a rare vocal on Nat King Cole’s “When I Fall in Love”?

Fripp: Well, actually, I have performed that live. I performed it live with King Crimson in the bar of a hotel in Japan in December 1981 with Tony Levin on piano. This was simply King Crimson band humor. And strangely enough, two and a half years later, March 1984, we were in another Japanese hotel, I believe in Osaka, and Bill Bruford was on piano: “Bill, E flat, please!” On that second occasion of performing this, Air Supply were in the lounge when I was singing. I have always loved the song from seeing Nat King Cole perform it in the Errol Flynn film Istanbul. Nat King Cole — stunning musicianship. I seek to emulate that.

Toyah, what are your challenges while singing these type of songs?

Willcox: As a singer, I have to think about the amount I’m going to do in 90 seconds. Firstly, that I present myself as a singer, and secondly, that I hold this culture of 90-second viewing because the attention span is apparently now about five seconds. So I’ve got to grasp people within that time. Very, very rarely do I think I can’t hold the attention. “Everlong” was an example because it’s an expression in the guitar, not in the voice. So at that point we had the opportunity of bringing in a live snake, which I used to hold the attention of the viewer. I felt as a vocalist on that particular song and the style it’s sung, I wouldn’t be able to hold the attention.

How much effort did it take to talk Robert into having fake tattoos stuck on his face for “Paranoid” while he was in some sort of vault in your house?

Willcox: He was so, so up for that! The guitar tutor I use, who is also Robert’s pupil, is head to toe in tattoos. So I said to Robert, “We are going to cover you in tattoos.” I got them online; they’re transfers. I knew I wanted a crown on his forehead.

Fripp: I was actually in the vault with my wife outside, and that terrified me.

Willcox: Why?

Fripp: Essentially I sit on the side of the stage, preferably in the dark, and I play. And there I was in full view in camera, in the [former bank] vault, with the vault door closed. I had terrible claustrophobia. That was a heavy one.

Willcox: I do have to position Robert in a way where he doesn’t feel the oppression of the camera on him. It’s just something about Robert. So we just move him slightly back. I’ll never be able to have him there in front of the camera. He just doesn’t like it.

Robert, what kind of feedback have you gotten from King Crimson fans at the sight of you dancing or covering songs by Alice Cooper and Joan Jett?

Fripp: In one word, surprise. One of my personal interests in this is to give a hefty kicking to received opinion. In terms of the received opinion of Fripp, it’s: “We know he’s in terrible man, he hates his friends, he’s nasty to people, he’s heartless, raging and venal,” and all the rest of this nonsense. In terms of actually engaging with this, I don’t think it’s possible.

But in terms of the Sunday Lunches, there is an entirely different aspect of me that my wife has actually been keen to present for a very long time, the side of Robert that really no one gets to see. I probably would not have done it without the lockdown either

How has the making of the videos changed during the course of the year?

Willcox: We decide on the Friday what is going to be the song for the Sunday 10 days later. We start rehearsing Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We do a test run Wednesday evening. What I don’t tell Robert is sometimes I run the camera without him knowing because that very first run-through usually is the sweet spot.

“Poison,” we actually did 20 takes. And we did that because it was technically a great song, but technically a lot going on onscreen and we wanted to get it right. We realized that our audience was growing and growing and growing. So since then we do a lot more prep. A lot of the earlier ones were only ever one or two takes without rehearsal.

Fripp: Often filmed on the morning they went up.

Willcox: Yeah, we can’t do that anymore.

How long do you see yourselves doing these?

Willcox: What we might do is move to once a month or once a fortnight. We’re in discussions with our media team about the most effective way we can keep impact, and what we all need to remember is that the virus isn’t going to go away until we eradicate it completely. So there’s still going to be people locked in. And we very much started this to say to people who were locked in that we’re with you here. You’re not alone. We’re point of contact. So we will never stop completely.

You two have been married since 1986. What’s something new you each learned about the other while making these videos in lockdown?

Willcox: With King Crimson, Robert has written music that has to be held within an invisible boundary to stop the train coming off the tracks. Robert has written music by which he has learned to be the rivet pin that must never be fractured. I’ve now seen that Robert has put himself in a position musically where he can’t quite go up on the stage, stand up, and have fun just doing a rip-roaring solo, because everything is on that line.

And I love that Robert has compromised that to take part in these videos and to understand [that] if something is slightly off the rail, that has broken every rule Robert has set for himself in his career. What has been remarkable about these films is Robert has done it full stop. That is quite miraculous. He’s done it with an open heart. He’s learned rock songs. He’s made the commitment.

Fripp: It’s confirmed what I already knew. My wife is a force of nature and my wife leads the way. My wife is a star. One thing has really pissed me off increasingly. Currently there is a debate ongoing about women’s role in the world generally, specifically now in the music industry. My wife is a cultural influencer from the late Seventies through the Eighties. And I’ve seen her airbrushed from history in a way which I continue to find incomprehensible. So here we are at home presenting essentially my wife’s visions, here and immediately.

Willcox: I didn’t pay you to say it, either.


SUPER DELUXE EDITION 3.6.2021

Toyah Willcox, the new queen of ‘Sunday Lunch’ lockdown videos talks to SDE about the reissue of Toyah’s 1980s album The Blue Meaning. This is the second major release in Cherry Red’s reissue campaign, since the label acquired Safari Records in early 2020.

SDE: You’ve been keeping busy during lockdown – I’ve seen the videos – but you must have missed playing live, since you used to do it so much?

Toyah Willcox: Yes, that’s true, but I managed to build a pretty phenomenal… brand name in lockdown. So we’re going to continue with it. It’s been a phenomenon we never expected, and it’s still growing. In a couple of years we’ll have our own TV channel, doing our own TV broadcasts. What seems to have struck home is the very basic truth and simplicity of what we do. We’re not in hi-tech studios or anything like that, but we’ll actually be broadening the whole of that.

You clearly enjoy doing them, but it must take up a lot of your time, over the weekends, since you do so many different types of video, don’t you?

Yeah, we try and get it all done before the weekend because we learnt the hard way that if you have a breakdown in technology, or a hacker – we have had people trying to get in – then you have to have all the backup systems there. Are you saying that when everything gets back to normal, you might go out and play a bit less, because you now have this new way to connect to your audience?

We’ll be going out more, because we are putting in a year and a half of concerts into the next period, so I’ll be doing twice as much as I’ve done before. I’m not expecting a day off until the end of 2022!

So you are still working as hard as ever then. 40 years ago, in The Blue Meaning era you were acting, touring, in the studio… where does the drive come from? Especially back then, because you were so young?

Back then, that was all you could do. There was only one way of reaching your fans and that was constant touring. This next 18 months is exceptional for all live performing artists. We’re catching up on ticket sales that people have held on to for literally 14 months and we’re honouring all of that. I’m going out with Posh Pop [Toyah’s forthcoming studio album] from August, so I’m doubling up. I’ve got to promote Blue Meaning and then next year I’m promoting [the reissue of] Anthem.

How do you look upon The Blue Meaning now, 40 years on? Can you rate it as a record, or do you just see it as a time, a period …

I think it deserves its place in history. These tapes have been owned by someone who left them in a vault and I deserve, as an artist, my historical place at this time. Sheep Farming in Barnet is a joyous album about five people getting a record deal at the ascending heights of punk.

With Blue Meaning, this is where punk was turning to goth and was taking on a lot more edge. By the time we released Blue Meaning we were still touring that wonderful pub circuit, but 2000 kids were turning up a night to see us. Blue Meaning was the turning point in our career when we knew we were going to be successful. Cherry Red now have the tapes and I’m so grateful.

Cherry Red seem to be doing a really good job…

Can I add that my team are doing a good job too! The design values on this has all come from my team. You were very young when you made this record and lyrically it’s quite dark and some of the references are pretty obscure.

Do you still recognise the person who wrote those lyrics and sang those songs?

No, I think this is probably one of the angriest of all the albums. I don’t connect to that person. But back then, I try to put it in the context that I was the only female in the team, at a time when I couldn’t even walk from the venue to the hotel in Leeds because The Yorkshire Ripper was around.

This was this glorious time for women in punk and yet there was still this feeling of vulnerability. And I found the sexual politics at the time, very hard-hitting. In that a woman was considered friendly and open if she was willingly promiscuous, and if she wasn’t, there was something wrong with her. And I was dealing with a lot of this at this time.

When I listen back to the album, I hear that anger. The anger of a lack of freedom, and the anger of the expectation of me to have no ownership of my body, which was very, very common back then. There are many, many images in this album which I think are related to me discovering about World War II, for the first time. I was never educated about that at school. But during this period of punk, there was a repositioning of political attitudes.

At lot of punk bands in the beginning were wearing German memorabilia – we never did by the way, Joel Bogen [Toyah guitarist and songwriter] is a devout Jew – but there was an awful lot of political re-education going on and conflict and confusion. This album reflects many conversations and many conflicts within the two creative forces in the band – Joel and me. And of course, Pete Bush [keyboard player] was very creative in the band at this time.

You mentioned you had a good live following at the time. Do you think people were listening to the lyrics or were they just jumping up and down and having a good time?

I think in the case of this album, they were listening to the lyrics. And by Anthem, my God the lyrics were their new religion. These were devout fans. ‘Ieya’ has remained the most important song in my career up until the point of ‘Dance in the Hurricane’ [from the 2019 reissue of In the Court of the Crimson Queen] when I last saw you, two years ago. It’s taken that long for a song to eclipse ‘Ieya’.

No one teaches you how to work effectively in a professional recording studio. You were used to the live stage, so how challenging was it in the studio?

The challenging thing for me has remained the one constant, and that is when you record, you shut the room out of your audio experience. I didn’t understand this at the time, so as soon as headphones when on me, I lost the room; I lost the connection that I was used to with an audience.

For me, the connection with the audience is 50 percent of the music, in terms of the audio experience. Steve James (the co-producer of The Blue Meaning) was incredibly astute and he realised I needed to hear a room. So he’d set up speakers and place me far enough a way, so that I could respond to the sound in a room and that’s how we did most of Blue Meaning.

The music, the lyrics, the songs, were fairly uncompromising. Was credibility for you and the band more important that trying to reach out and have a hit record?

We weren’t looking for mainstream at that time. In fact, many of the punk bands actually turned down Top of the Pops. What we wanted was to be loyal to was our devout, punk following, who saw a kind of separateness in our music, from the mainstream. And that’s how we felt at the time. We very much wanted to explore new sounds and have the freedom to express ourselves as artists and not as a commercial entity.

When Keith Hale came back into the vision for ‘It’s A Mystery’, at the beginning of recording Anthem, by that time everyone could feel the spirit of the Eighties New Wave / New Romantics coming in. I felt we quite naturally evolved into that new world, with Nick Tauber coming in and the other musicians.

The Blue Meaning reissue has that early version of It’s A Mystery, with the band Blood Donor on it. Despite its subsequent success, you’ve said a number of times that it’s not one of your favourites. What’s the issue? Is it because you were singing someone else’s words or because it was so different to what you were doing at the time?

My initial reaction to it was “this isn’t me”. This isn’t the person I am, it’s not the truth of me. That was my initial reaction, because I always came into this industry wanting to be a strong, independent, female leader. And I felt the song was about vulnerability and so I didn’t think it was right for me or my fans. Keith Hale and I went into the studio and I wrote the second verse [but] I was never credited for it and I never received payment…

I was going to ask you about that. I noted that you had said that but your name isn’t on the songwriting credits…

Keith would not allow me that and I think in this day and age it’s something he needs to address. But when the song came out I truly believed it would end my musical career. And it was an instant, instant hit. And today I am incredibly respectful of that. I’m not going to go on stage and refuse to sing something that has opened every door for me, in my career. I believe that since then, I’ve done work that is completely independent of that success and I have my own successes, but that song put me in the mainstream, and I’m not saying that was ever a problem – it wasn’t.

You touched on being a woman in a man’s world. You really were, weren’t you? The rest of the band was men, there were men in the audience, men running the record label. What was that like? Did you just have to get on with it?

It’s all I knew. I didn’t know any other possibility. I would not say I was a feminist back then. I probably didn’t understand feminism, back then. This is the world I knew. But what always kind of baffled me was why was I apart from other women in this experience and it’s taken so long to see this, but I’m not built like other women [laughs] so let’s look 40 years back and you’ve got a really stunningly, beautiful, well-proportioned woman, they’re going to do far better than I did. And it’s taken me all this time to realise how important the physicality is. It’s taken a long time for me to understand that about myself.

But as I said earlier you were driven and ambitious, so that steely determination must have stood you in good stead?

I was very reliable. One of the reasons I still do well today is that I’m incredibly reliable. If people have faith in me, I’ve got their back 150 per cent. Back then, I turned up on time, I knew my lines, I’d written the songs, I was always there – I never let people down. I never disappeared into some kind of altered state. The reliability of an artist is a huge percentage of the industry supporting you. Yes, back then I was determined, but I was also aware that literally everyone was saying that I have no place in this industry.

I had no place in show business, because I was so small and I had a very unattractive walk. It made me even more determined and I just thought “well, fuck you. I’m gonna prove you wrong”. That determination was there probably from the age of about seven, when I was told constantly I would never have a place in show business. There was revenge in my heart! (Laughs).

Looking back to 1980, you had your acting, the music was going well, but were you happy? Or were you still battling childhood/teenage angst?

I did enjoy the moment, very much indeed. But the next challenge was always waiting.


NME 25.6.2021

Toyah Willcox shares new single ‘Levitate’ – and talks “magical” new album ‘Posh Pop’

Her first album of new material since 2008’s ‘In The Court Of The Crimson Queen’, ‘Posh Pop’ was made with Simon Darlow, following on from his work as co-writer and a producer of her aforementioned previous album, and features guitar lines from her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp – with whom Willcox has become known for Sunday Lunch video series, sharing renditions of songs by Nirvana, David Bowie, Metallica, Billy Idol, The Rolling Stones, Judas Priest, The Prodigy, Guns N’ Roses, Alice Cooper and many more.

Of the opening salvo ‘Levitate’, Willcox told NME: “It was the second song Simon and I wrote for the album. I went into the studio with a few chords and started singing a song which was very thrashy and punky and that slowly evolved over two weeks.”

She continued: “‘Levitate’ was something I wanted to connect to people who are educating their children at home in a two-bedroom flat. The idea of the lyric: ‘How’s your day?’ and then suddenly this music comes along and lifts you through the roof and into the sky. It’s about levitating out of a situation to find who you were before lockdown.”

Each song on the 10-track album, which is released on August 27 via Demon Music Group, is accompanied by a video which created and directed by Willcox, and inspired by the success of her weekly viral Toyah & Robert’s Sunday Lunch.

We asked asked her about her new music, and her unlikely internet fame.

Hello Toyah! How did ‘Posh Pop’ come about?

Toyah: “When COVID stopped everything last year, it allowed me to concentrate on writing and recording the next album. We recorded in Simon’s outdoor studio with just him, my husband and I. ‘Posh Pop’ was a magical experience created out of the need and ability to make contact with our fans in a heartfelt way.

Also the terrifying distance between those who run the world and those on the ground inspired my writing. Working with Fripp in the studio, we just handed him the chord charts the day before and said: ‘We want you to come in and improvise and that’s what we’ll use’. It was spontaneous.”

Did any of the anthemic songs you were covering as part of Toyah & Robert’s Sunday Lunch have any influence on the album?

“It hugely influenced the album. I felt very much that what we were writing was going to lift people out of anxiety, help people dance with friends again and connect, and I wanted on many levels to say: we have shared this experience with you.

Is there a song that you feel might help people the most?

“‘Barefoot On Mars’ is having the biggest impact. I had discussions with the record label about whether I could use the line ‘I held you when you died’. In recent years, both Simon and I have both lost parents and we wanted to write about that but in the context of lockdown, where people have not been able to visit relatives in hospital when the NHS was overloaded. It changed grief for the whole world.”

And it’s a hugely personal song about your mother?

“I wanted it to recognise that love is always there, even though sometimes it’s buried. In those last days I had with my mother, I was the only person she allowed near her physically. She never held me once in my life other than when I was baby and she never said she loved me, but at the point of death, she accepted me. We all have experiences like that but it feels taboo to share them – and that taboo became greater during the lockdown.”

Every song on the album is accompanied by a video. You’ve even managed to convince Robert Fripp to take part in a synchronised dance routine for the song ‘Space Dance’… “He’s in all the videos. With ‘Space Dance’, I wanted to hit the late ‘70s with videos from Devo and Kraftwerk which were all about very stilted movements. Fripp and Darlow are the best musicians I know but neither of them can dance! I wanted to do something I found utterly inspirational in the late ‘70s, and have been influenced by the arthouse movies that were coming out of Germany and New York.”

It seems lockdown has been good for Robert Fripp. Would you have imaged years ago that he would ever be dancing in one of your videos?

“He hated being on camera at first, but he was moved profoundly by getting messages saying our films, like us performing Swan Lake, saved their lives. It’s that British thing of laughing in the face of adversity. Slowly, that evolved into us playing rock songs. What’s incredible is Robert has never played that kind of guitar and he took on a student who’s a heavy rocker and the student took on me and taught me guitar. And Fripp now has a Mohican and is studying heavy rock. It’s glorious!”

Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi observed of your ‘Paranoid’ rendition: “I think this lockdown has drove them mental.” Have you had any reaction from other artists you’ve covered?

“When we did ‘”Whole Lotta Love’, Robert Plant – who we know – texted us with: ‘That’s a Whole Lotta Laughs’! Alice Cooper played it [their cover of ‘Poison’] on his band meeting online and they were literally fucking rolling on the floor! I’m such a fan of Alice Cooper, I felt like a naughty child! The loveliest one was Judas Priest who got in touch saying it was the best publicity they’d had in a long time!”

Do you think there’s been a shift in perception of you and your legacy during lockdown? Shirley Manson wrote an open Instagram message to you apologising for mocking you as a teenager when in fact she was a fan who “sucked at Toyah’s teat [but did’] not have the strength of character to admit it.”…

“That made a huge difference. Also, last December, my back catalogue started to be released which made things go stratospheric.” Robert Fripp said this year you were a “cultural influencer from the late ‘70s through to the ‘80s” that he’s seen “airbrushed from history in a way which I continue to find incomprehensible”…

“Well, I think where [Garbage’s] Shirley Manson was great was she pointed out the amount of people that copied me! Around eight years ago, I got a call from somebody who said: ‘You need to know there’s a team that have come over from America linked to Lady Gaga that are looking at everything you’ve done.’

I said: ‘That’s great. If that’s what she wants, she’s welcome. I did it first’. I’m still functioning and incredibly creative. I play sold-out shows, act constantly in award-winning films, I have high-end directors contacting me – like JJ Abrams – regularly. Perception of me is not something I’m at the controls of, but what Robert says is he sees how hard I work and the influence I have.”


NME 5.8.2021

In Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?!, we quiz an artist on their own career to see how much they can remember – and find out if the booze, loud music and/or tour sweeties has knocked the knowledge out of them

1. You starred in Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk film Jubilee. Upon its release, who created a protest T-shirt deeming it “the most boring and therefore disgusting film”?

“Vivienne Westwood!”

CORRECT.

“I got one right! I’m so happy! Derek Jarman, the director, was thrilled by that (Laughs). When we started pre-production, people were behind the film, but then the punk world felt it was going to be exploitative. Derek Jarman was special and had no compromise. He saw talent in everyone and everything. Working with him on Jubilee, I quickly became aware that I was being catapulted from nowhere into the glitterati of this new movement and I immediately knew it was special.”

Ever run into Vivienne Westwood?

“I actually did some modelling for Vivienne. She probably wouldn’t have known it was me, but I did some modelling for TV at her shop [Sex] which was great fun. I got John Lydon through the screen test for Quadrophenia. Franc Roddam, its director, asked me to go over to Johnny Rotten’s apartment, learn two scenes with him, and accompany him to the studio to do the screen test for the role of Jimmy. He was an absolute gentleman and a brilliant actor, but nobody would touch Johnny because they felt he was unpredictable.”

You’ve acted with some big names including Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Oliver…

“Laurence Olivier was quite old when I worked with him [on the 1984 TV movie The Ebony Tower] and not terribly well so we could only shoot with him three hours a day, but he burnt brighter than anyone I’d ever met. He was a rebel and wonderfully naughty. I used to have supper with him in the evenings and was told not to let him drink – and we’d get through six bottles of champagne and he could still keep going! My first professional job was at the National Theatre so to be acting with him in a movie was thrilling.”

2. In a bizarre moment of TV, when you hosted the BBC2 chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning in 1980, what video game did you introduce Steve Strange, Derek Jarman, Christopher Biggins and Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Vivian Stanshall to?

“Well, I can only imagine it was Space Invaders – the only video game I’ve ever played!”

CORRECT.

“I was promoting my [second] album ‘The Blue Meaning’ at the time and I was invited along to host. We rehearsed from 10am and the show didn’t go out until 10pm. By that time, everyone was either exhausted or stoned. Viv Stanshall and Steve Strange definitely weren’t on the planet!”

Steve Strange used to hire the arts commune warehouse, called ‘Mayhem’, you used to live in – where you slept in a coffin – for his parties. What was the most outlandish thing you witnessed there?

“Steve Strange would hire it for the weekends and I’d come back knowing he’d not been to bed for 4 days with a bin liner picking up all the booze cans after 400 people had been there for 76 hours. He was great at tidying! Iggy Pop rehearsed ‘Lust for Life’ there [at Mayhem] with John Cale on production, and John Cale was always coming in saying ‘Don’t tell Iggy I’m here!’ and hiding in my bedroom from him because he secretly wanted to see what he was up to. That building was great.”

3. Which of your album covers ended up with you being arrested?

“‘Sheep Farming in Barnet’”

CORRECT. Your 1979 debut.

“‘Cause we broke into the early warning system [RAF Fylingdales near Whitby]. We drove up from London to North Yorkshire, got through the fence, my face was painted blue and as we were taking the pictures, Land Rovers were appearing in the distance coming to get us. We got the film out because I stuffed it in my pants, as you wouldn’t be strip-searched back then.” Any other memorable brushes with the law?

“All the time! We built the whole of Mayhem out of stolen wood from the morgue opposite us. Every night, we’d scale the wall into the morgue and funeral parlour to take the wood they’d use to build the coffins. Once, I was leaving Mayhem to go to a film set and a policeman said I couldn’t leave as the building was surrounded. They arrested a mercenary from Africa below us who was hiding nuclear warheads. Now we knew this guy – and we really liked him. We didn’t know what he did, but were down the pub with him every other day. He was an arms dealer!”

4. Which two TV shows did you perform a cover of Patti Smith’s ‘Because the Night’ on?

“Through the Keyhole? No, sorry! Stars in Their Eyes and… you’ve got me on the other one! Wait, French and Saunders?”

CORRECT.

“I’d forgotten about that. That was huge fun. I spent most of the time sitting on set gossiping with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.”

5. You made your debut Top of the Pops appearance in 1981 singing ‘It’s A Mystery’. Name any other two acts who were on your episode.

“Adam Ant and… Joe Dolce, who sang ‘Shaddap You Face’?”

CORRECT. You could also have had: The Teardrop Explodes, Headgirl (Motörhead and Girlschool) and Stray Cats.

“That was everything I needed in life because I was the girl that everybody thought would do nothing with her life and suddenly I’m on Top of the Pops – the one programme the whole of the country watched. It was such validation and verification I had a future and was capable of doing something. Even though I knew Adam Ant and had done Jubilee with him, I was still star-struck by the whole event.”

Didn’t you once try to beat Adam Ant up?

“Yes! He formed a band for Jubilee that was needed in a scene called the Maneaters – I was the singer for it, and Adam’s wife, Eve, was the bassist. The problem was, I was too individualistic and I already had the Toyah Band. They said they needed to get a singer who was more feminine and melded in. And there was an altercation but Derek Jarman stood between us holding me at arm’s length laughing his head off! (Laughs) I was a terrible scrapper, but I had to be a scrapper in Birmingham. I had a reputation for sticking up for myself so there weren’t too many fights!”

6. You helped Prince Edward organise 1987’s ill-fated It’s a Royal Knockout. Can you name any three members of your team?

“John Cleese? Kiri Te Kanawa? Sheena Easton or Cliff Richard? No? Tessa Sanderson?”

CORRECT. Among many others, you could have also had actor Christopher Reeve, Nicholas Lyndhurst – aka Rodney from Only Fools and Horses – and swimmer Duncan Goodhew. (Pop stars Sheena Easton and Cliff Richard were on Anne, The Princess Royal’s Team).

"Six months earlier, my friend Prince Edward asked me to be involved in it and I said yes. Jane Seymour, John Travolta and Tom Jones were all there, and the egos were bouncing off the wall. It was great fun but doomed not to work because people want their Princes to be Princes. Princess Diana wasn’t allowed to be on it – she wanted to do it, but Prince Charles said no.”

7. Which musical icon did you play when you toured prisons with a one-woman show in the 1990s?

“Janis Joplin.”

CORRECT.

“That was eye-opening and emotional. The whole reason I was asked to do it was to discourage heroin addiction. There was a sequence where I take a heroin overdose as Janis Joplin and I remember being in HM Prison Lewes and someone stood up and screamed: ‘Don’t do it! Just stop!’. We halted the show and I said ‘Are you OK?’, and he replied: ‘Please don’t do it. I’ve seen too many people do it’."

8. You narrated the children’s TV series Teletubbies. But which pop megastar – and also fellow lockdown slayer – once dressed up as Laa-Laa for Halloween?

“Sophie Ellis-Bextor? I haven’t got a clue!”

WRONG. It’s Taylor Swift.

“I would never have guessed that! Anne Wood, its creator, showed me the Teletubbies pilot – which she’d mortgaged her house for £60,000 to make because it had been dropped by the BBC. She didn’t know how she was going to survive and asked me to do the opening and ending narration – which I did as a favour.

A month later, the BBC lost a children’s show and needed to fill that space within 24 hours. She ended up having to make 366 programmes within three months which shows how life can turn on a pin-head. The only time I’ve ever needed security when filming in public was at the height of Teletubbies because parents would tell their children who I was and we’d get mobbed!”

Any chance of you and husband Robert Fripp covering Taylor Swift on your beloved Sunday Lunch YouTube series?

“That would be good! Only if we get Robert in a Teletubbies suit!”

9. In the 1986 Smash Hits Annual, which musician did you describe as “Not my type at all. A great songwriter but too thin for me. I like big muscley hunks” – and he said of you: “Stick to acting”?

“Oh my God! (Laughs) I can’t think of anyone I would have thought that of! Was it Julian Cope?”

WRONG. It was Paul Weller. For a feature called ‘Excuse Me, My Mate Fancies You!’ where pop stars assessed whether they’d go out with each other, including Weller, and ABC’s Martin Fry (who said of you: ‘Looks like she has a heart of gold but she’s no Aretha Franklin.’)

“(Laughs) That’s funny! The press at that time used to try and make enemies of artists and whenever you’d run into each other, there would be huge apologies.”

10. Who said of your Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch YouTube series: “I think the lockdown has drove them mental”?

“[Black Sabbath guitarist] Tommy Iommi.”

CORRECT. In response to your typically bonkers and surreal cover of his band Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’

“(Laughs) He’s our neighbour! We’ve got quite a lot of people around here – like Robert Plant – so we get to talk to them about it.”

Any chance of an album of your lockdown covers?

“We’ve been asked to. We’re developing Toyah and Robert into a bigger brand. The aim is to make our site more like a TV station. We’ve loved making the content and we’re going to take it a lot further. There will be a product line, but also it’s going to start to run like Toyah and Robert TV.

It’s going to become educational in a very unique way. There’s going to be postings of me learning, Robert teaching, but it’s not going to be what you expect. As for recording Sunday Lunches, we’re going to do a Toyah and Robert Christmas special which will be an hour-long.”

The verdict: 8/10

“I’m very impressed with myself! I was slightly terrified of doing this and I’m absolutely amazed at that score.


READER'S DIGEST 19.8.2021

Toyah Willcox is an English musician, actress and TV presenter. From fronting a band to releasing solo music, there is little that she hasn't done across a four-decade career

My childhood was definitely privileged. We had hot water, heating, food, we had our own home, and I went to a private school.

Having a limp, dyslexia and a lisp. I wasn't even aware of it. I was having a perfectly happy childhood until people pointed out that I had a physical difference to everyone else in the room. Then, when I was sitting my 11-plus people realised that I was not on the same page as everyone else because of dyslexia. Alan Sugar, Richard Branson—you could name a thousand people who have exactly the same experience as me and we're doing perfectly well. I have such a wonderful life. I have overcome so much.

I wouldn't say that that specifically made me tougher. What made me tougher was being the only woman in the music industry. My way of learning, my way of working, means that I have to just be a little bit ahead of everyone else. And I think any woman in acting or music would say, "I feel the same too." You never arrive.

The name becoming famous. Everywhere I've had success, from Australia to Africa right through to LA, there are now Toyahs. You kind of permeate the culture. The Toyah [Battersby] character in Coronation Street was a really lovely character and they had my blessing for that.

The Battersbys being laughable "chavs". I don't judge people like that. No matter what money they have in the bank, people just crave individuality and for so me people it's through names. These were good, honourable, salt-of-the-earth people.

I was driven to be an actress. That's what I felt I was supposed to be doing. The way an artist picks up a paintbrush and feels at home, I wanted to act and sing. Both, I was very, very passionate about.

The moment I left home, I became the Toyah who I felt I should be. I had such a closeted education that was exclusively female that when I went out into the world, I didn't know the things I needed to know. I was never taught how to get an electricity account, or phone account or how to buy a train ticket.

I found myself at the age of eighteen as the youngest member of the National Theatre. I remember [actors] Brenda Blethyn, Kate Nelligan, Warren Clarke all helping me find my feet in London. And when I found myself with other artists, who were very free thinking, very bohemian, very forward thinking, I found myself being an observer.

Being talked down from a bridge by a policeman suspecting a suicide bid. I'm often contacted by people who are so low they don't know what to do. I can talk them back. I totally realise as a 63-year-old woman that time is a gift and even when events are challenging, they are a gift to help us see the opportunity that they're presenting. I have no need to look back to that girl on the bridge because I have forty years of experience.

Parallel success as an actor and singer. I got spotted on the streets of Birmingham because I had dyed hair—I was a hair model—and there was two directors called the Bicat brothers who were looking for an exceptional young girl for a half-hour play on BBC Two called Glitter.

There was a very clear division between actors who did voiceovers, actors who did TV and actors who did stage. The actors that did stage were considered royalty. I just couldn't see the sense of that. I did voiceovers, I did TV, I did absolutely everything. And I had a band as well.

The acting just happened to take off before my band. I formed the band immediately I moved to London because the National Theatre is one of those creative hubs where you can just find anyone you need for a creative project.

Successively obtaining parts in film Quadrophenia and TV series Quatermass and being signed to a record label. It's what I expected. I really believe in myself and back then I believed in myself even more. Now, I think that's unrealistic. I had an extraordinary run of luck but I deserved it—that was my attitude.

1980 album The Blue Meaning. There was a revolution at the time with synthesisers and people were experimenting with sound. Blue Meaning doesn't stand out as punk or Birmingham rock – I'm a Birmingham girl – because we were genuinely fighting for something unique.

Many critics have picked up on this was the embryonic beginnings of the Gothic movement. It's not been available for forty years. People can get hold of it again. This has been a driving force for me: to get this music back where it deserves to be in the historical place it belongs within music. There's no resting on laurels till I've done that.

Being an unusually flamboyant pop star. My really big commercial hits started about March 1981 and it was so evident that I was like no other artist who'd been before. I was completely attached to imagery. This wasn't linked with fashion. The hair and images that we created at that time could not be copied at home.

We had to use specialist hairsprays that set everything solid, the makeup wasn't available on the high street, so what I was creating was unique. Also, it was slightly third gender in that I wasn't a glamour model, I wasn't exposing my body. It was otherworldly. Women just weren't behaving like that at that time.

Marrying Robert Fripp of King Crimson. When we first met, our careers were culturally very wide apart. He's the creator of prog rock and I was a kind of new wave pop-rock artist. I would be photographed, he would walk away from the photographer.

We were just complete opposites. Apparently, when he met me three years earlier, he said to his friends, "I think I've met my wife." We didn't do the vows of ownership. We had

those taken out. I never, ever had any urge to have children. The most extraordinary thing about lockdown for us, it's the longest we've ever had together uninterrupted. We've absolutely loved being together. We've become incredibly creative. We've created a worldwide audience through Toyah TV.

Recording new album Posh Pop while simultaneously overseeing Blue Meaning re-release. My lockdown was exceptional in that I made the album. I made and directed ten videos in lockdown. It was very expensive. We had nurses come to the house to test us. The person on Blue Meaning was still having to learn a lot about the world, was thrown into this chaotic world of success.

It was an extraordinary time. I look on myself with complete admiration for the strength I had at that time. [On] Posh Pop, I'm a completely different human being. I have the wisdom of 40 years of writing, acting, creative experience. I'm much, much more grounded. The only connection I can feel between me now and the girl that did Blue Meaning is respect and admiration. It's like looking on a daughter.


RETRO POP MAGAZINE 1.9.2021

Toyah on dyslexia breakthrough: ‘Learning an instrument broadened and deepened my communicative skills’ According to the singer, music lessons "rewired" her brain and helped "broaden and deepen" her communicative skills.

Learning to play guitar and keyboards led to a huge breakthrough in Toyah’s lifelong struggle with dyslexia.

The Summer of Love hitmaker was diagnosed with the learning difficulty at a young age, which can cause problems with reading, writing and spelling.

Speaking exclusively with Retro Pop ahead of the release of her latest album ‘Posh Pop’, Toyah reflects on the profound impact lockdown had on her, both personally and professionally, and reveals lessons in piano and guitar have enhanced her life in numerous ways.

“I can now play guitar, I can now play keyboards, and it means that my communicative skills are much broader and much deeper,” she explains. “It all happened in lockdown. We have a neighbour who has the ability to teach severely dyslexic people. He came in and he said, ‘I’m going to be able to teach you this, you’re going to be playing a song within a week.’

“He studied how I physically moved and he realised how I was wired. And he just broke that boundary. He broke the boundary and taught me to play – no one had ever been able to do that. “He realised that, because of the way I’m physically made, the way I move was how my brain was telling me to move, so he broke that system, he broke it. So the brain had to think another way.

“This is probably because the guy has an army past – he just would not let the old Toyah function physically. He broke that rule from my brain to my body. And I can suddenly see letters, I can do things.” Admitting that from a young age she was “treated as someone who couldn’t read,” Toyah insists: “The problem with dyslexia and dyspraxia is not in the brain alone, it’s in how the brain tells the body to function.

“This is where that teacher went in and he stopped the brain misfiring the information to my hand. He saw that immediately, he saw the relationship between my brain and my hands needed to be rebuilt.” And while she jokes her husband, Kim Crimson’s Robert Fripp “ can’t believe it” and “genuinely thinks I’m unteachable,” Toyah’s efforts pay off on her new 10-track album ‘Posh Pop’, featuring The Bride Will Return, written in the wake of the August 2020 Beirut explosion.

“This news story arrived about a bomb in Beirut in a warehouse. And there was a very beautiful, famous model doing a shoot as a bride. “The moment was caught as the bomb went off. She’s in the wedding dress, she’s startled, and it destroyed me to see that, because Beirut is so cosmopolitan, so beautiful…

“I ran upstairs to my keyboards, I sat down, and I started the first two verses. Went into the studio next day and played them to Simon (Darlow, co-writer and producer) and, when I turned and looked at him, he was in tears. “So where there’s a will, there’s a way.”


FINANCIAL TIMES 21.11.2021

How I Spend It: Toyah Willcox on rocks, hag stones and meteorites

The musician reveals what lies behind her lifelong fascination with crystals

I collect crystals, and I’m not talking about crystals you keep in your pocket. These are museum-quality collectors’ pieces. My fascination is that these are timeless things. They have been there since the Big Bang. All around the house we have crystals, along the skirting boards, in cupboards, in the cutlery drawers. My computer sits on a piece of rose quartz that is at least 10kg in weight. It’s the size of a Bible you’d see in a church.

I remember clearly the first stone that meant something to me. I was about seven years old. I was on a sandbank on the River Avon and picked up a pebble with a hole in it. My father said it was a “hag stone”, one with a naturally formed hole in it. I could not put it down. I was instantly in love with it, the smoothness of it, the history of it, what it’s been through, what it’s survived, that it’s outlived all of us and will outlive all of us.

I’ve had this particular hag stone since I was seven – I’m now 63, and it’s been a point of conversation with virtually everyone I’ve known. A lot of musicians feel the same way about stones; we collect pebbles and send them to each other.

The second stone I felt a real connection with was a cut citrine that my mother was about to throw away. I was about 13. It fell out of the ring and she said, “Oh, it’s worth nothing.” And I just dived into the dustbin and got it. I still have that. It’s worth about £30, but it’s a citrine, which brings good fortune and wealth. I didn’t know this back then, but I had an instant bond with that stone. It had been in a ring my mother had had since childhood; it contained her whole history.

I started really collecting crystals in their natural form in 2003. I would get them from a shop on Charing Cross Road called Watkins Books, where young monks from Tibet would travel to with these amazing stones. At the time I was trying to buy a fire agate, which is very rare and thought to tune you creatively; it costs thousands of pounds so you can only get tiny pieces.

I went into Watkins and they showed me all these stones this monk had brought in that week and I was just dribbling: there was moonstone, aquamarine, amethyst, all in their natural state; it was just mind-boggling. That was it. I was sold. I’ve been a collector ever since.

It’s important to me to know the provenance of my pieces. The meteorites mainly come from the Arizona desert. Phenomenally – I have no idea why – meteorites tend to fall in unpopulated places. I have a crystal from a meteorite that landed north-east of Vladivostok in Russia on 12 February 1947.

Another one was found in north Africa, picked up by Berber Arabs and sold on. It’s a chondrite stony meteorite, so it’s a light colour, which is very unusual. Chondrite is one of the oldest materials in the solar system, thought to be about 4.6 billion years old. It contains some of the nearly 100 different naturally occurring elements, including those that are quite rare on Earth, such as iridium and niobium.

I find meteors astonishing. Where I live, which is near Worcestershire, I see shooting stars. About 17 years ago I just happened to look out the window at 11pm and saw this really huge burning orb. I could almost see the flames on it coming through the sky. I thought, “Bloody hell, that’s going to wipe us out.”

They are a proof that out there is this vast expanse and, for me, at my age, it’s not nothingness. It’s something that is incredibly connected. So these meteorites are full of potential. They’re what’s put us here. They’re what created the moon. They’ve created our universe. They’ve created us. I find that wildly exciting 

2022

CLOSE UP CULTURE Toyah Willcox – Live Music Review 22.1.2022

IT’S a mystery. It really is. How can a 63-year-old dressed to kill in a glittery gold dress bounce around a stage like a manic teenager and still look divine in the process?

It’s exactly what Toyah Willcox did on Friday night (January 21) as she shook a rather polite and conservative  Wokingham audience out of their torpor and (eventually) onto their feet. Thrillingly so. Toyah was born to perform and age ain’t going to get in the way. Whatever she takes, I want.

It’s A Mystery was a massive hit for  Toyah in 1981 and in introducing it at the impressive Whitty Theatre (Lucklow House School) she admitted it changed her life. A song she was reluctant to take on board when she was first approached to sing it because of her connection with the punk scene, but one which received immediate widespread approval from her supporters.

Toyah, a pocket dynamo on stage,  is as much a raconteur as a singer – she’s done some mean acting in her time, starring with Katharine Hepburn in the 1979 film The Corn Is Green.  And her show is all the better for the fun insight she gives on an artistic career spanning more than 40 years – and a long-standing marriage to King Crimson founder Robert Fripp that goes back to 1986. If you read her latest blog on her website (Toyahwillcox.com) you can tell straightaway that they remain very much in love.

At various times. Toyah has flirted with most genres of music: punk, pop and music inspired by the Mods – she was Monkey in Quadrophenia. The result is an eclectic show musically. All the hits that made her a pop sensation in the 1980s get an airing – Thunder In The Mountains, I Want To Be Free and the night’s opener Echo Beach. And of course It’s A Mystery.

But the night was not just a nostalgic dip into the past. Toyah’s latest album, Posh Pop, is proof that Toyah wants to continue pushing boundaries. And she played a number of songs from the 2021 album that showed her music is as compelling as it was 40 years ago.

Zoom Zoom (a song about our obsession, fuelled by past lockdowns, for zooming), Summer Of Love and Space Dance (both immediately catchy tunes),  Levitate, Rhythm In My House and Take Me Home (the night’s encore) were all enthusiastically received.

With Dance In The Hurricane (from In The Court Of The Crimson Queen) tugging at the emotions – a song about living with grief – and a quirky Neon Womb (1980) being unexpected  highlights,  this was a night when Toyah triumphed.

It’s a shame the audience was not a little younger because Toyah’s new music is as relevant today as It’s A Mystery was 41 years ago.

The Posh Pop Tour runs through until the end of March.  If you want proof that the 60s are now the new 40s – while  listening to some brilliant music – the whirling dervish that  is Toyah will not let you down.

 

DAILY MAIL 29.1.2022

Now here's a super trouper: Toyah's voice is glowing with energy as she charms audiences with her snappy and uplifting Posh Pop.The 1980s are having a moment. As several of today’s young stars revive the sound of synth-pop, a decade that was once derided is beginning to resemble a golden age.

Its music scene was a flourishing ecosystem, full of distinctive creatures from Sade to the late lamented Meat Loaf. Every week on Top Of The Pops they brought us all together to gawp or giggle at them.

Younger readers may not believe this, but we even had a serious prime minister. One of the most 1980s things about the 1980s was the annual vote for the Most Fanciable Human Beings, as chosen by readers of Smash Hits. In December 1981 the male winner was Adam Ant. The female one, seeing off Kim Wilde and Debbie Harry, was Toyah Willcox. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I never expected that.’

Forty years on, she takes the stage in the unlikely setting of a Berkshire boarding school. The Whitty Theatre
at Luckley House School is small but perfectly formed, and so, at 63, is Toyah. Looking around at the audience, I find myself wondering if The Oldie magazine has a readers’ poll.

As a singer, actress and TV presenter, Toyah is a super trouper: you could get exhausted just from reading her Wikipedia page. Undaunted by lockdown, she formed a bubble at home in Worcestershire with her husband Robert Fripp, the legendary King Crimson guitarist, and her co-writer Simon Darlow.

The resulting album, Posh Pop, put Toyah back in the Top 30 for the first time since 1984. On the side, she entertained herself and her fans with Toyah & Robert’s Sunday Lunch, a series of YouTube videos. Each one is a jokey cover version of a classic, from The Who’s My Generation to The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks.

Fripp wears a waistcoat and a Mohican, while Toyah wears just enough to be allowed on YouTube. Her live show is demure by comparison. In a sparkly dress with a full skirt, she could be going to an old friend’s 60th birthday party.

Backed by a classy four-piece band, she plays most of Posh Pop and makes it work because the tracks, while not particularly posh, are definitely pop – snappy and uplifting. On both the new material and old favourites such as It’s A Mystery, Toyah’s voice glows with energy.

Between songs she tells stories about fronting the Whistle Test Christmas special or making a film with Laurence Olivier. At times she comes close to reading out the Wikipedia page herself. But she gets away with this too because she’s so clearly a grafter with a good sense of humour. The audience, all 176 of them,
go out into the night feeling more alive than when they came in.


GOING TO BE ME: The Life Of A Toyah Super Fan 3.2.2022

It is 1981. I am seeing Toyah play live. For the first time I am actually in the same room as her, albeit a very large room. There she is, over there. I can see her with my eyes.

It is 1991. I am putting together the latest issue of the Toyah Fan Club magazine Tellurian, a cut and paste concoction of photocopied articles as well as a handwritten letter to the fans from Toyah herself. I am typing up the lyrics for her new album Ophelia’s Shadow to include in it; once finished I’ll then take it to a print shop in Store Street WC1 to get a few hundred copies run off.

It is 2001. I am in a recording studio in Nuneaton where Toyah is recording guest vocals on a track by the band Chester with whom I currently play bass. The track will eventually be put out under the band name Family of Noise.

It is 2011. I am putting the finishing touches to the manuscript for my memoir I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan which grew out of a series of blog posts I’d written about my experiences some thirty years previously. I am about to self-publish this as both a paperback and an ebook.

It is 2021. I am writing this blog entry about Toyah and the impression she’s made on my life over the past 40 plus years.

I’ve often heard it said that every cell in the human body is replaced in a seven year cycle which means that none of the versions of me at the ten year intervals above are the same person at all. And yet there is a continuity of experience there, and for the purposes of this piece there is one aspect in particular that has endured – the impression Toyah Willcox made on me which crystallised who I now am and have been for decades now, from the acne-faced impressionable teenager forty years ago to an adult now nearing pensionable age.

I didn’t really think about the experience in depth at the time but it’s interesting to realise now that Toyah was simultaneously both my first teenage crush and my role model. As time went on it was the latter aspect that became the significant one that shaped who I went on to become.

One of the things about her that interested me in the first place was the way that she seemed to be interested in many of the same strange and otherworldly things that I was – from the science fiction songs about racing through space and lost cities of Mars to the mysterious and uncanny trappings of seventies hauntology familiar to any child who’d collected paperbacks of Aden Chambers’s ghost stories or the Unexplained magazine with free Zener cards to test your own ESP…

Yes, I thought, this was clearly a person who was on the same wavelength as me and as such I was open to any other ideas she came out with either within or alongside her captivating music. The way her make-up range was marketed at “girls and boys” was an important early realisation for me and the stunning series of out there looks she fostered helped me realise that I too could create my own persona, that I could appear however I wanted and use that image to communicate how I really felt inside. 

I didn’t realise the full significance of this until much later when I was diagnosed with autism as a middle aged adult. Without realising it, the narratives and imagery Toyah expressed through her work helped me make sense of the world. In retrospect it all falls into place.

Well, of course I wanted to meet her.

As detailed in I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan I managed this by turning up at TV studios as well as both before and after gigs. I wasn’t alone either; a number of like minded young people clearly felt the same way I did and I got to know some of them by face and eventually by name.

Toyah herself got to know the more persistent of us as well. She always made time for the fans and – even though I had nothing to compare this to – I somehow knew it was out of the ordinary. She cared far more than most. Many of us used to write to her and she used to write back. I can still remember the thrill of an envelope coming through the front door and it being in that handwriting, a highly distinctive longhand instantly familiar to me even to this day.

Toyah may have been the focus, but during this time I was also getting into music in general. Seeking out the strange and unusual that resonated with me, attracted to the musical genres of alternative and indie and drawn into the then still relatively young goth subculture. 

Some people felt that because of her now commercial success Toyah was too mainstream for them but I always kept the faith — she had been the person who’d opened the gates into these strange new worlds for me and I wasn’t going to turn my back on her now, no way.

Some were concerned about being considered what they called credible, but I was happy to remain incredible, despite the attitude of some of the snobbier music fans I encountered now I was at university – some of the wannabe Peels who hosted shows before or after me on the student radio station. Toyah was a big part of who I was and I wasn’t going to deny it and besides, there was a lot more depth and imagination to her work than many realised. Problem was they couldn’t see past the surface – their surface.

Even though fashion and fad often plays a big part in the music industry, the core significance — what’s really important — is how the music makes you feel and how it speaks to your inner self. My inner self already had a lot of Toyah in it, so naturally most of her music was always going to feel right to me. No matter how many serious raincoat-clad young men with floppy fringes looked down their noses at me.

Now more at large in the world, the new more flamboyant me hitchhiked to see bands and ended up running the lighting rig and selling merchandise for some of them. I even put together fanzines and the like. Despite its reputation, the mid-eighties was a very exciting time in music if you knew where to look, there was a lot more going on in the alternative scene than just The Smiths. And throughout this time a core group of us stayed connected with Toyah, making an effort to see her every so often and fill her in on what we’d been up to.

Then one day, just after I’d left university, I received another letter addressed in that familiar hand. Toyah asked me to run her fan club. This was in many ways a dream come true.

This was of course where the memoir I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan ended. For a start I wasn’t a teenager any more and while I was still a fan in many senses of the word it was different now. I was able to contribute and give something back to someone who’d given so much to me and been so instrumental in shaping my soul. I used my encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of her career and autistic attention to detail to put all my energy into this.

To be honest I sometimes slipped up and the newsletters didn’t come out as frequently as they should but after a couple of years I got into my stride and found my groove – after a flirtation with a glossier booklet I discovered that the whole thing just worked better in a traditional fanzine format, A4 pages printed both sides and stapled at the corner. That was the Toyah fan club I’d first got to know in the early eighties and it was the format in which I carried it forward into the next decade.

What was even better was when Toyah started touring frequently again in the early nineties.

With a new young band and a stripped back to the basics sound, this tour felt like it would go on for ever. As the fan club person I was along for the ride selling merchandise – and furthermore merchandise I’d designed. 

Toyah aways liked to encourage creativity and it still gives me a frisson of pleasure to this day when I see someone wearing one of those t-shirts (a little threadbare after nearly thirty years) at one of her present day gigs. I meant that in some way I’d played a small part in this captivating creative story.

One tradition that started around this time was that I’d send Toyah novels that I’d recently enjoyed and which as a voracious reader she devoured. I was always very happy to hear when she’d been particularly taken by a specific book and that it had captured her imagination – that same imagination which had inspired me so much over the years.

Every so often over the years I’d get people asking me when I was going to grow out of all this, when I was going to stop going to gigs, dying my hair and dressing in an unconventional manner.

In other words when I was going to stop being me.

One of the more important things my association with Toyah had taught me was to embrace who I really was, a process which continues to this day. How I appear outwardly isn’t necessarily the central component of this – as the old saying goes it’s what’s inside that counts – but as I mentioned earlier, my outward appearance is the expression of my inner self so it’s no surprise that I became unhappy when attempting to reverse engineer this in a doomed attempt to fit into societal norms. I was happiest when I learned to ignore the social pressure. It was OK for me to carry on being me, there was nothing wrong with it.

Everything changes and after a while I even started playing in bands myself. Quite apart from the Chester collaboration with Toyah mentioned above, the band I was in most recently – Das Flüff – supported Toyah on a number of occasions during some of her tours during the twenty teens. 

It was a big thrill when – during the first time this happened – I happened to glance over to the wings mid song and saw her standing there watching us play. Another time I staggered offstage at the end of the set and she was waiting to tell us how much she’d enjoyed our set

The pandemic has taken us all by surprise, an unexpected finger slapped down on the pause button of life. However, Toyah has taken the opportunity to reach out to the world online, embracing diversity and expanding her digital horizons. This was a big help to me – I live alone so Toyah at Home on Saturday morning has been a lifesaver during lockdown. Not only is there someone I can relate to out there making contact, but it’s Toyah herself.

As significant to me now as she has ever been.

Chris Limb is a writer and designer based in Brighton, UK. 

CORPORATION, SHEFFIELD 6.2.2022 GIG REVIEW

Set List: Echo Beach (Marth & The Muffins)/Thunder In The Mountains/Dance In The Hurricane/Neon Womb/Levitate/Obselete/Summer Of Love/Ieya/It's A Mystery/Good Morning Universe/Space Dance/Brave New World/Rebel Run/Sensational/I Want To be Free/Take Me Home.

Well its been 10 years since this legendary lady embarked onto this stage but she's back again in her wondrous glory. A full band in tow but what is strange is the fact that there is no drum kit to be seen but instead a pair of bongos. The drum sounds instead come from the keyboards I guess – well it's less to hug around right?

The band line-up for the tour is Manolo Polidario & Chris Wong (Both on Guitar), Chloe Du Pre (Keys) and Mike Nichols (Bass) who are truly solid with the majority of them only being toddlers or not even born when the likes of 'It's A Mystery' was bothering the UK charts and beyond! Mrs. Fripp even said that Manolo wasn't even a sperm at the time – yep she tells it like it is!

Toyah is full of warm, loving, polite, genuine grace as well as plenty of banter & stories filled with biographic intrigue and humour in-between songs. She'd actually be good doing her own 'Spoken |Word' Tour too – hey there's a thought...

Anyway, as you may or may not know the new album in came out out on 27th August 2021, entitled 'Posh Pop' that she wrote during the lockdown with Robert Fripp taking care of most of the instruments and several songs are knocked out from it tonight.

Early on she apologised for being overdressed! Well if you have seen any of her and Robert's 'Sunday Lunch' clips you'll know where I am coming from, where they get all dressed up with Toyah herself often performing songs stood on the kitchen table – brilliant!

Well sadly, there's no 'Enter Sandman' or 'Too Drunk To Funk' in the set but we do get a fantastic take of 'Echo Beach' to make up for it which seems far more fitting to be honest. In fact, it's not often an artist starts a set with someone else's song – though I've seen a small handful do it. Saying this, she did feature on 2015's 'Desire' album!

We find out that Sheffield means a lot to her because one of her early songs of her career which was very unlike her previous material, was thought to be very much a sink or swim moment. But when she performed it in this very city, the people here went went ballistic for it and helped it fly up the charts. I forget which number it was – my bad!

Toyah thanked a lady at the front for being there at every one of her 'Proud's Cabaret All-Stars' Shows last November – a type of thing not embarked on before by her personally. Toyah held onto her hand and said how much confidence she had given her for being there in the audience and also mentioned her lovely wife too. It was done with genuine love and passion and you knew that she totally meant every single word.

Some of her old albums are now being re-released on vinyl where she joked that she got her order in for 'Anthem' at the cutting plants before lockdown since you have to put them in way in advance. Furtherly saying, she is not Adele and cannot get a few million done at once but a few thousand and that we should look out for releases soon.. in fact, 'Toyah, Toyah, Toyah' is already coming out via Cherry Red... here's to the others on their way in future months!

Plenty of songs stood out in the set for example hits like the fast catchy, almost operatic at times 'Thunder In The Mountains'; the hot off the desk, blasting rocker 'Space Dance' with its Bowie-feel; the beautiful poppy 'Good Morning Universe' and newer material which came about her reading about levitation and influenced the song 'Levitate' while the pandemic was on. It's one hell of a number that at times reminds me of Hawkwind for some reason or another.

Then what about the old gem that is 'Ieya' – with its Who lyric like moments and Ultravox groove to it. A cut that came around the time when Toyah had been in the film Quadrophenia alongside Sting. Talking of 'Quad', she said it was a very clever film because it made out that it only happened in Brighton but in fact the Mods-Vs-Rockers situation took place all over the UK.

And how can I fail to mention the absolute milestone both in studio and live setting that is the riveting in-your-face 'I Want To Be Free' that she fully engages everyone with. New number 'Take Me Home' is an anthemic epic and perfect live closer which I can see stopping in her set for many years to come. It was placed where the encore song usually goes which made a change from the typical walk-off, when most acts come back on anyway.

It's incredible to think that this UK multi-talented Icon is now 63 since she looks so, so good. You'd never think she was that age while watching her performance.

10/10

By Glenn Milligan 

BEST MAGAZINE 8.2.2022

Toyah’s Potty-Mouthed Ghost!

Singer Toyah Willcox talks sweary spirits, sage and loving being scared, as she appears on Celebrity Help! My House Is Haunted…

Fans of creepy TV shows will be loving the return of Help! My House Is Haunted – its spin-off show hunts down unwanted spirits haunting the stunning homes of UK celebrities.

Ordained exorcist Ian Lawman, ghost-hunter/investigator Barri Ghai and paranormal researcher and historian Jayne Harris return to tackle their most notable cases to date and exorcise the haunted properties of some famous faces – as they enter the homes of among others, Alex Best, reality star Charlotte Crosby and musician Toyah Willcox.

Here, the 63-year-old singer from King’s Heath, Birmingham – famed for hits like It’s A Mystery and Thunder In The Mountains – tells us about life in her haunted Midlands home with her musician hubby, Robert Fripp.

“Our last house was so haunted we had to leave”

Toyah, what made you want to do this? 

It’s as far from making music as you could imagine… My house is very old and one of the most extraordinary things about it is that my husband and I only went to view it to be nosy – but as we walked through the door, I burst into tears, We both knew immediately it was meant to be our home. It was as if the house had invited us to live there. I’ve always experienced haunted properties because I’ve constantly lived in old places – but this house, for me, has just been glorious.

What surprised you the most about this experience?

I’m very proud that my house has friendly feeling. My guests see something all the time! I always say, ‘It’s friendly, don’t worry, it’s just proof of life after death.’ But when the team told me there was something here meaning harm, that threw me. It was as if it only wanted me in this house, not outsiders. I’ve never felt compromised in any way in this house, but the team started getting attacked! What happened?
 
Barry, one of the crew, got strangled by one of the spirits – and they think it’s because I wasn’t there! That made the hair on my arms stand up. But I’m afraid I loved every minute. I kind of enjoyed the team being scared too, because it was really reaffirming for experiences we’ve had elsewhere. Our last house was so haunted that we had to move – it shows you’re not alone in this.

Has all this made you want to explore paranormal activity more? 

It’s made me very aware of history. I live in an abbey town, where parts of the Battle Of Worcester were fought during the English Civil War. So over the river where I live, people died in battle. Out of respect, I would want to know more about it. A deserter spirit came forward in my home, who was running away from that battle. If you tuned in and know the history of a place, you have a sympathetic leaning towards whatever spirit may still be there.

Have you always believed in the supernatural?

Yes, I think I have. And I firmly believe that we lead such busy lives we only see the obvious, you know? I think there’s a lot that goes on around us that we would never notice, because it’s so subtle. 

GIG REVIEW: Toyah at Haslemere Hall, 10.2.2022

Toyah treated us to a superb career-spanning show last night at Haslemere Hall in deepest rural Surrey, surely one of the poshest places that I've ever seen a gig and definitely a very apt venue to host a date on the "Posh Pop" album tour. Even Toyah remarked on how posh the area was, which, given the size and grandeur of Toyah & Robert Fripp's home was really saying something. 

Actually, joking aside, it was refreshing to see a show in a real community theatre, staffed by lovely friendly locals with no over-the-top security or regulations and everyone was extremely helpful.

Certainly a bit different from when I saw Toyah for the very first time back in 1981 at the Hammersmith Odeon. So, it was great to see Toyah perform in such an intimate environment and it really suited the Electro-Acoustic line-up which featured Nat Martin on guitars, Chloe Dupree on keyboards, Mike Nichols on bass and Jamie Dupree on guitars and all were superb musicians, really doing justice to the songs. 

I loved the new arrangements, they all worked really well and in my opinion "Brave New World" even beat the original. It was nice to hear something different for a change rather than note by note reproductions of songs that we pretty much know by heart anyway. 

They opened with a version of Martha & The Muffins "Echo Beach" and then a few songs into the set, Toyah encouraged the audience to get up from their seats, go to the front and dance and before "It's A Mystery" she even suggested we might want to get our cameras out and start videoing. 

Toyah was on fine form both vocally and with her between song chat which covered many diverse topics such as teaching Robert Fripp to do the Twist (unsuccessfully apparently...) and upsetting legendary movie director George Cukor with her red hair. She name-checks her musical collaborators Joel Bogen and Simon Darlow and chats about working with Katharine Hepburn and performing as a female wrestler in "Trafford Tanzi".

She mentions the support she received from DJ's such as Mike Read and Janice Long and of how she escaped the attentions of Jimmy Saville during Top Of The Pops. Along the way we even learn about the financial benefits of licencing your music to Weight Watchers. Of course she talks about the terrible effects of the pandemic but lightens the mood somewhat with how she came to master Zoom meetings. 

 Toyah is not only in good humour but also full of a positive and uplifting attitude and I really liked her take on how the all-inclusive attitude of the early Punk movement allowed female musicians in particular to be able to start bands and make a career out of music. She also introduces each song with a little anecdote or nugget of background information which goes down well with us music nerds.

And what a great selection of songs it was...all the hits such as "Thunder In The Mountains", "Good Morning Universe" and "I Want To Be Free" and the oldies like "Neon Womb", "Ieya" and "Danced" are complimented by a selection from the excellent new album "Posh Pop" including "Zoom Zoom", "Summer of Love", "Levitate", "Rhythm In My House" and a wonderfully moving "Take Me Home" to close the show. 

The only negative of a thoroughly entertaining night was the complete absence of merchandise which was a bit strange. However, it saved me some money to put towards the pre-order of the deluxe re-issue of "Toyah! Toyah! Toyah!" so I can't really complain. For details on forthcoming "Posh Pop" tour dates or for general information then please check out the official Toyah web-site here. 

I'd also like to recommend the excellent "Dreamscape" fanzine which is a must-have for all Toyah fans.

AUTUMN VOICES 14.2.2022

Toyah Willcox should really need no introduction to you all – she’s a prodigiously talented singer, composer, writer and actress, as well as the co-creator and host of the hugely entertaining Sunday Lunch videos and Agony Aunts podcast with her husband, Robert Fripp.

Tell us 4 important facts about yourself:

I am still a charting recording artist today at 63 years old
I’ve been vegetarian since lockdown and have no regrets
I work hard to be able to afford solitude, ironically considering the last couple of years, and I only write music in silence.
I’m aiming to be a conceptual artist within the next two years.

What is your favourite age that you’ve been so far in life, and why?

I live in the now – the past becomes the barometer of how we expect the present. I don’t reflect on any age; life is a constant journey forwards.

Who is your favourite fictional character or famous person over 60?

Gandalf from Lord of the Rings and Will Ferrell the actor (Autumn Voices think he is in his 50s, but he’s a great choice!)

You are alone in your house (no pets). You have three minutes to get out before the house collapses and burns to the ground. What one possession would you grab and take with you?

My password list! I can’t prove anything without it.

What’s your favourite creative pastime?

Making art and walking and writing music. Tell us something about yourself that’s surprising or unexpected.

I have a hearing condition called Hyperacusis, which is hearing oversensitivity. It’s not great when you work with drummers. I can hear people speaking from about 50 to 100 yards away. I can even hear mice moving under the floorboards two floors away. One day I hope to turn it to my advantage!

This is a Happy Valentine’s Day from Autumn Voices, and we hope you’re inspired to be Sexy Over Sixty! Here’s Toyah and Robert strutting their stuff in their latest Sunday Lunch. 

 

Read all HELP! MY HOUSE IS HAUNTED 18.2.2022 Press HERE

GIG REVIW BRIGHTON AND HOVE NEWS 14.3.2022

Sensational Toyah brings her ‘Posh Pop Tour’ to East Sussex

The music scene in Hastings has steadily been getting back on its feet this year and is starting to thrive once again. Tonight’s show at St Mary In The Castle is a sure sign of a return to normality though you could hardly describe Toyah as ‘normal’.

My first encounter with Toyah may have been as a 16 year old hearing ‘Sheep Farming In Barnet’ and being most intrigued by her, or it could have been watching her playing ‘Monkey’ in ‘Quadrophenia’ around the same time, but whichever I was hooked. I got around to seeing her in the flesh for my one and only time at Drury Lane Theatre Royal on Christmas Eve, 1981, which was actually broadcast on BBC2 as an ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ special. 

I say seeing her in the flesh but my main recollection of that night is being stuck in the balcony about as far away as you could get. I then lost my return tube ticket home, but luckily the train inspector was full of Christmas cheer and allowed me through the barrier.

Tonight was my opportunity to reconnect having lost touch with her career and was surprised to find out that she has released 16 albums, of which 11 are as a solo artist. Throw in a few compilation albums and a box set, and you have quite an accomplished music career. Of course that isn’t the end of her talents as she has appeared in over 20 films, presented on television, appeared in numerous shows, and done a fair bit of charity fundraising.

Most recently though she has reinvented herself as an internet sensation with a helping hand from her husband, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. If you haven’t already, then I insist that you give ‘Toyah and Robert Fripp’s Sunday Lunch’ a view without delay. 

This was essential viewing throughout Lockdown and they have continued this success story with their own take on a wide variety of songs ranging from ‘Too Drunk To Funk’ (a Valentine’s special) to the hilarious destruction of ‘When I Fall In Love’ to a performance of ‘Swan Lake’. 

This couple’s talents know no bounds as you will see from these videos where Toyah struts her stuff whilst Robert ferociously plays his guitar There are many videos on ‘YouTube’ and you would be hard pressed to find anything more enjoyable.

Toyah embarked on a 31 date intimate tour to promote her latest album on September 2nd, 2021, so it’s fair to say it hasn’t been too intense, with the longest run of shows being four nights in a row. Tonight she visits Hastings thanks to Black Rabbit Productions, for the 27th date of said tour. 

I couldn’t forgo this opportunity and after a 15 minute stroll down the West Hill, I found myself at the wonderful hidden gem of a venue that is St Mary In The Castle, which is a grade II* listed former Church, which was constructed in the Neo-Classical style. So well hidden that the person I was sitting next to told me how he had been searching for the venue for about twenty minutes until he found the entrance.

As Toyah bounced onto stage belying her near 64 years, I was relieved to see that she was wearing a sparkling outfit that wouldn’t have been out of place when I last saw her in 1981. Those who have seen her ‘Sunday Lunch’ videos will know what I mean especially as I was with my wife!

Toyah was gushing with praise at the lovely venue she was about to play and quickly went straight into storytelling mode, reminiscing about the last time she visited Hastings in 1984, to film ‘Murder: Ultimate Grounds For Divorce’ with Roger Daltrey and Leslie Ash. Being at the seaside, she felt it most appropriate to open proceedings with her cover of the Martha and the Muffins classic ‘Echo Beach’ and we were up and running. 

This was a taster of what was to come as every song was proceeded with a wonderful story relating to it, which you couldn’t help but become invested in. This was to be a career spanning gig in which Toyah has flirted with many genres of music, with a personal insight into Toyah and her love of life. 

I was happy as she kept on harking back to her punk days, when I first discovered her, and how they had made her what she is today. She definitely hasn’t forgotten her roots.

With this electro acoustic tour promoting her latest album ‘Posh Pop’, it was interesting to hear how every video for the songs on this album had been made at home. I particularly liked her story for ‘Space Dance’ where she talks about the love for her 75 year old husband Robert Fripp, who can play 11 notes a second on the guitar yet when it comes to dancing the twist he failed miserably. Watch the video and you will see exactly what she means.

Of further local interest the story behind the recording of ‘Ieya’ was particularly interesting as it was recorded at Parkgate Studios in Battle, during which they had to overcome a lot of paranormal activity resulting in the drummer jumping out of the first floor window.

Personally it was interesting to hear her story about the aforementioned Christmas Eve gig that I attended and the memories came flooding back of her making the stage entrance on a 40 foot ladder. She had so many more stories that I could write the longest review you have ever read, but I wouldn’t want to put in too many spoilers.

There was a nice touch from Toyah as she dedicated ‘Rhythm In My House’ to DJ Janice Long who passed away on Christmas Day. Janice had championed Toyah throughout her career and particularly liked this song as in her words “it sums it all up!”.

Highlight of the set for me was ‘Ieya’ and even though blood wasn’t pouring out of the walls as Toyah suggested happens when played live with a full band, it was still a great arrangement. Having said that I did notice the hairs on my arm stand on end when she started to sing ‘It’s A Mystery’. 

As with most tunes tonight they were not played identically to their original which made it all the more interesting. Her band for tonight were faultless and are obviously enjoying the tour. For Chloe Du Pre on keyboards it was a return to the venue where she played her first live concert when just 15.

For anyone who likes Toyah in the slightest this show is recommended. I attended with my wife and her music knowledge was limited to the hits of the early eighties, but she commented that in spite of this, Toyah makes you feel fully involved and with the background that she gives to each song you almost feel like you know them anyway. 

ROUNDABOUT Star Q&A: Toyah Willcox 25.4.2022

Musician Toyah Willcox, who turns 64 this month, shares her excitement for a summer of festivals, including Let’s Rock where she is set to star…

Hello! Given the past two years, do you think 2022 could be the most joyous ever? “2022 will be joyous – the artists have missed the audience and the audience have missed the artists. 

It’s going to be one big party. Let’s Rock is very special because not only are there back-to-back acts all day who are brilliant and iconic, but also the atmosphere is so friendly and family-orientated. 

You can look out over an audience and sometimes see three generations of the same family. They are a joyous community with one thing in common – they all love the 1980s! 

I love performing with the Let’s Rock band (sensationally good musicians). We also get to see the friends we’ve been performing with for decades… for 40 years.”

Q. Are there any other performers you’re looking forward to seeing?

“I always end up on the same plane and same hotel as Chesney Hawkes, all over the world… Somehow fate brings us together and we have a scream. Chesney lives in the States, I live in the UK, but we walk into the same room in the oddest places and say ‘What are you doing here?!”’

Q. Which musician, living or dead, would you most like to see perform?

“Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, Robert Plant (with me) and Talk Talk.”

Q. What is your strongest memory of appearing on Top Of The Pops?

“Top Of The Pops was an event, every time. It’s a show I used to watch with my family and to be on it was an honour. On my first appearance there was a mini disaster when my costume didn’t arrive and I had to wear a dress I bought as a back-up. Ironically, I think it made me more approachable to the Top Of The Pops audience – less confrontational, image-wise.

Q. Have you kept any souvenirs from the 1980s? 

“I have warehouses full of every on-stage costume/every acting costume I’ve ever worn, as well as every photoshoot. They are my life, a life I am immensely proud of.”

Q. What other plans do you have for 2022?

“I have three sold-out tours this year, including Toyah & Lene Lovich’s Electric Ladies UK tour in June, followed by the Toyah Anthem Tour in autumn to celebrate of the re-release of my 1981 platinum album Anthem. I will also be making two albums – a reimagining of my 2019 album In The Court Of The Crimson Queen, whilst the second album will be recorded in September and is the follow-up to my 2021 no.1. album, Posh Pop. In the last two years I’ve had four Top 10 albums – Posh Pop out-sold Queen, Metallica and Justin Timberlake in its first week.” 

THE GURADIAN 28.5.2022

Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp look back: ‘He came from the 60s, having multiple girlfriends at once’. The musicians recreate a photo from their wedding – a day of panic, pasta and paparazzi

Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp are a rock star couple turned lockdown YouTubers. Actor and musician Willcox, 64, rocketed to fame during the punk rock era, appearing in cult movies such as Quadrophenia, before releasing 80s hits such as It’s a Mystery. Meanwhile, Fripp, 76, is a founding member of King Crimson, and has collaborated with artists including David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Both prolific musicians, they launched the successful Sunday Lunch video series in 2020, in which they cover classic songs in their home in Pershore, Worcestershire. Toyah is performing across the UK this summer: on the Electric Ladies tour in June; and at Let’s Rock – The Retro festival from May to September.

Toyah: This photograph was taken on our wedding day in 1986, which started off really dull and rainy, but as soon as we got to the church the sun came out. Robert was terrified. I was enjoying it, but very nervous: I had to keep the ceremony secret so photos weren’t leaked to the press. Sadly, the papers got wind and we were chased by paparazzi for two days afterwards. They were banging on the car door, shouting and saying that if we didn’t let them get a picture they were going to print a bad story about us. It wasn’t fun.

There were only about 15 people in the church, just family. I couldn’t be seen buying anything bridal, so I got a ballgown from a local dress shop. I prepped all the food for the reception myself – chickpea curry, rice and pasta salads. The most terrifying part was that it was such a commitment. We were both thinking the same thing: are we ready for this?

Robert never expected to get married, and I’d only been to one wedding in my life. To go through the ceremony was so official and regimented. It was a very strange feeling for a punk rocker. Robert wanted medieval vows about beasts rotting in the field, whereas the one thing I really wanted was to leave out the “I will obey” line – the vicar insisted that it should be in.

Back then, everything was from Robert’s point of view. He came from the 60s – from having multiple girlfriends all at once, lots of casual sex, whereas I’d had none of that. He was a global rock success and his world only included him and his band. I came from my world of punk and complete independence. It was an unlikely match, but he was the first person I had met who wasn’t trying to dominate me as a female and was meeting me as a human being.

Robert and I met while working together on a charity performance. We talked nonstop and didn’t sleep for a week as a result. He told me he realised immediately I was his wife; we were engaged after a week and married nine months later. But at the time I was trying to extricate myself from a horrible relationship. Organising the wedding to Robert was incredibly stressful, so getting to that church was oddly the calmest moment I’d had in a long time.

For the first 30 years of our marriage Robert never saw what I did beyond the home environment. It’s since lockdown – during which I’ve released an album and created our Sunday Lunch YouTube videos – that he has realised just what I do. Getting him involved with the videos was an experience. He has a reputation for being stubborn, but over the years has become kinder and more fun.

I was worried Robert wasn’t moving enough, so I said to him: I’m going to teach you how to dance. We started with a jive and I quickly realised this man can play 11 notes a second, but he can’t tell left from right. I posted the footage and within five minutes we had 100,000 responses from around the world. We’re up to more than 65m views.

Robert and I have never really relaxed – there are no beach holidays. For 36 years, we’ve talked about doing Route 66, but I need to accept that won’t happen. What we have done is built something as artists that means the world to us. We are completely dedicated to our work, and it’s what keeps us going.

We would like to renew our vows, and if we do he’s paying for a dress, the ceremony and reception. That sounds unromantic, but he has to take part this time. No homemade chickpea curry. We’ll do it the right way.

Robert: I’m sure if I could remember being born it would be a level of terror on a par with my marriage day. I knew I loved her, but I didn’t know her very well. And here I was committing my life to this person.

When we first met we were followed everywhere by the press. So the wedding had to be a private family event. This was to some degree undermined because the Abbey House in Witchampton, Dorset, opposite the church where we were being married, had a big auction taking place at the same time, so there was a lot of national press. A local photographer saw that something was going on, and pounced. After the wedding ceremony we fled from the church.

My approach to living has always been one of challenge. I surround myself with pointed sticks. One of the strategies I’ve always used is to spend money that I don’t have. I then have to go out and earn the money back. It has had my wife twitching. However, the past two years have been the only time that I have found comfort; cohabiting with my wife on a daily basis. We have little moments of intimacy: 30 minutes in a wonderful tea shop in town, where I am able to listen to my wife telling me what she’s been thinking about.

What I’ve seen in the past two years – what I already knew but had not participated in as fully – is the depth of my wife’s creative vision. There is something very other about her. I often say that she came from the planet Zarg. But I have also seen how difficult it is for a very short woman of a certain age to be seen, heard or acknowledged. These days I am copied into her business emails, because if I am not there’s a high chance she won’t get a response.

It hasn’t always been that way. When Toyah did It’s a Royal Knockout in 1987, I was sitting next to a banker who was supporting the event. He said to me: “Does it ever concern you that you’re simply an adjunct to your wife’s fame?” I said: “No, it’s never been an issue for me.” She is the star in this household, there’s no doubt about it, and I do not contest it for a moment. I’m here to support her. Even if it means donning a tutu, going down to the river at the end of our garden and dancing as well as I can to Swan Lake.

THE METRO 24.6.2022

Age won’t change Toyah Willcox: ‘We’ve never stopped being rockers, we are just rockers in a different time and place’

Born out of a lockdown-powered creative burst, Toyah Willcox and musician husband Robert Fripp’s weekly online Sunday Lunch videos have quickly become regular news events. Cheeky, audacious, entertaining, and even eye-watering, each episode has been attracting hundreds of thousands of views.

But if you think they’re big now, wait till you hear what’s next. ‘We are developing a stage show and a movie is in development as well,’ reveals Toyah, adding that the duo are even considering an album.‘But once you get into a studio situation you’ve got to rethink everything, and how people will experience that in an album form. ‘It’s not a no, but it takes an awful lot of consideration.’

From early ‘funny vignettes’ in 2020, the clips see the couple (mostly) perform an unexpected cover from their Worcestershire kitchen – from Neil Young, Iggy Pop and ZZ Top, to Rage Against The Machine and The Prodigy. Alongside the Aga, dishwasher and plate racks, a studious and straight Robert typically plays a solid tune while Toyah burlesques and sings.

Although the DIY ethic is part of the charm, each one-take performance – which drops at noon, every Sunday, on YouTube – takes days of preparation. ‘Because Robert doesn’t play in E tuning, he plays in C tuning, that means he has to transpose everything [and] he’s playing two parts at once – he’s either playing two guitar parts, or a bass and a guitar. That’s an intense amount of work. He wants to do it as well and as inventively as he can, so for Robert it usually takes four to five days to be ready.

‘For me, I learn the melody, I learn the words and then I do all the set-up – I need a good 48 hours for the set-up. ‘What people are seeing sometimes is 60-90 seconds. But every second has to count, and I think that’s why they’re so successful, because we don’t waste any of those seconds.’

For many viewers of a certain age, the videos have proved inspiring and empowering – something which was important to Toyah as her performances are perhaps not what some might expect from a woman in her mid-sixties. ‘One of the points is questioning what is age. We have all been rockers, we’ve never stopped being rockers, we are just rockers in a different time and place. It is questioning all of that and raising this positivity about life, the art of growing older. ‘What is ageing? Is it a negative? I hope that what we put across is that it’s not a negative at all.’

The Birmingham-born actress and musician emerged with punk in the late-1970s. Though she appeared in Derek Jarman’s punk opus Jubilee and mod drama Quadrophenia, and later narrated pre-school series Brum, it’s her punchy pop hits – notably Thunder In The Mountains, It’s A Mystery and I Want To Be Free – and her strong, flamboyant and challenging visual identity for which she’s best known.

With sci-fi, fantasy and prog rock influences apparent, she was far more than the ‘Punk Princess’ she was often pigeonholed as – a misconception she continues to fight. ‘If there’s anything women suffer from it is the simplicity of the fact that women have to work 100 times harder to get 30% of the recognition. It’s a really frustrating wall of resistance that I tell all women to be tenacious about – never give up, and just push against that wall.

‘A lot of judgement we face is based on sexual identity, it’s based on sexual attraction, it’s women… being made to compete against each other. ‘We have a lot of resistance to push against. I know who and what I am, and that’s all I should care about.’
 
Having earned her highest chart placing in almost 40 years with last year’s Posh Pop album, Toyah is touring with her Electric Ladies show. Announced pre-Covid with pal Hazel O’Connor, Hazel stepped back after ill-health to be replaced by Lene Lovich and Republica’s Saffron. But the tour is dedicated to Hazel.
 
‘Because it’s highly likely she won’t be performing this year, we’re raising funds for her medical rehabilitation and to just help her not to worry about how she’s going to run everything. ‘So a percentage of the tour goes to Hazel, and at the end of the show Saffron performs Hazel’s Eighth Day and we both perform Will You.

‘It’s a been a very joyous experience with a wonderful eclectic mix of music by women,’ Toyah continues. ‘We’re playing to sold-out venues and it’s absolutely brilliant that we finally made it.’ 

DAILY RECORD 20.8.2022

Toyah Willcox continues to be audacious in her 60s and refuses to be “controlled by the number” of her age. In the 80s her anthem I Want To Be Free and her vivid hair colours made her an icon of rebellious youth. And the punk remains a beacon of individuality at 64, posing in revealing outfits for her Sunday Lunch YouTube sensation with guitarist husband Robert Fripp.

The videos have had 100million views since they started doing them during lockdown in 2020. Toyah said: “I’m not being controlled by the number of my age. I have a great passion for what I do and I’m continuing it. Age should only be a number. “I’ve been rocking in this world for 45 years as a career. You don’t just suddenly stop or stop that connection with music.”

The Birmingham singer and actress – who Coronation Street character Toyah Battersby was named after – has had a late career boom. Her 2021 album Posh Pop reached No22 – her highest charting album since 1982 – and in October she will tour the UK with Billy Idol, including Glasgow’s Ovo Hydro. She’s also become a social media star. Toyah and King Crimson legend Robert publish weekly videos at noon on Sundays on the official Toyah YouTube channel.

They have covered songs from Britney to Ozzy Osbourne – Robert on guitar and Toyah gesticulating wildly as she sings, sometimes wearing very revealing costumes. She posed as a schoolgirl for AC/DC’s Back in Black and covered herself in gold leaf while squirting paint on her chest for their rendition of Foo Fighters’ All My Life. It’s provocative and often mesmerisingly seductive. Toyah is certainly unapologetic about the videos.

She said: “It has been a positive experience because I’m able to connect with the people who look at what I do in a very positive way. My message is positive. Robert’s message is positive. “We are playing on British humour and irony and puns.”

Like everyone in 2020 the couple, who married in 1986, were in lockdown at their home in Pershore, Worcestershire, in 2020. On April 5, they posted a video – filmed on Toyah’s iPhone – of themselves dressed up and dancing to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock. The 28-second clip got 100,000 replies in five minutes.

Toyah said: “The replies we got to that first clip were from people who were alone in lockdown and really suffering. They’d enjoyed this clip so much that we felt we had a responsibility to keep entertaining them.“Sunday Lunch has grown and grown and grown out of that very British humour both Robert and I create.”

Each week Toyah gives Robert a list of songs and he decides which one he wants to do. “He very much needs to enjoy what he’s playing,” Toyah pointed out. They don’t just use any song – the lyrics have to mean something to them or to what’s happening in the world. Toyah said: “We are aware of what we do and how huge the audience is.”

So much so that next year they will tour Sunday Lunch. Toyah is definitely back in vogue and finding support from places she wasn’t expecting. She and Robert covered Garbage’s tune I Think I’m Paranoid in May after Scottish lead singer Shirley Manson wrote an open letter on her Facebook page in 2020 claiming Toyah inspired her after seeing her at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1982.

The Scot even apologised for not admitting she was a fan because as a teenager she didn’t think it would be cool, and then later not revealing she was an inspiration. Toyah said: “That was really, really lovely. We’ve stayed, via social media, connected. I’m hugely grateful.”

Ahead of her Billy Idol Autumn gig in Glasgow, Toyah remembers her first concert in Scotland playing the city’s Apollo in 1981. She said: “It had so much character about it. Just getting on stage was an adventure. The way the whole building moved with the audience dancing, it was a fantastic venue. The Scottish fans were riotous. The audience were rapturous and I still find when I play Glasgow the fans are completely dedicated to the lyrics, dancing and singing. I find it a very joyful audience.”

As well as fans from the 80s, Toyah is pleased to see her followers include their children and now children’s children. She is proud of her Coronation Street namesake, Toyah Battersby, played by Georgia Taylor. Before she was introduced in 1997, the producers asked Toyah for permission to use her name. She said: “I was very grateful they were so respectful towards me before the character began to film. I’m very proud of that actually.”

Next up is a six-date arena tour with Idol. Toyah, who starred in Derek Jarman’s punk movie Jubilee in 1978 as well as mod film Quadrophenia the next year, said of Billy: “Our paths crossed but I’ve never had the opportunity to get to know him. But I’m wildly excited about this tour. “I think it’s going to be a really excellent, high-energy rock night, where the audiences get hits as well as little visitations to punk.”

Toyah will later go on her own tour celebrating her 1981 album Anthem, which will be re-released in September. She’s also released a cover of Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm and revealed: “I was a demo singer and sang the song before it went to Grace. I was very happy when she did it.” It follows the success of her 16th studio album Posh Pop.

“I was absolutely thrilled,” she admitted. “To have written and released it when I was 63 years old and for it to reach No22 in the charts - That’s quite staggering.”

blitzedmag.com 9.9.2022

Toyah remains an iconic figure across several decades of the UK music scene. Outside of her acting career, she chalked up a series of chart hits as a musician including ‘It’s A Mystery’, ‘I Want To Be Free’ and ‘Thunder In The Mountains’.

More recently, she returned with the album Posh Pop which reached the top 25 in the UK charts. She also enjoys her regular (and popular) Sunday Lunch video shows, alongside husband Robert Fripp.

This October sees Toyah supporting Billy Idol as part of his Roadside tour. Meanwhile, Toyah’s classic 1981 album Anthem is also being reissued this September. Blitzed sat down with Toyah to discuss her busy autumn plans…

You’ve got the Billy Idol tour coming up in October, which is an interesting contrast. You’re both very different, yet at the same time you’re both seasoned travelers from that fervent 80s pop scene.

It’s great and don’t forget punk rock. Billy used to be based in London with Generation X, which is when I met him. We both have 45-year careers, are quite diverse in our individual journeys as musicians and then you’ve got Television performing Marquee Moon.

I think it’s quite a clever line up because I’m only on stage for 7:30 to 8:00 o’clock and I’ve got to fit in 28 albums and 15 hit singles. That’s quite a journey to make, but what all of us have in common on this bill is we started in punk and we’ve both, all of us, evolved into rock. I think it’s quite diverse. I’m not just an 80s icon.

I’ve been pretty present, especially in the last few years. I think it’s a very clever mix I hope that I can get in some good punk rock material. Obviously the 80s material, but also the new stuff as well because Posh Pop went to No. 1 in 36 charts, 22 in the main charts on August the 27th last year and I’m certainly going to be including some Posh Pop tracks.

There’s also the reissue of your classic album, Anthem. What are your thoughts on that album today?

We’re going to be performing a lot of it on tour. My band are very, very young. My lead guitarist Manolo and both Matt were one year old when this album came out! – and they love this album. So, for me that is a very important emotional barometer about how people are going to see the re-release and they can’t wait to play it. They love the song ‘Marionette’, they love ‘Demolition Man’.

They’re so excited by it. So, for me that brings me into the present day with it. And on this tour, the sound design, we’re going to go back to all the original drum sounds, the original keyboard sounds and the original guitar sounds. But we’re adding an element that makes it very danceable. The Anthem tour is mainly standing and I want my audience to be able to move and to be able to kind of plug into the heart of 1981.

It’s going to be good. It’s going to be challenging for me because I’m writing new material and I’ve been touring new material all year. So, this one is a trip down memory lane.

How do you feel about the reaction to your Sunday Lunch videos?

We just had our stats in and it’s gone into over 100 million now over two years and that’s quite extraordinary. It seems – touch wood – to be growing in a really nice way and I think part of this success is we’ve been consistent in what we do.

People know they’re going to get a kitchen, they’re going to get something that looks as though it’s completely under-rehearsed, but it’s going to be fun and people just tune in when they want a bit of cheering up and that’s fine with me.

Finally, is there any message you wanted to send to attendees of the forthcoming Billy Idol concerts?

I cannot wait to be on the same stage, in the same arena as this incredible audience. I’m going to be watching and listening to Television do Marquee Moon and I am going to be rocking out when Billy Idol is on stage. It’s an honour and I am grateful. I feel very honoured and special to be doing this tour and I think it’s going to be a really good one.


THE GUARDIAN 12.9.2022

Toyah on It’s a Mystery: ‘I told Princess Margaret I was a punk rocker. She said
“How ridiculous”’

‘There was a vinyl shortage when it was released. Old records had to be sent to the factory to be melted down and pressed. But soon it was selling 75,000 copies a day’

Toyah: I was a cult punk singer playing sweaty little clubs and getting covered in so much gob that dry cleaners would go: “Yeuch! We’re not touching that!” Then a brilliant PR woman called Judy Totton turned everything around.

She put me in every parish magazine in the country that would talk to me. I soon had all these fans who said they discovered me because their parents or grandparents had told them about this punk rocker.

I was making singles that were eight minutes long with reams of lyrics and had never had a hit. When Safari Records played my 1980 single Ieya on rotation in their office, a man apparently appeared at their door with a knife and said: “If you play that song again, I’ll kill you!” I started working with a new producer, Nick Tauber, who said I needed to simplify the message. He was completely right.

It’s a Mystery was written by Keith Hale, who was in a band called Blood Donor. Safari were convinced it could be a hit, but I wasn’t. The demo lasted more than 12 minutes, with a very long intro and an instrumental.

We shortened it to under four minutes so it would get radio play. Then I wrote the second verse that begins: “It can treat you with a vengeance and trip you in the dark.” That bit’s about empowerment, because we’re not in control even though we think we are.

Otherwise, it’s a song about how life really is a mystery – it’s a mystery to me that an aeroplane can fly! But the song is vague enough that everyone can read their own life story in it. I did the vocals in one take, then Nick said: “Could you be more contemplative at the beginning?” We redid the first four lines in a different voice, which made the rest sound like a call to arms.

It was released on an EP called Four from Toyah, but there was a vinyl shortage at the time. Safari were ringing round to get old records sent to the factory, so they could be melted down and pressed, making enough to get the song into the charts. Soon it was selling 75,000 a day and went to No 4. Having been unsure about the track, It’s a Mystery opened every door for me.

Shortly afterwards, I went with Katharine Hamnett to have tea at St James’s Palace with the Queen Mother. Princess Margaret was fabulous. She asked what I did and I said: “I’m a punk rocker.” She went: “Ohhh! How ridiculous!”

Nick Tauber, producer

I went to the filming of an ATV documentary featuring Toyah’s band and watched them play a song. They asked me what I thought and I said: “Do you want the truth?” I told them that the guitarist – Joel Bogen, who’d done everything with Toyah – was great, but I wanted to put a new band together for her.

Toyah wasn’t too happy about losing the other musicians, but she was a very driven young lady and wanted to be successful. I brought in Nigel Glockler, a great drummer, an incredible bass player called Phil Spalding and an electronic whiz kid called Adrian Lee. They gave us a very contemporary sound.

I always think a producer’s job is to make records that are creative and representative, but it’s no good having something that no one gets to hear. Toyah’s previous records were eclectic and dark, but they didn’t have wide appeal.

My role is to make things a bit more commercial, which I think is why Safari got me in. I spent hours in the studio with Adrian trying to sync things up, as in those days everything was manual. To her credit, even though Toyah didn’t like the song at first, she got it and understood why it would be a success.

She was a star the moment she walked out of her front door – and she was brilliant at it. She was the same in the studio. I’d previously worked with another punk band called Slaughter and the Dogs, who I loved dearly but they were difficult.

They’d been thrown out of their hotel for wrecking it and they scribbled graffiti all over the studio control room on the first day of recording their album. There was none of that with Toyah. She never made a fuss. She just had to hear the music in her headphones and get the lights right in the vocal booth, then she’d nail it. 

THE MIRROR 14.10.2022

Exclusive: Toyah Willcox's awkward first meeting with Rod Stewart at 'very unglamorous' caravan park

With 30 albums, 25 feature films and countless theatre and TV presenting roles under her belt, punk rocker Toyah Willcox is one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. But her first brush with fame came in less glamorous surroundings - when Rod Stewart visited the caravan park she used to go to every weekend with her family near Birmingham, the Wyre Mill Club.

“One day this group of people who used to come here turned up with Rod,” recalls Toyah. “I was only six at the time, so I didn’t really know who he was. I just remember everybody was going absolutely crazy and the girls were all screaming, ‘oh my god, it’s Rod Stewart!’.

“The club is just that kind of place, where stars come to hide. Paul Weller was here recently and we’ve snuck Kate Bush in here before. When I became famous, I’d go there myself to escape the paparazzi.”

Since she burst on to the music scene as the front woman of the new wave band Toyah in 1977 following appearances in plays, Toyah, 64 has rubbed shoulders with many famous faces. Also an actress, she starred alongside Phil Daniels in 1979 mod flick Quadrophenia and iconic actor Laurence Olivier in 1984 TV movie the Ebony Tower, and she also went into the I’m A Celebrity jungle in 2003. But among her fondest celebrity memories is meeting, and then getting to know, the late Princess Margaret.

“She had the wickedest sense of humour,” recalls Toyah. “When I first met her, it was at St. James’s Palace with the Queen Mother and we were having tea. “She looked at me and just said, ‘what are you?’. I said, ‘We’re anarchists. I’m a punk rocker’, and she burst out laughing and said, ‘that’s ridiculous’. I had a fabulous time with her. She was very social and very witty. She was quite punky for a Royal, a total rule breaker. I think she would have loved to be a civilian and that was the side I saw.”

During the pandemic, Toyah added another string to her bow when she launched the weekly YouTube series Sunday Lunch alongside her husband Robert Fripp. Amassing a huge 80 million views worldwide, the series sees Toyah and Robert, 76, perform conceptual music covers and they’re even set to take the show out on the road next year. Toyah and Robert, a member of the prog-rock group King Crimson, married in secret in Poole, Dorset, in May 1986. But as they tried to relax in the local area for their honeymoon, they were hounded by the paparazzi. So Toyah came up with a plan. She and Robert packed their bags, leaving in the dead of night for the sanctuary of her family’s caravan.

“We’d gone from having a very quiet wedding to being chased around country lanes,” recalls Toyah. “So Robert and I drove up to Wyre Mill and just hid there. It’s usually empty on weekdays, so nobody knew we were there. We were able to go to walks, went to buy food from a local village shop unbothered. It was just very romantic, we’d sit outside on the hill drinking wine and we were left alone.”

Next week, Toyah will be telling this story, as well as sharing many other memories from time spent at family’s old motorhome at The Motorhome and Caravan show at the NEC venue in her native Birmingham. She says: “I’m a Birmingham girl - and this is such a massive show because people really want to be holidaying within the UK at the moment.

“From the moment I was born, until I moved to London to become a rockstar at the age of 18, I spent my weekends on the River Avon in our caravan. It was wonderful. Most people think their best years were their school years, but my weekends in the caravan were mine - even though it had no running water. I was always sad to leave when it got to Sunday night.”

The family caravan, which Toyah says was already decrepit back when she was a teen, has long gone. As has the boat her family used to use to travel down the river on holidays. “When my father Beric passed away in 2009, we couldn’t bear the memory of the boat so we got rid of it,” says Toyah. “It now belongs to another family, but I live on the river and see it go past once a week. It’s lovely. “All my friends come past on their boats. Even the cast of Quadrophenia, they hire longboats and come back every Bank Holiday.”

Not that there’s much time for relaxing and watching boats for Toyah. As well as appearing at the NEC, she is also currently touring her groundbreaking 1981 album Anthem, which re-entered the UK Top 40 last month. And she’s just done her first gig supporting rocker Billy Idol on the UK leg of his Roadside tour, which kicked off this week in Manchester.

“Supporting him is an absolute dream come true, because I’ve had his songs in my set for 25 years and I really love his music,” says Toyah. “It’s going to be one hell of a rock show. I knew him when he started out in the punk band Generation X in the 1970s, but we lost touch when he moved to the US. “I work flat out, so I’m juggling the shows around other commitments. But I’ll be staying over after the Glasgow concert - all of us have to - so I’m looking forward to that.”

Among her favourite performing moments have been doing The Old Grey Whistle Test’s live Christmas Eve show in 1981, which went out to 12 million viewers, and her two gigs at Wembley Stadium over the years. But her number one moment was her very first Top of the Pops in 1981, when she sang It’s a Mystery on the popular programme.

“This was a show I watched religiously with my family every week, we even watched it on Christmas Day,” says Toyah. “To actually be on it was probably the pinnacle of my life.” Yet despite over 40 years of experience as a performer, Toyah admits she still gets nervous about singing or acting in front of large crowds - but thankfully the ‘monster’ inside the 5’1 star will always take over. “I do suffer terrible nerves,” she says. “The more I want it to be the best show in the world, the more nervous I am. But as soon as I step out on to the stage, the monster comes out. There is another part of me that is much larger than me, like an alter-ego. I don’t know where it comes from when I walk onstage, but it’s always there.”

Although she’s approaching her mid-sixties, Toyah says a quiet retirement is off the cards. She’s just finished a short film called Weightless, which saw her learning to cold water swim for the first time. She says: “I had to train for two months, because I was going to be spending two to four hours a day in the sea filming wearing only a flimsy swimming costume. “It’s quite extraordinary that as a singer and a film actress who is now 64, that I’m still having to meet quite incredible physical challenges. But it’s the best career to wake up to every morning. At my age, it’s speeding up - there’s no retirement in sight.” 

DORSET LIVE 15.10.2022

There are plenty of celebrities connected to Dorset from award-winning Hollywood actors to popstars and renowned radio DJs. Whether they were past alumni of schools in the county or have settled here in their later life, it seems Dorset shows no bounds when it comes to its celebrity connections. This is true of punk Princess Toyah Willcox who has opted for a quiet life in Dorset secluded away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Her connections to the county run deeper than you might think from being married in Dorset to owning a home here.

With a career spanning more than 40 years, Willcox is perhaps best known for fronting the band Toyah between 1977 to 1983 before going solo in the mid-1980s. She was nominated for British Breakthrough Act and Best Female Solo Artist at the 1982 BPI/BRIT Awards and her hit singles include 'It's a Mystery', 'Thunder in the Mountains' and 'I Want to Be Free'.

Born in Birmingham and spending much of her young adult life in London, she then settled in Dorset after marrying King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. She also reportedly bought Evershot Manor in rural Dorset. As mentioned, her connections to Dorset began when she married King Crimson's Robert Fripp who she reportedly calls her 'soulmate'. Their secret marriage was held in the village of Witchampton near Wimborne Minster in 1986.

But as they tried to relax in the local area for their honeymoon, they were hounded by the paparazzi, The Mirror reported. So Toyah came up with a plan. She and Robert packed their bags, leaving in the dead of night for the sanctuary of her family’s caravan. “We’d gone from having a very quiet wedding to being chased around country lanes,” recalls Toyah. “So Robert and I drove up to Wyre Mill and just hid there. It’s usually empty on weekdays, so nobody knew we were there.

“We were able to go to walks, went to buy food from a local village shop unbothered. It was just very romantic, we’d sit outside on the hill drinking wine and we were left alone.”

Her routes to Wimborne Minster remain strong as her husband was born in the area. He also attended Bournemouth College, where he studied economics, economic history, and political history for his A-levels. The couple reportedly purchased a prestigious Grade II listed Evershot Manor, and reports suggest Fripp described the house as the happiest place he's lived. Remaining close to her Dorset connections, Willcox even brought her Posh Pop Tour 2022 to the county. Her tour saw her travel the UK and playing at London and Wolverhampton before making her way to Sturminster Newton where she performed material from her then new album Posh Pop.

Amid her number albums and feature films, punk rocker Toyah Willcox become one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. With plenty of TV and showbiz experience under belt, she has gone on to appear in hit TV shows including I'm A Celebrity and going on to win Celebrity Mastermind. Since she burst on to the music scene as the front woman of the new wave band Toyah in 1977 following appearances in plays, Toyah, 64 has rubbed shoulders with many famous faces. Also an actress, she starred alongside Phil Daniels in 1979 mod flick Quadrophenia and iconic actor Laurence Olivier in 1984 TV movie the Ebony Tower.

But among her fondest celebrity memories is meeting, and then getting to know, the late Princess Margaret. “She had the wickedest sense of humour,” recalls Toyah. “When I first met her, it was at St. James’s Palace with the Queen Mother and we were having tea. She looked at me and just said, ‘what are you?’. I said, ‘We’re anarchists. I’m a punk rocker’, and she burst out laughing and said, ‘that’s ridiculous’. I had a fabulous time with her. She was very social and very witty. She was quite punky for a Royal, a total rule breaker. I think she would have loved to be a civilian and that was the side I saw.”

During the pandemic, Toyah added another string to her bow when she launched the weekly YouTube series Sunday Lunch alongside her husband Robert Fripp. Amassing a huge 80 million views worldwide, the series sees Toyah and Robert, 76, perform conceptual music covers and they’re even set to take the show out on the road next year.


2023

NME, 27.6.2023  

Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox — known as Toyah & Robert — caught up with NME backstage at Glastonbury 2023 to tell about the future of their successful Sunday Lunch series, plans to hit the road, and how they handle hateful comments.

Since starting off the series as a bit of light-hearted relief during the pandemic, no one was more surprised by the sudden momentum than the couple themselves. Now, over three-years since they began Sunday Lunch, the duo have ventured out of the kitchen taken the show to the stage.

The latest of which included a debut slot at Glastonbury 2023 this weekend, where they delivered their brand of classic rock covers on the Acoustic Stage. Shortly before they took to the stage, they had a quick catch-up with NME…

NME: Welcome to Glastonbury! Let’s start by taking a look back to when you first started Sunday Lunch. Did the response catch you off guard? It seemed to get a lot of momentum very quickly…

Toyah Willcox: “It did surprise us. We were going for about eight months and it was growing and growing and growing. It started with one very simple post: 28 seconds of us jiving. Within five minutes it got about 100,000 replies from across the world. At that point, we realised that we’d posted something that basically cheered people up who were alone in lockdown.”

“NME almost championed us in a way, and what we loved about NME was they were linking the songs we were covering with the actual artists, and it had a phenomenal effect. Judas Priest wrote to us and said, ‘Thank you so much’ and we’d given them the best tour publicity they could have had when we covered ‘Breaking The Law’. They loved it!

Did it resonate to a different audience to what you were expecting?

T.W: “It did start purely to make people laugh and to put two fingers up to a virus. Then, we realised that if we did classic rock [covers] it crossed more divides in a really good way.”

“It crossed languages. It crossed countries. It crossed cultures. We were reaching a much broader audience by purely using classic rock.”

Robert Fripp: “For me, there’s nothing old about classic rock. It’s alive in the moment. So if you are looking at The Beatles, for example, the present moment is 60 years so far… Metallica may be 30 years. The point is classic music is available in this moment and it is alive if we wish to participate and be in the moment with it.”

What was it like embarking on your recent spoken word tour?

R.F: “It reached almost no one if we are going by statistics!”

T.W: “But thanks to social media it’s reaching more…”

R.F: “Still very, very few indeed, dear. If you are looking at best sellers and high statistics, not many at all. But that’s not an issue… the number of people in the audience has no relevance.”

“If we look at Toyah & Robert, we have many, many, many more views and comments are very interesting. Two of my favourite ones came from [our appearance at] the Isle of Wight festival last Sunday. One [was about] being the eldest guitarist on stage and said: ‘Is he embalmed?’ The other one was: ‘Is he alive?’

“Well, to that I would say ‘If the embalming was good, I would seem to be alive. So obviously if someone thinks I’m not alive, then the embalming has failed.’”

T.W: “They were joining in the humour!”

R.F: “Actually the two quotes were not offered in the spirit of goodwill or encouragement!”

How long do you see Sunday Lunch running for?

T.W: “That’s such a good question. We’ve actually been picked up by a world agency and we have decided that we’re going to give them a set amount of years.”

R.F: “I figure I’ve got until I’m 84 to rock out…”

T.W: “I think that’s enough time. I will not allow my husband to carry luggage, carry equipment past 81.”

R.F: “Let me put it another way. My wife is hoping that I don’t die on stage. But from my point of view, if I die on stage, probably the best place to go!”

T.W: “At the moment our social media numbers are growing. So as long as those audiences are there and that kind of pull is there, we’ll keep going. But I will not watch him do anything that makes his health suffer. At the moment though, he is utterly remarkable, his playing is remarkable.

R.F: “Yes, it’s true. I’m godlike when I step upon the stage.”

You’re set to take Sunday Lunch on the road for the first time later this year – what can we expect from the shows?

R.F: “Expect nothing!”

T.W: “The whole idea is people come and they have a really memorable night. It’s rock’n’roll, but it also has our energy and our humour… Basically, I’m keeping my clothes on and we are doing fantastic rock music.

“Another bit of news that’s happening is we’re being courted by TV at the moment. We’ve got about three ideas in the very embryonic form that we should be shooting next year.”

R.F: “It seems that Toyah & Robert are becoming popular, not purely musically…“

T.W: “Just as old codgers!”

Robert, how would you say that your time performing with Toyah is different compared to your time with King Crimson?

R.F: “Toyah & Robert is the first time I have seriously engaged with the classic rock repertoire. I’ve also been playing in the C Pentatonic tuning since 1985. Since King Crimson is not currently touring, I can focus on learning how to play in E for the first time in 35 years.” 

T.W: “Having been married for 37 years and seeing the amount of practice [he] needed daily, I’m kind of happy that Robert now has a chance to just enjoy rocking out without this incredible weight of the responsibility of King Crimson music on his shoulders. He can just have fun on stage.”

While we’re here at Glastonbury and looking back at your earlier discography, we have to discuss another artist who had a strong tie to the festival: David Bowie. Are there any new artists that you think the Starman would have been into?

T.W: “That’s a fantastic question. There’s so much talent around, and there’s always new talent discovering Bowie for the first time. I think there’s some absolutely genuine talent out there, [for instance] Wet Leg, they’re fabulous and they’re just creating their own genre and their own places in music history.”

R.F: “David would know who was hot and who was about to appear before anyone else. We live in Middle England, so the live music that comes to town tends to be an older generation… but Bowie would always know.”


THE DAILY MAIL 31.10.2023

Pop 80s icon Toyah Willcox, 65, claims violent ghosts called George and Mary are haunting her house as she recalls the 'terrifying' time she was 'exorcised' as a teenager

Toyah Willcox has claimed violent ghosts are haunting her house - as she recalled the time she was 'exorcised' as a teenager. The 80s icon, now 65, appeared on the Halloween special of Loose Women on Tuesday alongside Olivia Atwood, Kaye Adams, Nadia Sawalha and Jane Moore. Toyah spoke up about her experiences of 'paranormal activity' in her Worcestershire home, where she has lived for over 20 years.

She told the eerie story as she sat in front of a smoking cauldron for the spooky episode dressed as a black witches' cat, complete with a belted jumpsuit and furry ears. The I Want To Be Free singer said she and her husband, rock musician Robert Fripp, had been 'invited' to live in the house by ghosts. She revealed that one of her resident ghouls named George has become so violent that she has begun to 'attack' her friends on numerous occasions.

Toyah explained: 'George has never bothered me but he's attacked my hairdresser, he's attacked friends at dinner parties. I've never been afraid. 'It all started to kick off when we would have dinner parties. Our ghosts do not like me when men come into the house something will happen.' 'My makeup artist came into the house and George [the ghost] was effing and blinding and telling him to get out and my makeup artist was like "who was that" and I told him I was alone in the house. He was woken up from a slumber by the ghost. 'We have had three exorcisms in the house. I saw him when I was hypnotised. He's never bothered me but he has attacked friends.'

But George is not alone in haunting Toyah's house. She went on to explain that a second ghost, Mary is much nicer - but does have a habit of nicking her clothes. Toyah said: 'We have another ghost called Mary who has two children. She's so beautiful, she's kind and she's lovely but she takes my clothes.'The singer has experienced spiritual experiences dating back from when she was a teenager, including a 'terrifying exorcism' at just 14 years old.

She continued: 'When I was 14 I had a terrifying experience. I had to be exorcised. 'It's common in puberty it when you're laying in bed and you feel like something is laying on top of you holding you. 'It was my sister we think, she was a cancer nurse and we thought that spirits were following her home.'

Toyah saw eight singles in the top 40 and released over 20 albums over her glistening career. The pop star previously appeared on Celebrity Help! My House is Haunted after becoming convinced of the presence of ghosts in her Worcestershire home. In the show, paranormal expert Barri Ghai was seen choking and gasping for air when confronted by an aggressive ghost called George.

Having gathered himself, Barri admitted that the choking incident - as well the team's other findings - confirmed Toyah's home was haunted, saying: 'That to me is validation'.'We have clear intelligent responses telling me that we need to help them.' Jayne Harris agreed. 'I think there is one malicious spirit here in this house that we need to release so that they can find peace.''The majority of the spirits I really, really like, and if they feel they're in the right place at the right time, then they're welcome,' Toyah said. 'If they're evil, they can f*** off!'


2024

YORKSHIRE TIMES 8.2.2024

In Conversation with Toyah

BBC Radio 2 presenter Gary Davies has announced a nationwide 2024 tour for the live version of his show Sounds of the 80s, which will include an appearance from Toyah.

Ahead of the tour, Toyah spoke to the Yorkshire Times.

What can people expect when they come to the Sounds of the 80s show?

Anyone who attends one of the evenings will find an atmosphere where the audience can be themselves dancing and singing to their favourite tracks from a classic period in pop music. There was such a broad spectrum of music at the time from artists like Bananarama, Prince, and T'Pau, among others, including myself.

I think what will work beautifully is that the stage will be constantly active. Gary will be on there plus the dancers, and a stage set that is Gary’s Radio 2 studio and there will also be live performances from myself and other artists such as Carol Decker from T’Pau and Denise Pearson from 5 Star.

Why do you think the 1980s were such a golden period for popular music?

It was all very hedonistic, none of us thought beyond the 80s. It was difficult in the 90s to sell music from the previous decade, but that all changed with the Millennium. People wanted to hear all those iconic songs again. Part of the success of those tracks is the narrative of the songs; we really were traditional song writers then, writing about people’s attitudes and what they needed in their lives.

So, Toyah, tell us about your best 80s memories.

There were many good memories appearing on Top of the Pops. One of the happiest memories is the magnitude of what we did. For instance, on Christmas Eve in 1981, I played the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which went out live on television, bringing in twelve million viewers, which at the time was phenomenal.

The tour visits York; have you visited the city before?

I have been to York many times, not just when playing a concert but also from my acting career. In fact, when the tour comes to York, I am going straight to Bettys for a cream cake, preferably with a macaroon on the side. I took my husband Robin (Fripp) for the first time in his life last October when we were touring together and there was a massive queue outside. When we went inside, he was very impressed with the atmosphere, service, and, of course, the cakes.

How did the opportunity arise for you to record with legendary British producer Trevor Horn on his last album?

Trevor called me and said that he wanted to record a new version of Relax, the old Frankie Goes to Hollywood song. He had already done a version using artificial intelligence, which the record company turned down.

He thought that I might be able to intimidate and impersonate the artificial intelligence version; we did about thirty versions of the song in one day. He would change the key I was singing in, speed things up and down here and there. He then had the material to present to the record label a version he thought they would like, which thankfully, they did. You can hear it on the album.

My version of Relax is going to be included in a movie, though I have not been told which one, something I am very excited about.

Were you apprehensive about working with Trevor?

Initially, I was very frightened. When you work with someone as talented as Trevor, it shines a mirror on your limitations as a performer and musician.

He completely understood my singing technique; working in his studio in Camden produced the as the best sound I have ever experienced as a recording artist. He is a master of sounds, the way Turner was a master of colour.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?

Robert and I are playing a lot of the major festivals this year, including some of the 80s ones, although some of those will probably be just by myself. In between, I am playing the female lead in two movies, both of which I cannot reveal the titles just yet; one of them is being filmed in York and the other in East London.

I am very much looking forward to what seems to be a very busy year, which all starts off with the Sounds of the 80s Live Tour. If anyone wants a night out that gives people a chance to socialise and hear these wonderful songs again, I would advise them to come and witness a really good night out.


THE MIRROR 10.2.2024

Exclusive: Toyah Willcox's baby shock as child conceived at her show and parents' surprising gesture

Punk singer Toyah Willcox has shared her shock after finding out a couple conceived at one of her gigs as the parents made a surprising gesture nine months later

Toyah Willcox has revealed a baby was conceived at her gig - and she found out nine months later after the couple made a surprise gesture.

The legendary punk rocker is one of the biggest stars from the 1980s, with huge hits including It's A Mystery and I Want to Be Free. She went on to have 30 albums, 25 feature films and countless theatre and TV presenting roles. In an exclusive chat with The Mirror alongisde husband Robert Fripp, Toyah shared her most memorable moment from her impressive singing career.

She said: "We both experienced very strange but legendary things. When I played Hammersmith Apollo in 1982, which we recorded live for an album called Warrior Rock, a child was conceived on the back row. Nine months later there was another Toyah in the world. She was actually named Toyah."

Toyah added: "It just seems, in hindsight, so fitting that not only music but one of my shows allowed that to happen." Husband Robert, who's had an equally impressive music career since starting rock band King Crimson, quipped: "I don't believe that any King Crimson shows had anyone conceived at our performances. I might be mistaken, of course, but they've certainly never been in touch."

Explaining about how she found out about the moment of passion at her gig, Toyah said: "My sound man came backstage and he said 'I cannot believe a couple were having sex next to the sound desk during your show'. Then that couple made contact about a year later and they sent us a picture of baby Toyah!"

Despite her huge success, Toyah admitted she didn't think she would have a singing career at the age of 65. She told us: "Last year we played Glastonbury. I was 65, I really did not think that at 65 I'd still have a career. When I was 21, I only thought it would last up until the age of 30, no interest at all in what would happen after that age."

Toyah, who performs solo and alongside Robert, added: "We are in the kind of confidence and comfort of what we do and we do have to take into account that we're not going to be running down huge platforms halfway through the audience, what we're doing now is perfect for us. We love the music. We love our audience. We love the atmosphere.

"But did I think I'd be doing this? No. I honestly thought I'd been an old people's home." Toyah also reflected on starting out in the music industry and admitted there have been "massive changes" for women in music. She said: "When I was very young in the punk movement, I really wasn't aware of the boundaries being placed around me. I was just too busy being brash, having a good time being very, very loud.

"But the boundaries were definitely there. If you were to succeed on a global level, you did have to fit a physical type. I have noticed, literally year by year by year, that if we are to really break it big, they have to be physically exceptional. For me, that's been a bit frustrating because I'm barely 5ft tall and I'm very tomboyish and boisterous."

Toyah revealed it has "always frustrated" her, but has "always had confidence" in what she writes, her singing voice and her acting talent. "I've always had that confidence," she said. "But I do realise that if you don't play by certain rules, you're gonna limit what you can do."


THE MIRROR 11.2.2024

Exclusive: Toyah Willcox reveals key to 38-year marriage and why she's happy being child-free

Punk singer and actress Toyah Willcox has shared they key to her near four decade long marriage to rock musician Robert Fripp and their decision to not have children

Toyah Willcox has given a rare insight into her marriage of 38 years with rock guitarist Robert Fripp.

The punk singer, 65, married Robert, who has worked with the likes of David Bowie and Brian Eno, in 1986. They have gone on to work together as well as creating their viral Sunday Lunch series, which they now tour. Toyah and Robert, 77, film themselves every week performing covers of huge hits including Slipknot's Psychosocial, Billy Idol's Rebel Yell and Foo Fighters' All My Life.

In an exclusive chat with The Mirror, Robert and Toyah have shared the secret to their successful marriage of almost four decades. Sharing what it is like touring together, Toyah said: "It's exactly the same as being married for 38 years, it's good. We both come from very different genres." Robert added: "But we complement each other well, I have a wonderful time being out working with my wife, may I say, even having greater fun than when we were at home together."

The couple have often spent much of their time apart due to their busy touring schedules. Speaking of lockdown, Robert said: "It was probably the first time since we've been married that we were actually together one day after the other on a continued basis. Up until that point, we'd only be together about eight weeks of the year because of our touring schedules."

Toyah and Robert, who was the founder of King Crimson, now head out on tour together thanks to the huge success of their online videos. She admitted performing together as husband and wife "normalises the experience" especially backstage. Toyah added: "Whereas if I'm working with other musicians that is purely a working relationship. But when we're working together I feel strangely more at home with the experience because I have a lifetime companion with me.

"When I'm on my own you just become a bit more of a self-surviving professional, whereas when you're together, everything is shared." Robert said: "I adore my wife. My wife is lots of fun to be with. My wife is constantly mischievous, and one of her favourite little things is to make me jump." Toyah quipped: "It does make me aware I might give them a heart attack!"

Explaining the key to their successful marriage, Toyah said: "I think we're both very independent. And because of our independent careers, we can have breathing away from each other. I would say to any couple trust and allow that in your relationships. Having these breathing space spaces, I think are really, really valuable.

"We don't have children, we never even considered having children. Hats off to those people who do because that commitment is extraordinary. I think with us we've managed to remain unique and independent as well as being a couple. We both travel the world independently of each other working, and we come back together because we want to - there's always a freshness in our marriage."

Robert added: "And if for any reason I'm falling asleep on that, my wife will hide and jump back on me just to remind me of how much fun it is being together."


LOUDER 18.6.2024

“I was summoned to have tea with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. We talked about the philosophy of punk.” In 1980, when Britain's royal family wanted “to see what a punk rocker looks like” they invited Toyah Willcox to St James’s Palace" by Paul Brannigan

Toyah recalls the day she talked punk rock with royalty

In the summer of 1977, punk rock gatecrashed into the mainstream consciousness in Britain when the Sex Pistols' second single, God Save The Queen, entered the UK charts at number 2 during the week of the official observation of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee: it's widely believed that the single was actually the UK's highest-selling single that week, but the official chart stats were deliberately 'adjusted' to ensure that the nation's most infamous punk band were kept from reaching number one.

As controversial as the song was, however, it seems that it didn't necessarily alarm the monarchy, for three years later, punk starlet Toyah Willcox was summoned to one of London's royal palaces so that Queen Elizabeth's mother and sister could see at close quarters “what a punk rocker looks like,” according to a new [paywalled] interview the singer has given to The Telegraph.

The anecdote crops up in the interview, when Willcox is asked to select her 'best punk moment', and nominates the day in question.

She recalls: “One of the most bizarre moments of my life was in the middle of recording [1981 album] Anthem and I was summoned to St James’s Palace with [English fashion designer and political activist] Katharine Hamnett, who is an all-time rebel, to have tea with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. I was wearing a Willy Brown dress, and my hair was bright orange with yellow streaks.

“We were told we had to say ma’am and curtsey, and the Queen Mother entered and sat on one sofa with another guest and Margaret sat on my sofa with me and Katharine and said, 'Oh Hello… we want to see what a punk rocker looks like', which was just fabulous, especially as I realised later that Princess Margaret was probably the original punk rocker as she just rebelled and rebelled and rebelled.

“We talked about the philosophy of punk rock and how it was opening doors for women, and she was fascinated, and I met her many times after that and she was a wicked and very sharp woman.”

Although Toyah never met Queen Elizabeth II, Katherine Hamnet did, in June 2011, when she received a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) medal from the monarch, for her services to the British fashion industry. Earlier this year, the designer made headlines when she posted a video to Instagram showing her dumping the medal into a dustbin outside her home, while wearing a T-shirt bearing the words 'DISGUSTED TO BE BRITISH'.

“I’m disgusted to be British for our role in genocide in Gaza,” Hamnet said in the video. “This is my CBE. It belongs in the dustbin, with [British Prime Minister, Rishi] Sunak and [Labour Party leader Sir Keir] Starmer.”


THE DAILY EXPRESS 28.6.2024 - Rebel With A Cause. Read HERE


THE INVERNESS COURIER 24.7.2024

Toyah & Robert on keeping the love alive and why they adore the Highlands

We caught up with music legends Toyah & Robert before they take the stage at Belladrum this weekend.

What is your favourite love song?

Toyah: For me it’s The Twelfth of Never by Johnny Mathis! But I’ve got a whole list…The Moody Blues, Nights In White Satin, Tasmin Archer’s Sleeping Satellite and Shakespeares Sister, Stay! They all make me really experience love!

Robert: I have no singing voice but there have been occasions I’ve sung Twelfth of Never to my wife! For me, it’s I Will Always Love You by Whitney Housten, the Dolly Parton song! Also, any early Elvis is when your heart aches!

Have you been to the Highlands before? What do you think of it?

Toyah: I’ve been there many times and I played there just before lockdown. I absolutely adore it. Inverness is just so different to Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’ve done plays there, toured there in theatre and done music shows there. People are very connected to the land, and it’s a very different feel. I’m looking forward to that grounded-ness and connection.

The sky feels so much lower than anywhere else in the UK. It does feel like a ceiling there and I’m just looking forward to being outside in that experience.

Robert: For me everything changes when I drive into the borders, and you realise this is not England, this is Scotland! Scotland is very different and part of that is space. There is a space available which here we don’t have, and there is a very different engagement with that place.

I’m looking forward to taking a deep breath of fresh Scottish air! It’s a long long way from England! You have to commit yourself to going up there, but once you have you realise why!

You work together and live together. How do you keep the love alive?

Toyah: Our lives have changed so radically since lockdown as we never saw each other before this! We were on different continents all the time! Lockdown was very good for us as a couple as we were together constantly and we really loved it. It just made us so happy being together.

We’re now very industrious on a level I never expected at our ages – in a world that demands content daily!

Robert: I listen to my wife! Seriously because how many men actually listen to women? And how many men listen to women of a certain age? My wife has the spirit of a She-Goddess! She sometimes has concerns and sometimes has no concerns but simply wants to tell me about the activity of the birds on the bird feeder – so what do I do? I listen.

Toyah: Robert definitely listens! We are very compatible and we’re both very eccentric! I think the compatibility is quite miraculous that we found each other because I don’t think we could be with anyone else, we are that radically different from anyone we know!