(* for the first nine hits "Toyah" was actually a band )
Chart entered : 14 Februrary 1981
Chart peak : 4
Number of hits : 12
The work of Miss Wilcox / Mrs Fripp attracted few critical plaudits at the time and fewer still now but in the early eighties she was an unavoidable part of the pop scene with a loyal fanbase that included my best friend when this was out. Its lead track still brings to mind those last days of my own Arcadia.
Toyah Willcox was born in Birmingham in 1958. Her father had a successful joinery business and her mother was a professional dancer. She was born with a number of physical deformities which required years of physiotherapy and corrective surgery to eliminate. She suffered some bullying as a result and grew up a feisty rebellious teenager . after trouble with the law as a juvenile she received some bomb disposal training in the wake of the Birmingham pub bombings presumably as an expendable denizen of the city. Toyah saw both acting and the punk rock scene as outlets for her to express herself and sought to develop both careers simultaneously.
From Birmingham's Repertory Theatre she appeared in a BBC play called Glitter in 1977 and on the back of that was invited to join the National Theatre where she made her mark by crashing a wheelchair into Sir John Gielgud. She then appeared in Derek Jarman's Jubilee as an overweight skinhead.
She put her eponymous band together with her guitarist friend Joel Bogen and began gigging as regularly as her acting commitments would allow in 1978. They got a record deal with the independent label Safari in June 1979 while she was filming her part in Quadrophenia.
Their first single was "Victim of the Riddle" in July 1979 which I have to admit I bought a couple of years later to possess something my friend would want to borrow. There's actually quite a nice Oriental keyboard riff running through it but the vocal is just theatrical off-key screeching . The subtitle of the version on the flip gives a clue that it's about vivisection but the lyrics would apply equally well to abortion. Either way, Toyah said she wanted to start off with something extreme and it certainly fitted the bill.
They quickly followed it up with an "alternative play" "Sheep Farming In Barnet" comprising 6 tracks for £1.50 which sounds like good value until you hear it. There are five helpings of tuneless Goth-punk wailing and the relatively palatable "Our Movie" whose rhythm track borrows heavily from Love Is The Drug. It was later expanded to album length by including both sides of the previous single and three new tracks which are slightly more accessible.
Toyah then got another lucky break, being written into an episode of Shoestring as a singer called "Toola" and allowed to showcase some of her own material during the episode. It wasn't enough to make the next single "Bird In Flight" a hit even though the hysteria is toned down somewhat and there's some tuneful keyboard work from Peter Bush.
Toyah's first real LP was "The Blue Meaning" released in June 1980. It was absolutely savaged by Smash Hits ' Red Starr and he was right on the money. It has no merit from start to finish . Toyah ludicrously overacts her way through a library list of schoolgirl obsessions dwelling on the occult and macabre while the band provide an uninspiring post-punk stew to back her up. That includes the single "Ieya" released at the same time , a strident but essentially meaningless jumble of phrases culled from the occult and science fiction. A re-recorded version was a minor hit in 1983. The album did reach number 40 in the charts.
Then the band got another TV break when ATV made a documentary about them including a large slice of a gig in Wolverhampton in June 1980. A recording of the concert was released in November as the live album Toyah! Toyah! Toyah! A live version of the episodic "Danced" was released as an unlikely single.
By the new year Safari were getting a bit itchy about her failure to really capitalise on all this exposure and perhaps the recent emergence of another singing punk actress in Hazel O Connor. They insisted she cover a recent song recorded by her producer Keith Hale with his own band Blood Donor. Toyah wasn't happy with the idea believing that the nature of "It's A Mystery" - chorus , tune, lyrics that hung together, that sort of thing- would alienate her existing fanbase but eventually went along with it. Nostalgia aside I still think it's a great song which manages to survive the usual reservations about the vocal performance - why does she have to shout the line " I SHOT !!! - in the dark" for instance ? Adrian Lee's keyboard work with the simple but haunting four note motif is the icing on the cake. Radio and TV completely ignored the other three tracks with good reason. "Revelations " is a tuneless synth pop updating of "Jack and Jill" which wanders from anti-nuclear fable to another shopping list of occult references without warning. "War Boys" sounds like she's been listening to her Jubilee co-star Adam Ant's recent work with its heavy drum pattern and warrior references. "Angels and Demons" is an occult fantasy co-penned with Hale and you can discern his influence in the structure and lyrical coherence but the song is a plodding bore that doesn't go anywhere.
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