Chart peak : 54
After her breakthrough year in 1981 , Toyah's commercial decline was quite rapid and she never made the Top 20 again. Toyah the group were dissolved at the end of 1983 but she was able to get a solo deal with Portrait and scored a couple of hits from her 1985 album "Minx". In 1986 she stunned the music world by marrying prog-rock guitarist and egghead Robert Fripp ; perhaps the punk priestess had been a closet hippy all along ?
I've been dreading this one coming round. Martha and the Muffins' Echo Beach is one of my favourite records of all time , the absolute apogee of the late seventies new wave sound. Toyah ritually murders it by turning it into a synthpop dirge with a robotic, but still off-key vocal, that makes her sound like a female Max Headroom. Producer Mike Hedges either passed out with the phasing button still on or he's using it as a deliberate distraction technique. You suspect that Toyah wearing skimpier clothing than hitherto had the same purpose. This is one of the worst covers of all time and anyone who bought it needs their head examining.
The follow up single "Moonlight Dancing", a boring four minutes worth of synth throb that doesn't go anywhere , didn't chart. Neither did the parent album "Desire". With the failure of a "pop" album , Toyah decided to take an experimental route with her next one. 1988's "Prositute" is a feminist concept album without gaps between the tracks and eschewing verse chorus structures. There are vague echoes of Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, The The , Peter Gabriel and other artists well out of her league but it's uninteresting self-indulgence from someone taking themselves far too seriously.
With her stage career unaffected by her declining musical fortunes , Toyah's recordings became more obscure in the nineties. Her next album "Ophelia's Shadow" made with the discreet aid of Fripp was released in 1991. It's less bracing than its predecessor but terminally boring, an aimless wander in Peter Gabriel territory without a decent tune in sight. She also released an album with Fripp and two other musicians as Sunday All Over The World. I've only heard two tracks from the album "Kneeling At The Shrine" but they sound a bit more interesting than her solo record. In 1993 she went out on tour and was flogging a cassette, "Leap!" which included some new punky tracks alongside re-recordings of old material with her new band. She was also the guest vocalist on six tracks of the eponymous album by obscure German prog-rock outfit Kiss of Reality.
Her 1994 album "Dreamchild" was something different as she had very little writing input , most of the tracks being composed by producer Ian Bennett. You would question the judgement of anyone who thought of Toyah as the ideal vocalist for their project but the end result is listenable Enigma-style dance pop with a considerable amount of the vocals being spoken word.
Her next couple of LPs "Looking Back" ( 1995 ) and "The Acoustic Album" ( 1996 ) were re-workings of older material.
In 1997 she added another string to her bow by becoming the narrator of Teletubbies , a more popular series than Brum , her first attempt at childrens' narration six years earlier. In 1999 she had the lead part in another kids TV programme, Barmy Aunt Boomerang. With her TV career booming music took more of a back seat than ever.
In 2002 she made some new tracks available through her website as the "Little Tears of Love " EP though this was restricted to 1,000 signed copies. She also did the Here And Now eighties revival tour that year. The following year she made them more widely available on the mini-album "Velvet Lined Shell" , released to coincide with her appearance on the second I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here in which she was fourth to be eliminated. The album is heavily influenced by Garbage but the stripped down sound courtesy of indie band Sweet Billy Pilgrim suits the songs and it's quite palatable.
She did further eighties revival tours in 2004 and 2006 , supervising a reissue of her singles for Safari inbetween. In 2007 she released a new single "Latex Messiah" a glam-flavoured stomp with a disciplined vocal , competent but uninteresting. She also formed a new band The Humans for a tour of Estonia, having persuaded the Estonian Embassy who had wanted Fripp ( now retired ) that they should have her instead.
In 2008 she released her last solo album to date "In The Court of the Crimson Queen". It's the most straightforward pop album of her career. Anno Domini has clearly reduced Toyah's vocal range but in her case that's a plus; she can't shriek like she used to and that's pushed her towards the mainstream. The tracks veer between modern glam a la Goldfrapp ( "Sensational" , "Come ") , Verve-style indie anthems ( "Heal Ourselves", "Bad Man") and the odd semi-acoustic number ("Hyperventilate"). Apart from the odd trite rhyme none of it's awful, none of it's essential.
Since then Toyah has mainly concentrated on The Humans when not touring the oldies. They recorded an album in Seattle in 2008, released as "We Are The Humans" initially in Estonia only in May 2009. A few months later it was released in the UK with a tacked-on cover of "These Boots Are Made For Walking" released as a single. Despite the presence of Fripp on guitar it's dreadful. As such it's an appropriate taster for the album. Apart from the occasional input from Fripp , Toyah's partners in the project were a bassist and drummer and so the LP is seriously melodically undernourished. One sparse, tuneless alt-rock dirge follows another to very boring effect. They made videos for one or two of the tracks ; the one for "Quicksilver" features a half-naked Toyah with a guy young enough to be her son rubbing her bare breasts. It has to be said she's in good shape for her age but it doesn't compensate for the turgid music underneath. The band also recorded with some Estonian musicians as This Fragile Moment.
In 2011 she was guest vocalist on a single by Yomanda called "Fallen", a sparse electro-pop ditty that doesn't really go anywhere. She was also in a film "The Power Of Three" and re-worked the track "21st Century Supersister" from the "...Crimson Queen" album for release as a single. Then came the second Humans album, "Sugar Rush". It's only different from its predecessor in shifting towards abstract electronica for the backing tracks and if anything it's even more boring.
In 2014 The Humans released their third album, "Strange Tales". With seven tracks and clocking in at under half an hour it's considerably shorter than its predecessors but that's not the only reason it's more palatable. The album features some additional sax and string players to flesh out the sound with some melody and there's a sense of urgency that was previously missing. "Amnesia" is particularly good.
Like everything else she's released since "Echo Beach" , it failed to chart anywhere ( it should be noted that, even at the height of her fame here, she struggled for hits anywhere else ). That's almost 30 years and , even in the knowledge it's funded by a buoyant TV and stage career, you have to admire that bloody-minded determination to keep putting out material for which there's no appreciable audience. It's a shame so little of it is listenable.
I'm a huge fan of the original "Echo Beach" too - the sentiment still rings true 30+ years on... I'd rather not listen to this.
ReplyDeleteHowever, had no idea she narrated "Brum", which I did watch as a kid. I actually never made the Brum/Brummie connection! Just assumed it was a onomatopoeia thing... doh.