TOYAH ON
BBC RADIO SCOTLAND
SUNDAY MORNING
WITH CATHY MACDONALD
11.1.2026
CATHY: Now, sharing her spiritual life with us this morning is punk icon, writer and cult actress of both stage and screen, Toyah Willcox. Toyah first came to prominence in Derek Jarman's punk film "Jubilee", a role in the iconic Brit flick "Quadrophenia" followed alongside roles opposite such legends as Katharine Hepburn and Sir Laurence Olivier
And it's no mystery why, over 40 years on, Toyah is still making music. 13 hit singles and 24 albums on the love of music, which began in church, no less, has never left her. We'll hear more about her new show, "Songs & Stories", which will be touring Scotland in June. But first, a very warm welcome to "Sunday Morning", Toyah. Hi!
TOYAH: Good morning to you. It's lovely to be with you today
CATHY: And it's a pleasure to have you join us. Faith has always played a part in your life, I believe, but it was through your school in Birmingham, as opposed to your family. What was it that appealed to young Toyah about religion?
TOYAH: I was very young. Obviously, I started school at the age of four and a half, and it was a Church of England School opposite a church. So going to church was a very regular part of my life. I loved the ornate grandeur of the church and the grandeur of the songs that we sang. They were very liberating as a child - to suddenly be in that environment where you focused on music and the voice and it meant a lot to me
I never queried or questioned it. I loved my religious education. We had scripture classes in my school, but we also were a very liberal school when it came to religion. Obviously, being in Birmingham, we had Hindu children - I don't remember Islamic children, but we always honored the families and the children and the religion that they were born into. I found it fascinating learning about Shintoism, learning about Buddhism, as well as Catholicism and Church of England
It just made so much sense to me. Not the literal meaning of it, but the wonder of it. I always found those lessons probably the most rewarding rather than being stuck in mass or stuck in history or stuck in geography. The ones I looked forward to were the ones that allowed my imagination to soar
CATHY: Well, it certainly wasn't a passing phase because when you were only 14 you decided to get baptised and confirmed. Was there anything specific that made you take that leap? And what meaning did it have for you?
TOYAH: I had a lot of meaning. I'm the youngest of three children and both my brother and sister were christened and I wasn't. My mother had a very tough life. She was very badly damaged as a child because her father murdered her mother. We didn't know this, but my mother was severely depressive and had no sense of joy. There was just nothing positive in what she had to say
She felt I wasn't her child. I was born at home. The midwife came to the house, helped my mother give birth to me and my mother said to the midwife, apparently, “this is not my child.” That summed up our relationship. So by the time I was 14 and very free willed. I mean, my goodness, nothing could stop me. I was determined to get to London to be an actress and be a singer
My mother felt that because I hadn't been christened, I was possessed. So I went into religious education in Birmingham every evening, just one on one with our vicar across the road from the school and I was christened. My history teacher, Mrs. Beard was my godmother because no one wanted anything to do with me at this point in time
My family are not believers at all. My parents were there. They were gobsmacked, and then I got confirmed and to be honest I was ridiculed for this decision. My family have no belief whatsoever but I was utterly determined not to be bullied into making a joke of religion. It was obviously so important to the world that we are here on this planet and we're capable of prayer and we're capable of belief. I was brought up, thankfully, by my school to respect all religions
CATHY: It's very interesting because we're going to be discussing in the second hour of the show that very subject - talking about bringing faith into the public arena, how comfortable people feel discussing their personal faith and how comfortable people feel listening to it - so that's very, very interesting
For you, clearly, hugely important on your own but in many senses within the family. I know you've spoken about your difficult relationship with your mom. Knowing what you do know now and you know her own traumatic childhood - do you think you were trying to repair that relationship in terms of being baptized because she felt that perhaps that would have been . . . – no?
TOYAH: I mean, if I knew what I know now I would have fought all my life to get my mother help but you're talking about the early 1970's where you couldn't really talk about mental health. If my mother said something she was a superior therefore she was right. If I could go back to that 14 year old self and know what she'd been through I'd have fought tooth and nail to get her help so she could talk about what happened to her. She never even told my dad
So we all believed we were living with someone who was completely irrational, which was true, but we couldn't help her. So by the time I was 14 I was so rebellious. I was running away from home. I just did not want to be in the same building as my mother. As soon as I was 16 I started working and by the time I was 18 I left home
It was a very damaged relationship but all the time there was love there and this is my connection with my Christianity. For me love is the greatest power every living thing has, including animals. We are all emotional, deep thinking, deeply tuned creatures, and love is the compass that brings everything together and helps us find everything
Even though my mother could not emotionally support me in any way or say anything positive to me, there was love there and that's the bond that held us together. It's the bond that kept us together right through her life but it was a very fractured and an incredibly difficult relationship which just drove me away. But I never stopped loving her and I believe in her way she was trying to love me
CATHY: That's very insightful. I know that faith is a part of your life. These days you attend church, but you also enjoy religious buildings in the sense that you believe they maybe hold memories or energy, perhaps. Sacred spaces are important to you
TOYAH: I think prayer is incredibly important because I think we are very unique in our ability to pray. I think it's part of the human condition. You can call it meditation. You can call it deep meditation. You could call it prayer. But if we are able to communicate with this remarkable existence on this remarkable plane, we are able to bring the future to us
I've always loved churches. I used to live in Menton on the Italian border, right up until the Covid lockdown. There was the most remarkable church in Menton, which is in France. I would just go there every day, and it wasn't so much to hear the scriptures. It was to be in the building and to feel what humanity had done to that building
I think when you've got places of worship, and even going back through history before Christianity, places of worship are very, very powerful and very rewarding and I believe the power of prayer can change things for the better
CATHY: Life after death for you is also something you believe is intrinsically linked to a changing relationship with time. Can you tell us more about this?
TOYAH: Yeah, the only people I get angry with is atheists who try to drum it into me that our energy doesn't continue. I just think it's blindingly obvious that we are divine sparks in human form, and that spark never dissipates. So I believe we're here to experience time. In eternity you can't experience time, but you can revisit when you've been here. This is a plane that vibrates at a certain level. You've got the fourth dimension, which is about time
For me, eternity is where time just doesn't travel. So to come here allows us to develop and become stronger, for that spark to become stronger. I do not believe that Toyah Willcox is going to live forever and I find huge comfort in that because I've been Toyah Willcox for long enough. This whole thing about moving on and experiencing new things is about the whole experience and energy of this universe and greater kind of solar system. So I just cannot fathom when people can't experience that we are more than the flesh
I felt that for a long, long time - even as a child I actually used to freak my mother out that I had this deep, deep belief of otherness and connection to her past and to my father's past. It's an ongoing bond and the greatest thing we can honor it with is love
I listened to your last speaker who was absolutely fascinating - that algorithms within social media are driving us apart. We cannot allow this to happen to us because the greatest thing we can give this world in our lives is love. And whatever you believe in, whatever you're born into, love is the greatest language we have
CATHY: Well, we're going to talk more to Toyah Willcox but we're going to pause for some music. You've chosen David Bowie's “Life On Mars” and you can tell me about why or why it's significant after we've heard it
The song plays
CATHY: Remembering David Bowie who died 10 years ago yesterday. Great track. Why is that particularly specific to you?
TOYAH: I think it means a lot to my generation. It's an astounding piece of music. I mean, musically it's just absolutely perfect, but the sentiment of it is dystopian and it's very, very broken. I remember hearing it and falling in love with the romanticism of it. Certainly fell madly in love with David Bowie and the fact that he was otherworldly and that you look up to the stars and wonder what experiences they are having, i.e is there life on Mars?
But for me that brokenness of seeing that everything around you is not working in your favor and giving you the strength to just walk away from it. That was very powerful to me. The song became a lucky charm as well. I sang it at my very first audition for a BBC Two drama called “Glitter” when I was 17. I got the part and I ended up at the National Theatre
Then I ended up working with (Derek) Jarman and Katharine Hepburn and I put it all down to the luck of that song. So it's very deeply embedded in me as a masterful, brilliant song but also something that has opened doors for me
CATHY: Marking a milestones in your life, because as you said you couldn't wait to leave home. You left Birmingham, you went to London and that would have been during very exciting years, because I think we're similar ages, to be honest
You were a teen hair model. You became a drama graduate and then of course all of this excitement with the National Theatre started. Tell me a little about your Mayhem warehouse years in the early 80's, as it was at the centre of the punk art scene, wasn't it? That must have been exciting!
TOYAH: I moved into this warehouse. It was actually about 1976 - it could have been '77. It's a long time ago! It was just an empty warehouse and it had really thick, almost two inch thick glass panes everywhere because it was used to make acid. So we used those panes as flooring. But very quickly this became the hottest place in London
We had people like Iggy Pop rehearse there, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Hazel O'Connor formulated the music for the movie “Breaking Glass” there. It was the hot spot. I remember we used to rent it out to Steve Strange (above with Toyah) every weekend or every other weekend and he'd have four day parties from Friday to Monday. They were 24 hour parties. Every cycle of the day he'd be in there making music. I can remember seeing Boy George in the audience, (and) Leigh Bowery
It was in intensely crazy. I cannot tell you. We would have up to 450 people in this very small area. Spandau Ballet gave their first ever live performance there. It was a really uncomfortable place to be. It had one toilet, no door on the bathroom (Cathy laughs) Yet people loved being there
They found it inspiring and it attracted a community that went on to create the new wave movement, the New Romantic movement and the kind of real glamorous rock and roll that started to develop in the early 80's. It all kind of happened in this building (Toyah at Mayhem, below) which had no heating and one tap
CATHY: Yeah, but art will find art. It must have been exciting. The names you've just listed off there are so well known and but at the time, clearly, very young and waiting for their break. You met your husband, a musician and founder member of King Crimson, Robert Fripp when you were both stars, but your love story is quite an unusual one, isn't it?
TOYAH: It's very unusual. I don't think it could ever happen again. He had a premonition. My husband has dreams that become very real. He had a premonition that his diary wasn't filling for this three week period. It was about 1984 or '85. He was living in New York and he thought “there's a reason for this. I'm going to go back to England”
He spent time with his mum. He felt that he was going to meet his wife so he came back to England. We were both sharing a taxi - this is pure coincidence - with our management going to a Nordoff Robbins music event. It's a music charity in London. And he realised I was his wife (Cathy laughs) and he proposed. It was just like out of the blue. I said, “well, can I get to know you first?” And he said, “well, you can, but I know you're my wife.” So he proposed in the first week we met each other
CATHY: That's incredible. What did you say? I mean, obviously you said "yes" (laughs)
TOYAH: Well, it's a really complex thing, because we made an album together. We did a charity album ("The Lady Or The Tiger", 1986) together to raise money for a children's school in Washington DC. We did very quickly fall in love with each other and by the end of that album he said, “I absolutely know you're my wife. We're together for life. Will you marry me?” And I said, “well, I still would like to get to know you.” So within nine months we were married
CATHY: Oh, that's amazing. That's wonderful. And so hopeful for anyone listening out there - at the beginning of a new year you never know what's around the corner. We must talk about your your UK tour. 49 dates, "Stories & Songs". You're heading to Scotland in June. Tell me a little about it?
TOYAH: Well, I'm really looking forward to coming to Scotland with this because Scotland has always been incredibly good to me and I can't wait to be with these particular audiences. This is a show that has two acts. There's music, there's very much the hits. And I tell stories that I don't otherwise get the chance to tell. So I've written a book called “Meteorite”, which is a visual autobiography of my life going behind the scenes
So within the very intimate settings of these venues that I'm going to be doing in Scotland and and the rest of the UK I want to be able to tell you stories that have developed me as a person but I've never had the luxury of time to tell. Like working with David Bowie – David Bailey, the photographer. I will talk about experiences with David Bowie. They're very few, but very powerful
I just want to go right behind the scenes and be really insightful. I find that with my shows a lot of daughters bring their mothers or vice versa. It's one of these shows that is inspirational. I very rarely talk about this in the press but I'm a child of disability, which was very problematic for my mother, who was a very beautiful dancer when she was young
So the fact that I was so rebellious was because I was not going to be pigeonholed into someone that could not move forward through life because I was physically disabled. So it's very inspirational, very open, very truthful. And also very funny, because there's stories like when I was 18 I got arrested in Trafalgar Square for busking on Christmas Day
I'm telling these stories about always being in trouble and always being in the wrong yet being in the right place at the right time. So that's what it's going to be about. Lots and lots of laughter, lots of insightful stories and brilliant music
CATHY: Absolutely and people are looking forward to it. I know I am, certainly after hearing this. Toyah, it's been a joy talking to you this morning. Thank you for sharing your spiritual life with us
TOYAH: Thank you, Cathy
Listen to the interview
