TOYAH ON
BBC RADIO LINCOLNSHIRE
WITH CARLA GREENE
31.1.2019

CARLA GREENE: Toyah Willcox is performing at the Doncaster Dome (2.2.2019). From Punk Princess to cult stage actress to High Priestess of TV

She's uniquely gifted, I'll certainly say that, and has a varied career but when I spoke to Toyah, I asked her when she first knew she wanted to be a performer?

TOYAH: When I was about seven I very much knew I was going to be an actress and a singer. I wanted two separate careers. I'm not terribly interested doing stage musicals. I like to be an actress and I like to be a singer-songwriter. So it's taken a long time to hone that and I feel I'm continually honing it

Today I finished an album that comes out on the 5th of April this year with two or three singles are coming off it. So I'm very much driven by being a creative person. It's important to me that I write. It's important to me that I develop my technique as a singer and a writer. I think I was very much born with it. It wasn't kind of an idle desire. It was a burning need

CARLA: Your mum had been on the stage?

TOYAH: She worked from the age of 12 til she was 19. I think she really regretted giving it up. And growing up knowing that frustration - my mother was just not made to be a domestic housewife, which is what she was

It was the fashion back then, in the 50s and the 60s. Women being housewives was a very normal thing to do. I think my mother hated every minute. And living knowing that she was not a complete person because of this decision I think very much gave me my work ethic

CARLA: Was it having children that stopped her from performing?

TOYAH: She gave up because she had children and my dad didn't want her to work. It was expected of her not to work. I grew up in a very different environment. I grew up in the age of power women, when women were very much flying the flag for working and going for motherhood. I grew up in a completely different world. I had many more choices

You've got to remember my mother's generation came out of a war. It was a privilege for women not to have to work and to have safety and security and food and a home. It was a privilege for her to come out of the uncertainty of a war into that environment. I grew up almost two three generations later and very much wanted the world. So it was a very fast changing political domestic landscape

CARLA: I wonder perhaps because your mum didn't have the career she would've like to have had ... what did she think about you and your career?

TOYAH: I have no idea. Neither my father nor my mother communicated that much. It was another thing about their generation – the suppression of thought and the suppression of ideas. They were just functioning day to day so I have no idea

CARLA: You seem to have done so much. Did you have people to seek advice from? To get direction with what you wanted to do?

TOYAH: I was very very lucky in the beginning. I was spotted by two brothers called Bicat. One was a scriptwriter, one was a songwriter. They very much saw my potential. I was 17 years old. They cast me in a half an hour play on BBC2 where I had to co-write the music and play the lead. That very much was the beginning for me and if they hadn't spotted me I'm not sure I would've had my career path

And there was a lady, an actress on that particular play called "Glitter". She was called Doremy Vernon. She played my mother and she was a phenomenal feminist activist. She was just great! She got me my first agent, she taught me so much about the business. About being a woman and being strong and being able to say no if you didn't want to do something. She was just such an influence

Then when "Glitter" showed on TV Kate Nelligan, the actress, saw it. Kate and a German superstar called Maximilian Schell invited me to London and I joined the National Theatre to work with them. I lived with Kate for nine months

I was so lucky! These people were guardian angels to me. If I hadn't started at the top the way I did ... I think I would've had a much harder career experience

CARLA: Toyah Willcox there chatting about life growing up and the luck she had to start that career that has spanned over forty years. She's done so much, hasn't she? Written books as well, singer-songwriter, actress