TOYAH ON
BBC RADIO SCOTLAND
THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON SHOW
WITH WITH RACHEL McCORMACK
24.4.2020

RACHEL: If you were watching BBC One's Children In Need And Comic Relief Big Night In last night you might've spotted pop punk legend Toyah Willcox cutting some moves on the dance floor because she was taking part in the Strictly Keep Dancing Challenge. She mentioned it on twitter. The singer and actress has been re-issuing her back catalogue over the last few months, including a recent album re-working In The Court Of The Crimson Queen. 

If you follow on her on twitter you have no doubt been thrilled by her various lockdown antics in cahoots with her husband Robert Fripp. They've been getting up to all sorts. Dressing up as bees, doing the tango at lunch time. Robert Fripp of course equally legendary, worked with David Bowie, formed King Crimson. 

So I caught up with Toyah, this was a few weeks back, just before the lockdown if my memory serves and I started by asking her about the impact of punk on her music and on her acting 

TOYAH: It was about everything, it was a lifestyle, it was a lifestyle commitment. You couldn't just become a punk to go to a gig, you had to be punk 24 hours a day. It was a radical change of shaking up attitudes within the industry. 

It was one of the most exciting times I can ever remember in music so it was quite remarkable and then you had film makers like Derek Jarman, who were very punky in their approach to film making, along with many other brilliant people. I remember it as being vibrant and so continuous in its creativity – there was never a hiatus at all

RACHEL: You mentioned Derek Jarman there and of course we can not mention Jubilee and your character Mad. Where did you get involved and how did you first meet Derek Jarman?

TOYAH: I was at the National Theatre when Derek Jarman started making Jubilee and a friend of mine, a wonderful actor, who was starring in Chariots Of Fire, Ian Charleson was also at the National and he said "I think you should come and meet my friend Derek Jarman because you've got a lot in common." And that meeting was the beginning of a great friendship and a deep deep love. 

Derek was very protective towards me and I just loved him so much and he believed in me as a creative and I went on to make The Tempest with him, playing Miranda (below) in Shakespeare's Tempest so we had a wonderful wonderful relationship 

RACHEL: And this of course – we're talking about 78'-79' at this point – and this anarchic celebration Jubilee and then of course The Tempest. It's interesting because Jarman is a revolutionary in terms of culture and film but I was wondering if his take on Shakespeare shed any new light on Shakespeare himself to you (Toyah laughs)? Because I'm thinking - if you fast forward to 91' and you're still singing, you've got Ophelia's Shadow as an LP. Did Shakespeare himself become a bit of an influence?

TOYAH: The Tempest became an influence. And what I mean by that – when Derek asked me to do it I said "I've never done Shakespeare, I've been Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream (Rachel laughs) in school" but that's you know … so Jarman led me into Shakespeare and The Tempest which is dripping with Masonic and Illuminati secrets being revealed to the point where there's talk about Shakespeare being bumped off because of it -

RACHEL: Yeah!

TOYAH: It just drew me in, it was absolutely fascinating. A brilliant brilliant play

RACHEL: And I love the fact that again – we should mention Quadrophenia 79' and you're with Phil Daniels, Sting … but also were always in music as well and were those different creative outlets both differently fulfilling for you?

TOYAH: I've been doing music and acting in tangent since I was 17. So I was at The National when I was 18 and I formed the band while I was at the National Theatre. I deliberately wanted to do that, I deliberately wanted two independent careers and I was never interested in doing stage musicals. They're incredibly demanding, to sing eight times a week, the way those singers do. I know it's slightly beyond my physical capacity. I wanted two independent careers as a rock star and as a film actress and that's what I strived for 

RACHEL: But we should say in terms of being kind of artistic and creative and subverting or questioning ideas and having fun with that perhaps as well, In The Court Of The Crimson Queen is of course a nod to King Crimson's In The Court Of The Crimson King, Robert Fripp being a trailblazer for them. Was that something you spoke about, at what point did that become a title?

TOYAH: No (laughs) He has nicked my ideas - we've been married for 33 years and I absolutely love him to pieces and he's nicked all my sayings, he's nicked all my – I've come up with lyrics or song titles (Rachel laughs) and they suddenly appear in his work. I'm an art collector, he's even used my art for his album covers -

RACHEL: Really?!

TOYAH: So we went with In The Court Of The Crimson Queen, my co-writer Simon Darlow and I. Then when it was officially In The Court Of The Crimson Queen I just told him and he said "I'll sue you!" and I said "Yeah? Just try!" (Rachel laughs) 



 
RACHEL: Yeah! "You owe a few as well!" It's lovely to kind of think about that you managed to take something back but also I'm thinking about Robert Fripp and his involvement with Bowie and it takes me to my personal formative memories of you because I think for a lot of people, when they talk about their ultimate Top Of The Pops moment they go back to David Bowie, they go back to Starman, but for me as a kid it was seeing you on Top Of The Pops performing It's A Mystery (above)

TOYAH: Wow!

RACHEL: I couldn't get over it, sat in my little bungalow in Stirling. It was absolutely mind blowing. I wondered what your recollections were? Was that a moment when you thought wow – in terms of your pop career (Toyah The Band, below) - this is huge -

TOYAH: Yeah

RACHEL: Or not

TOYAH: Oh yeah! I can't tell you – I didn't fall asleep the night before. We were told we got Top Of The Pops I think about three days before we actually recorded it and it's everything I'd ever wanted. It was climbing to the top of the mountain and seeing the view and I was terrified.

The clothes I wanted to wear weren't ready. My clothes designer Melissa Caplan made everything by hand, painted everything by hand and she just wasn't ready for this day so I wore a dress (below) which was very unlike me by a designer called Willy Brown who dressed Bowie for the Heroes album and I think the dress was as much a turning point for my career as the song because it feminised me in the right way. It was beautiful, it was strange, it was hand painted. Half of it was see through panels and the rest was taffeta. It was absolutely gorgeous. 

But I was terrified. I was so terrified I could hardly move and I think again that added to the charisma of that performance because every performance after that I'm just jumping around like a Jack-In-A-Box and I've got a lot of energy but that particular performance I was anchored to the ground by fear 

RACHEL: Oh my goodness!

TOYAH: I was so proud because I knew my family were watching and it proved that all the times since the age of seven that I said I was going to be a singer that I was right

RACHEL: Absolutely. I was an interesting song as well. There's an uncertainty there that maybe isn't in some of your other work. Were you aware of that? Was that something that you wanted to celebrate or to explore?

TOYAH: No, I was terrified of it. It's about vulnerability after I'd spent years being Boadicea, being absolutely undefeatable. When I heard the song I said well, this isn't me. It's about doubt, it's about vulnerability – I don't do either of those.

So I went into the studio with the original writer Keith Hale, because as an original song it was a 12 minute vocal and then about a 28 minute instrumental, so we set about arranging it and I wrote the lyrics for the second verse and we made it into the kind of single format which had to have the hit chorus and the middle eight. 

And I still thought "nah, this isn't right, this isn't me!" (Rachel laughs) But we started playing it on a university tour in March 1981 (It was Jan/Feb 81') (below) and I thought this will be the proof of the pudding. They're going to hate it! And the audiences loved it! The rest is history 

RACHEL: When I was explaining to my kids I was very excited to be interviewing you today and they know your early work and I was playing In The Court Of The Crimson Queen frequently when it came out -

TOYAH: Bless you!

RACHEL: But they of course know and love you so dearly because of Teletubbies ...

TOYAH: Yeah, I know (they both laugh) And Brum for those who are old enough

RACHEL: I know! How did that come about? Did you have any idea when you were approached how huge that would become?

TOYAH: No … I was doing voices for all of the series of Brum created by Anne Wood and she went on to do the pilot and create Teletubbies. She uses child psychologists to build her ideas. In The Night Garden. She spent decades using child psychologists to create all of that. And when I'd finished doing Brum, she contacted me and said could I come in and do the voice for the pilot of something new called Teletubbies and she was terribly terribly frightened about it. She said the BBC don't want to take the project, she'd mortgaged he house for £60 000 to pay for the pilot and she just thought she was going to lose her home. 

Now miraculously the BBC lost a programme which meant they had to take Teletubbies and it meant that as soon as Teletubbies showed it became a worldwide hit and Anne had to spend the next ten years of her life making hundreds and hundreds of programmes of Teletubbies to go around the world. 

So do you ask me did I know it was going to be that successful? (Rachel laughs) The answer's no. I said to Anne when I did the opening and closing lines as the narrator, I said if children don't like this … students are going to be loving it! (Rachel laughs) It's like Magic Roundabout. They're going to be on the wacky baccy and they're just going to be watching this day in and day out!

RACHEL: There you go, Toyah on the wonder of Teletubbies