TOYAH ON
BBC RADIO MANCHESTER
WITH BECKY WANT
31.10.2017

BECKY: Toyah Willcox was a punk icon in the 80’s. She has dedicated her life to music and film and theatre. Never stopped working. She's back on stage in Manchester, with an adaptation of the Derek Jarman cult classic “Jubilee”, which first came out for the Queen's Jubilee. Toyah said she can't believe it's 40 years ago.

TOYAH: It's a long time ago - to be completely accurate with these memories, I was 19 years old at the time -

BECKY: And you're not 19 now . . .

TOYAH: No! (laughs) I’m about to turn turn 60!

BECKY: You look amazing!

TOYAH: Thank you . . .

BECKY: You really, really do look amazing. You're about to turn 60. How does that feel?

TOYAH: It’s great!

BECKY: Is it?

TOYAH: I mean I'm still playing to 8000 people a night so … I do about four concerts a week throughout the whole year so that's a few hundred concerts a year. It's really good, I'm a performer, it's what I do and my voice is getting better and better. I can still do it. I'm not losing any notes.

So 60 to me just means that I've gathered a lot of information and a lot of wisdom. I'm not fighting kind of physical slowness at all. So I just intend to carry on.

BECKY: (laughs) Well, what's the secret then? Of not fighting physical slowness?

TOYAH: I don't know! Everyone says . . . you get to 60, you want to retire, you want to slow down. I don't feel like that at all but I've never felt how we've been told to feel anyway. I never felt maternal. I've never felt kind of growing old, I just think life is too exciting.

BECKY: Let's go back to “Jubilee” and the punk era. Was it a very bohemian experience to make the film?

TOYAH: It was incredibly bohemian. We shot the film around a warehouse near Tower Bridge in a bombed out area of London, which is now one of the most expensive real estate areas in the world.

So the whole irony about this film - coming back into such a different world - is very powerful to me. It was a big bohemian experience because the base was Derek Jarman's apartment, which was a whole floor in a warehouse. It was next door to the artist Andrew Logan.

People were popping in who were so luminary in the shaping of culture as we know it today. Brian Eno, Richard O'Brian. As I said, Andrew Logan. Sandra Rhodes was around, John Maitri the filmmaker - they were all present. And they're all by their nature bohemians so it felt as though we were having a mad, crazy party, when in fact I think Derek was very organised as a filmmaker -

BECKY: Didn't you have money problems?

TOYAH: Well, every film has money problems. I'm shooting a movie this month, while rehearsing “Jubilee”, that has been greenlit and had the rug pulled (from) under it, greenlit again. It's so common in film. With “Jubilee”, Derek had a budget of £360,000, which it was quite a healthy budget for a film like “Jubilee”. But he kept running up against people not keeping their promises and giving him the money.

And I got a phone call from Derek Jarman before we even started shooting saying he had to cut my role from the film, because he had to bring things below budget and I was heartbroken and he sensed that and he tracked me down two weeks later and he said “look, I know that you really want to do this film and I know how hurt you are that your character is gone. So I've put my fee back into the film to put you as the character of “Mad” back in" -

BECKY: That's real belief, isn't it?

TOYAH: It's astonishing and it was so generous of him, and there were times when we were filming where he couldn't even buy us a sandwich to eat at lunchtime -

BECKY: You went hungry . . . (chuckles)

TOYAH: Well, we didn't go hungry because people are by nature generous and people did everything they could to make it possible for us to continue working

(After the break)

BECKY: Toyah was only 19 when she starred in Derek Jarman's punk film “Jubilee”. She was very much a part of the punk scene and she said she was attracted to it because in those days it was very inclusive

TOYAH: I … how can I put this? Going into showbusiness - as a woman - there's expectations. The first thing that’s looked for you’re slim. You're tall. You're beautiful. I was neither of those when I was 19 and punk was the first time I wasn't called fat or ugly or a stupid cow.

It was … you have an idea. We want to know your idea. You have an opinion. We want to know your opinion. I found it incredible. It was the first time I went onto the dance floor in a club and wasn't laughed at. The first time I saw disabled people on dancefloors -

BECKY: Because you yourself - you had curvature of the spine, didn’t you?

TOYAH: Yeah, so I had one leg two inches longer than the other so I was always ungainly. Punk didn't see that. Punk saw the person. So I found it incredibly feminist. Very liberating. And it was the first time, as a 19 year old - I felt I was allowed to truly be myself. There wasn't a voice on my shoulder saying "be ladylike. Lose weight". You've got to be this, you've got to be anything other than who you are naturally. It saw you. Punk saw you as an individual.

BECKY: It's interesting though, Toyah, you talk about it like that but for many people who weren't involved . . . it was quite scary

TOYAH: Oh, it was definitely divisive and separatist in the beginning. It didn't want anything to do with conformity, it didn't want anything to do with “straights” and what I mean by that was men in suits, doing the daily commute.

It was definitely very very divided and it felt that way, but I think every new generation coming up - all these brilliant teenagers we have around the world - need something to belong to. And for me it was punk.

(After the break)

BECKY: More from Toyah Willcox, who's back on stage in Manchester, for something that is a very hot ticket, actually. After Manchester it’s going on to London. It's the 40th anniversary production of the punk film “Jubilee”. This is what she had to say about the new version, which is on at the Royal Exchange Theatre.

TOYAH: The original was a story of an all girl gang, who were a group of murderers, drug takers, sexually promiscuous. Well, in today's language that doesn't translate. We are used to aggression, we are now used to extreme violence. We're almost numbed by it. The world is a very shaky place.

So the way Chris Goode, the writer director, has brought it into the present is the majority of the cast - in real life - are gender fluid, gender neutral. They are also quite activist, as people they're politically very active and very very astute. And that has been brought into the play.

So you have speeches about how dangerous it is to be transfemme on the street, and that transfemmes are being murdered for how they look. And that all comes into the play along with the argument about Universal Credit, about how poor people are, about how students are instantly in debt. It's been brought up to modern day.

It's still an incredibly violent oversexd play. There's a lot of nudity, there's a lot of sex, and there's seven murders and they’re graphic, it's a graphic play. I'm playing Queen Elizabeth the 1st. And I'm marginalised as soon as I arrive. Within the first scene I mocked. And I'm not respected at all within the story, it's like “you have caused this Britain today.”

Everyone gets seen in this play from the Grenfell Tower victims right through to the victims of abuse, to the victims of the system, to the victims of the drug lords. Everyone is seen. It's an abusive, rude, production with nudity, sex and violence. But I come away from it in tears because there is a beauty about it that makes it incredibly clever.

BECKY: The Royal Exchange, from the 2nd of November, which is very soon. How are you feeling?

TOYAH: I can't wait! The space is so special. It's performed in the round, and the audience are almost sitting among us. They're in for a surprise! It's challenging. It's great.

You can listen to the interview HERE