TOYAH ON
POPNERD
WITH HOLLY CARNEGIE
26.2.2026

HOLLY: My guest today is English singer songwriter, actress and presenter Toyah Willcox. Toyah rose to prominence in the late 1970's and early 1980's as a distinctive voice of the new wave and punk movement. Fronting the band Toyah, she achieved major UK success with her 1981 album “Anthem” and hit singles including “It's A Mystery” and “Thunder In The Mountains”, which both peaked at number four in the UK Singles Chart, respectively, and earned her multiple Brit Award nominations

Beyond music, Willcox has maintained a diverse career in film, theatre and television, performing on stage at the National Theatre and appearing alongside Phil Daniels, Ray Winston and Sting in The Who's rock opera film “Quadrophenia”. She is married to guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson, and we do discuss in this chat their creative and rather humorous videos they post on social media

We touch upon Toyah's life growing up in this chat, her surprising thoughts on AI in songwriting and where on earth she gets all that energy from. Welcome to "Popnerd", Toyah. Thank you so much for joining me today

TOYAH: It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me

HOLLY: This for you is a big year of performances. You've got Henley on Thames, you're performing at "Rewind", you've got some Christmas shows, but you start things off with this marvelous tour called "An evening with Toyah - Songs and Stories". What can we expect with this show?

TOYAH: It's a visual show. Because everything I do I prefer to be visual. It's how I work. Music for me is a very visual thing. When video came into being around 1981, when it really took off with MTV, it was fantastic for me because I just have always written music with visuals in my head. So with the “Songs And Stories” tour we have a small screen and the visuals will be up there, but they'll be synced to what I'm doing

So the whole thing, like when I sing a song, will be synced to the official video. When I'm telling stories about working with Katharine Hepburn and Lawrence Olivier (below with Toyah, Greta Scacchi and Roger Rees in the 1984 film "The Ebony Tower") there will be photos to accompany it

Also there'll be some behind the scenes photos. So I want to immerse my audience in my experience, and also inspire the audience to believe in themselves. We live in a world of saturation. I think many people have dreams that they've never visited, or ideas that they've just let go of as soon as they thought of them

I just want people to go out of my show on this particular tour and think “oh, my goodness, I really want to have a go at that. I really want to see if I can do something in my life that I've always intended to do but have never been encouraged to do”. I'm really into that. I'm hoping that I'll inspire people to just look at their own creativity


HOLLY: This is a message that has been woven through a lot of your music throughout your whole career. I'm just thinking of "I Want To Be Free" or something like that. I can imagine you performing that and feeling the same sentiment that you had when you first performed it

TOYAH: Well, I feel it even more now. That song means more to me now than ever before - but so do most of my hit songs because it's a shared experience, yet again, with the audience. When I sing, “I Want To Be Free”, "It's A Mystery" or even "Rebel Run" I see the audience being taken right back to a memory of old, which they're revisiting. It's highly emotional

Most of the time I'm looking out at people that sometimes are in tears because I've taken them back to being with their parents or their first kiss. I always say with “I Want To Be Free” I hope it takes you back to your first detention (Holly laughs)

But that song is not a novelty song. It's a song from a severely dyslexic human being. Even my parents told me I would amount to nothing, let alone my educational background and that song really means something to me. It's got such truth in it

The most prized memory I have of this song is in 2018 when Derek Jarman's movie “The Jubilee” was brought to the stage by a gender neutral cast. They chose that song as a representative of who and what they are in their generation. That was just so profoundly powerful for me

HOLLY: It's really interesting because you touched upon your dyslexia as a child. I'm really interested to go back to your childhood. You were someone who really championed the arts and acting and singing and music. Did you come from a musical household? Was that something that was really encouraged?

TOYAH: When I was very young I had absolutely no idea that I was perceived as someone with learning difficulties. So my very young childhood was very naive but incredibly happy. My mother was a professional dancer from the age of 12 till 19, when she got married. She toured alongside people like Max Wall, the comedian, and many of the vaudeville stars of the time. She was a very beautiful woman. She was like a beauty queen as well

So I inherited some of that. My father loved music, but he was tone deaf. He used to put on the Coldstream Guards (an regiment in the British Army) every morning and sing along to it but in one note. There was only one note and it used to drive me bonkers (Holly laughs)

So in my childhood I remember as being very happy, but then it just took a sinister turn. In the early to mid 60's there was a stock market crash and my father was hit by that. So by the time I was 12 my parents were going to lose the home and lose everything. By the time I was 16 I was the breadwinner and that's fine. I remained the breadwinner right through to when they died. I bought the family home so they could stay in in their home. I bought them a retirement home and I financially supported them

I thought that's what I was supposed to do. I don't resent that, but it made life very challenging. I could never have a day off. That feeling of "I will be punished by losing my home if I ever take time off" has never left me. But creatively that desire to be as creative as I am came from being told I will amount to nothing


HOLLY: Wow, that's crazy. That's just crazy, isn't it?

TOYAH: Well, today I'm so inspired by people telling me I'm no good at what I do (Holly laughs) Honestly, if you want me to work twice as hard as I already work, tell me I'm no good at what I do because I will prove you wrong

HOLLY: But then that's what helped create the unique Toyah sound. That's what brought you that amazing sound and that sound world. That punky energy that you had in the late 70's, early 80's period

TOYAH: I agree. But I think one of the biggest things that contributed to my creativity, and I do a lot of creative writing today, was discovering the book “The Lord of the Rings”. It took me three years to read. Literature really meant a lot to me, and that literature, again, was visual. When I read a book it's a film in my head. That emotion and that drive and that endorphin lift from reading a great book just makes me want to write music and sing and storytell through music

HOLLY: I know in your songs you've referenced Shakespeare and Carl Jung and all sorts of figures. I'm going to hazard a guess here. Are you the kind of person who writes lyrics first before you write a melody when you're writing a song?

TOYAH: In this present day I do write lyrics first. When I was contributing as a co-writer on “Posh Pop” (the 2021 album) I was writing on guitar and coming up with chord sequences first. It's a little of both. I have to say, with the advent of AI I can put lyrics into AI and they're teaching me how to scan them. What I mean by that is I sometimes have to dilute my lyrics for how I scan as a singer. This is how I place words within a tune

AI is helping to teach me to use a different scanning that I can fit more complex words into a line. The prime example of someone who scans brilliantly is Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. Their scanning is unbelievable. I never learned to do that. No one ever taught me to do it, but AI is teaching me. So I can put a lyric that I really want to keep pure and I really need it to tell the story to get to the chorus - I can put that in AI and it will scan it to 4/4 (timing) for me. Then I create the melody

HOLLY: Wow, that's so interesting. It's so cool

TOYAH: I'm having this argument with quite a lot of people because they just don't want AI in music. I've always had a problem with how to scan. You can hear it on the very first two albums I made, which I think is what makes them so unique. I'm slightly off the beat and now I don't have to be off the beat. I can learn how to scan

HOLLY: Wow, that's so fascinating because I think a lot of musicians are very against AI. It's got quite a bad press, but it actually can be used to really help and hone that creativity

TOYAH: Yeah. I will not let AI replace me, which is the argument. AI learns everything we do and it can replace you. With me it's just lifting the frustration out of my life and saying "you can fit that word into this melodic line"


HOLLY: It's really cool. Your melody lines are so fascinating to me. They're really quite angular and you push your voice to the extremes in quite a lot of your songs. I'm interested to know do you sit at a piano and write those kind of lines or does it just come to you like "this is what I'm feeling and this is what I'm giving it"?

TOYAH: When I write a line it belongs somewhere but hasn't yet been given its place. So (for example from "Thunder In The Mountains") “where the mountains meet the sea” - that was visually stronger to me the moment I wrote it. Then I thought "well, how do I represent that in music?" Then I just ... I don't know. I go somewhere deep inside me to do with my base chakra or my solar plexus and I just think "OK, we're looking at these chords. How can I make those words resonate as powerfully within music as they do within the image that's in my head" 

So it's all just making connections. With “IEYA”, which is off "The Blue Meaning", which my long term die-hard fans really love - I wanted something that they just represented. The human being shouting beyond the ether into the universe and I just chose those syllables. That is a purely emotional, emotive chorus. Whereas “I Want To Be Free” is an absolute statement

HOLLY: Absolutely. It's so interesting. He's a very different sort of performer to you, but I watched an interview with Rick Astley -

TOYAH: Oh, I love him!

HOLLY: He's great, isn't he? He was talking about how when he sung songs written by (the producers) Stock, Aitken and Waterman they were really tricky to sing because they would really push him vocally to the limits. The songs would be quite high

TOYAH: That's a scanning thing as well. Stock, Aitken and Waterman write on the piano. They do a scanning of the words on the piano, which is constructed through the fingers. If you aren't vocally acrobatic like Mariah Carey or Celine Dion or Adele, it sometimes doesn't suit your vocal style or the muscular use of your vocal cords. I totally get what Rick Astley is saying. So where did he come out of that conversation?

HOLLY: He was saying with Stock, Aitken and Waterman it sat really high and they'd really push him to the limit. But when he writes his own songs it sits really comfortably. He sits it in the middle of his range. I feel you're sort of the opposite of that. "It's A Mystery" - which I know you contributed to a little bit feels more straightforward vocally. Then something like “Neon Womb” sits very low and it goes very high. You're really happy to push your vocal range to the extreme and I love that

TOYAH: I love performing "Neon Womb". It was one of the first songs that I co-wrote with (guitarist) Joel Bogen and (keyboardist) Pete Bush - 

HOLLY: Who were in your band at the time -

TOYAH: They were in my first band. "Neon Womb" was on "Sheep Farming In Barnet" (the 1979 album) and it's one of the first tracks I ever recorded. Within a live performance I like to feel possessed by the music. I like something else to come into my body in a completely different experience

So with “Neon Womb" and "IEYA" - when I sing those it's as if I've touched the higher self and I'm just completely taken over. Something comes into the body that plays my body like an instrument. "It's A Mystery" was written by a man and it was written for a man's voice, which is why it's a slightly more stable vocal line


HOLLY: Yes, interesting. It's very cool. When you're getting ready for these performances that are vocally quite challenging and a big performance, how do you warm yourself up for that? Are you doing vocal exercises and warming up the body and that sort of thing, or do you just go out there and rock it?

TOYAH: There's very split decision on this, because I know so many people that do do vocal warm ups. I never do because I suffer from nerves. I mean very good nerves before a performance. The tension goes right into my body and if I start doing a warm up it's signaling to my body that I'm about to put it through a shocking experience. So the best thing that I can do is relax

I pace, I constantly walk. I sometimes hum very low, but I never ever use my voice until I'm in the the atmospheric air of the performance arena. You can warm up all you want in a centrally heated dressing room but once you get onto that stage, the humidity of the audience is completely different. So I always open with a song that is relatively easy for me to sing

HOLLY: Nice. So that's the warm up 

TOYAH: That's the warm up. Then I start to open the vocal cords. I have to open my vocal chords before I do “Thunder In The Mountains” or they will shut down. So I find the second song is usually something I can open up the vocal chords to like “Echo Beach”. That way I don't start coughing when I go into the chorus of “Thunder In The Mountains”

HOLLY: Absolutely. You touched upon "Echo Beach" there. You're someone who's done numerous fantastic covers of songs. The one that really sticks out to me is your wonderful performance of “Slave To The Rhythm” by Grace Jones. Am I right in thinking you sung the demo of that song?

TOYAH: Yes, I was on the original demo when it was being formed and written

HOLLY: Amazing. You've also sung (Frankie Goes To Hollywood's) “Relax” as well. So you've done a couple of Trevor Horn tracks

TOYAH: Trevor, after he heard Simon Darlow's (below on the left, with Toyah and her husband Robert) and my version of “Slave To The Rhythm” - because Simon Darlow is one of the original writers of it - Trevor invited me to do "Relax". It's an interesting story. He wanted it to be a robotic version, possibly AI, but he wanted a robot voice singing “Relax”. The record label in Germany didn't accept it. They said no, it had to be a human. So he asked me if I would do it. The record company accepted that, but he very much wanted me to sing it robotically

HOLLY: In a lot of your songs you're often not the sole songwriter. There's you and a few others members of your band. Has collaboration always been quite an important aspect to you of music making?

TOYAH: It's very important when it comes to arrangement. I can send a song in that has the basic chords, it has the full lyric and the vocal melody, but I can't do what a band does. So it's really important to have that collaboration and respect that collaboration, because they bring something to the song that makes it more fully formed


HOLLY: I can totally imagine that. Moving on to what you're doing with your life, performances and everything coming up. I'm part of Generation Z, which is people who were born between 1997 and 2012 but we're quite a nostalgic generation. We're very much looking back at a time which we weren't actually around for

I'm interested to know, particularly with your YouTube channel that you do with your husband, Robert Fripp, and also your live shows - have you noticed that people are bringing maybe their sons and daughters along? Or younger people are coming along instead of just people who lived through that era?

TOYAH: Absolutely, very much. My audience age is very, very mixed. There's less eighty year olds because they don't live as long. But I remember this show where there was an eighty year old lady standing right by the speaker. I said "are you going to be okay there?" Because that's really loud, but she had a lovely time

At the front there's lots of very young people. I think some of them are trans, a lot are definitely gay. Very young, between 18 and 20 and then they start to get around 30 upwards. A lot in their 60's, because I'm going to be 68 this year. I like it. It's a really nice mix. It's a very friendly mix

HOLLY: Yes, and I imagine a very accepting audience of everybody who's in it, particularly with the message of your music as well

TOYAH: Oh, within an audience there's no judgment whatsoever. I'm totally accepting

HOLLY: Touching on the younger generation and social media - you have a fantastic social media presence and the videos you're doing. There's stories, there's covers, there's showing your bunny rabbit. There's also just a real eye opening world into the world of Toyah and Robert Fripp. It's fantastic

TOYAH: Well, we're two very, very straight vanilla human beings - until you put a camera in front of us

HOLLY: Yeah, that's not the vibe I get at all. Vanilla! Wow!

TOYAH: We're not into sadomasochism. We're not into plural sex (Holly laughs) We are really vanilla. But what we do on our videos is try and say “what are you calling normal?" Nothing is normal. What you see you may think is normal, but is what you see the only reality?

We're also trying to say OK, we're pensioners, but it doesn't mean you disappear and it doesn't mean you don't have the same rebellion you had when you bought your Rolling Stones albums. We're questioning what reality is all the time and that's gone down really well

HOLLY: Absolutely yeah, for sure. It's holding on to an amazing legacy that you've already got, of amazing songs that both you and Robert have done together and separately as well. I saw an interview with an actor from "Stranger Things" called Finn Wolfhard. I don't know if you watch "Stranger Things". I know you quite like horror things. He was asked, "what are your four top favorite films?" and the first film he said was “Quadrophenia”


TOYAH: Yay!

HOLLY: And I thought, yes, there she is. There's Toyah. He's in his early 20's and he wasn't around when "Quadrophenia" was out. I just thought this is incredible. This is somebody who wasn't there, and yet it's one of his favorite all time films

TOYAH: "Quadrophenia" is big in LA

HOLLY: It's huge!

TOYAH: It's huge. It still has conventions and it is big around the world. It is that kind of cult film that's really a smash hit

HOLLY: Absolutely. Did you realise how much of a legacy that film and how much of a cult following that was going to have?

TOYAH: When we were making it we knew it was good. We knew the cast was good. We knew the director, Franc Roddam, was great. We knew The Who were wonderful. We knew but when it came out it was critically not well received. But over the years it's grown and grown and grown by audience strength and audience demand. The thing with critics and criticism - I've never found it accurate. I've never, sadly, in my case, found it truthful

I've had reviews where we knew the reviewer wasn't in the room. But the wonderful thing about social media is we now can expose the people that do that. With “Quadrophenia”, with your example of the actor from “Stranger Things” - he's discovered the film and he loves it and that's all that matters

HOLLY: It's extremely cool. So I suppose, going back to your music, similarly - did you take note of what critics were saying or did you very much feel like "this is what I'm doing and this is how I am"?

TOYAH: I do react very much to criticism. Therefore, I don't always read it because my reaction is personal. When a critic writes something, they're not thinking about the person. They're thinking about the time they feel they wasted being there. So I don't generally read the criticism. My team are very good at sending the good reviews to me (laughs)

HOLLY: (laughs) “Look at this!”

TOYAH: “Look at this!” You really can do it. You really are good.” It's very interesting. The most important critics to me are my audience

HOLLY: They're so positive on social media. All of those comments on those YouTube videos, all those views you're getting every week on your YouTube channel. This isn't, by no means, a small thing. You're getting 50,000 - 100,000 plus views on these weekend videos. You've got a real following

TOYAH: It's fabulous. But in hindsight, I never saw myself as a very small woman that is slightly muscular, slightly bulky and has short legs and a lisp. I never saw myself that way. I went into an industry that wants their women to be of a certain height, a certain weight with great legs. "Oh, if they can sing, if they can write -  well, that's a novelty. It's even better. "

I never saw myself as that because punk rock didn't lump me with that. But within the industry that I love, which is the music and film industry, it has been slightly problematic and I'm now shrinking inches per year (Holly laughs) I think how am I going to walk on that stage and have physical confidence? You've just got to face it  

HOLLY: The final thing to say to wrap everything up is the energy - where you get your energy from when you're on stage? Every time I talk to people and I say "I'm interviewing Toyah" the first thing they say is "I want to be Toyah's best friend". And the second thing they always say is "where on earth does she get this energy from? Because she is just a real firecracker when she's on the stage"

TOYAH: There's something so magical about what I call "the church of being on stage". When you've got a group of people together that are focused on the same thing they create a very unique and special energy. You see it in arenas. That energy, I really feel it. It feeds me. I can't go on stage and not have that energy. It's there   

Also, I have a very wonderful secret that almost got me arrested the first time I played the Isle of Wight Festival in 2022. I said to someone "I've just got to have my green tea. It's like speed." They literally thought I was taking speed. I had this slight reaction to green tea that for two hours I could run a marathon. I remember the police followed us from the Isle of Wight Festival to the ferry and they're going to pull us over. They think I'm carrying some drugs and they waited for us to get on the ferry and left. This is green tea. It's tea leaves!

HOLLY: It's just green tea. That's the answer. Oh, Toyah, this has been an absolute delight. Thank you so so much for coming on the show

TOYAH: Well, thank you, Holly. It's been really great to touch base with you

Listen to the interview HERE