Four years ago, Toyah Willcox left a “very boring all-girls public school” in Birmingham with only one O level, in music, and a whole heap of bad reports. At 14 she’d been banned from art, her favourite subject because her paintings were too erotic. She got into fights, confused the teachers by making her own clothes and “by wearing a Dr Spock haircut with the back of my head shaved. I was a very paranoid kid and I hated every minute of it.”
Today, at 22, Toyah is being hailed as a sort of Thinking Man’s Punk, and is certainly the most impressive female all-rounder to have emerged in the latter days of the new wave. Earlier this year she won considerable acclaim for her part as Miranda in Derek Jarman’s exquisite film version of The Tempest. Her acting career had already included everything from Jarman’s punk celebration Jubilee, to Quatermass, and Quadrophenia.
Now her rock band, simply called Toyah, have released their first “proper album,” The Blue Meaning (Safari, IEYA666), and the lady with the shock of bright red and ginger hair has jumped straight into the album charts.
I suspect her potential as an actress is even greater than that as a singer, but this is still an impressive, enjoyable album that manages to be both declamatory and accessible. In her first compilation, the quaintly titled Sheep Farming In Barnet (which she now hates), she admits she was “well over the top,” but here her tendency to over-do things is tempered, and matched with strong playing from her band.
The set ranges from driving improvised rockers like Ieya to the title track, a chilling description of her days with the rich school girls (“big grey buildings, satanic mills, conceptive pills”), to a manic chant of sexual hatred. She explained that as being “about my experience on the road with groupies, I hate them. I’m very moralistic and emotional – I can’t stand that sort of person.”
Toyah’s success sounds like a result of both lucky breaks and her own forceful personality. “No one can rip me off,” she announced, I’m too much of a bitch, I haven’t been hyped. I sell myself, I create what I wear, and I boss the band about.” I believe her.
When she left school, she studied drama in Birmingham, keeping herself by working in a cafe, then doing wardrobe at a theatre, then dancing in a nightclub, I had four hours’ sleep a night and was very happy.” She was approached in the street by a man who asked if she could act. “I thought he must be a pervert because I looked so strange that there was no other reason that he’d have kept following me.”
In fact he was a director at BBC Pebble Mill, who offered her a part in one of the Second City First plays, Glitter. That was seen by Kate Nelligan, who helped her get a place at the National Theatre, and a part in Vienna Woods.
While she was at the National, Toyah met Derek Jarman. “He is the sort of man you can just sit and talk to. I picked up a script that was under a settee and started looking through it. Then I told him I wanted to play the part of Mad.” That’s how Toyah was cast in Jubilee. Later, he asked her to play Miranda in The Tempest “and of course I said yes. I respect him more than any other director and would do anything he asked.”
Toyah’s portrayal of Miranda as both knowing and naive was influenced by Jarman “not telling me what to do, just guiding, and helping so subtly that you don’t see what he’s putting into a performance. He told me he wanted Miranda to have been raped by Caliban, so not a virgin and not innocent. But also to remember that she’d been brought up by her father. So I made her boyish and a completely tribal child.” She added that all her rock fans liked The Tempest “just because it was visually gorgeous, even if they didn’t understand it. They should have been given Valium as they went in.”
Toyah doesn’t yet know if she’ll be in the next Jarman film, Neutron, but she should be the star of the one after that which is supposed to be about a singer turned prostitute. But I’m sure it will become more advanced than that. I don’t like that idea because there are too many films about singers at the moment.”
Before either of those she will play the lead in Nigel Williams’s Sugar And Spice, which opens at the Royal Court later this summer. “And that’s a really brilliant comedy about a butch woman and her mates.”
With her album now a best-seller, Toyah also has her band to look after. They formed after she met guitarist Joel Bogen at a party “where apparently, I had two bottles of whisky in me, and was hanging from a shower unit trying to strangle people. I’ve always written poems and had a mental tune for them, but I’d never met anyone who could create that tune for me before.”
She’s confident enough now to say, “It’s easy doing both music and acting because people now plan their productions around my spare time. So the first half of the year was music, and the second half will be acting, but with two more British tours.
Toyah agrees she is a bit of a megalomaniac. “I want to be a great actress and a great singer. But I’m not doing it for money – I love insulting money. Do you know I’ve spent over £10,000 on shoes?
She doesn’t drink, or take drugs, or holidays, and currently lives in a warehouse in Battersea where she practises dance, designs clothes and jewellery.
Next, she wants an even bigger warehouse where she can combine film, live music, and acting projects, and also run “a 24-hour psychedelic nightclub, with films projected all over the place, where people can live out their fantasies. I don’t take drugs, but I think people should take certain drugs just to escape inside themselves for entertainment.” She has already tried to buy several disused cinemas “but the government bought them first. I think it’s a plot.”
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