I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan

by Chris Limb

  I WAS A TEENAGE TOYAH FAN

  by Chris Limb

  © 2011 Chris Limb. All rights reserved.

  To Toyah - for inspiring much more than this.

  Introduction

  We are the stories we tell ourselves.

  This is a story set in the past. Strictly speaking these people no longer exist even though there are individuals in the present day who have inherited their memories. But the actual people from back then? They’re familiar old tales, tales we revisit from time to time to flip through the pages with nostalgia.

  Other people are also stories we tell about them, but they are only ever told in the third person. Whilst we might think we know what is going on in someone’s head, chances are we have absolutely no idea. Only they know, only their own personal story is canon.

  Whilst the story I tell here about myself is true, it is viewed through the distorting lens of time and whilst I’ve done my best to check the facts it’s possible that things didn’t happen exactly as I describe them here. Perhaps chains of events have been slightly reordered to improve narrative coherence. Perhaps separate days have been concatenated. But things happened close enough to what is described herein for this to be a reasonably accurate account and I don’t think anyone else who was there will find anything wrong with it - if anything I hope they find it all hauntingly familiar.

  This is primarily a story about two individuals who no longer exist. The versions of Toyah and myself from thirty years ago probably bear little resemblance to the people walking around now with their names – and in particular the version of Toyah described here is one that only ever existed in my head. While my interpretation of what she did at the events described might coincide with the things that the real Toyah did, only she knows the truth.

  This is life. Everyone else described herein is also real, their description my interpretation of their behaviour at the time although I should say that in some cases the names have be changed to protect the author from the guilty, even though any culpability as described here is of course only in the mind of the beholder.

  This is a story of a teenager and as the story opens he has only lived a third as long as I have now. I would like to think that this is an on-going process and that in the future when I have lived three times as long as I have now I will look back to now with a smile and the recollection that that there were changes lying in wait for me just as exciting as the ones described in this book.

  But only time will tell. In the meantime please enjoy this interpretation of times past.

  1: Standing all alone

  I was always a bit of a late developer.

  Whilst all the other boys at school were sneaking porn mags into class under their jumpers, I didn’t understand the appeal of the airbrushed mannequins contained therein. I disliked the way they prised their nether regions open with gynaecological expertise whilst wearing expressions that made them look simultaneously half-asleep and nauseous. Furthermore, the short cut to views of genitalia offered by these magazines seemed to miss the point completely. For me it was about fancying the girl to start with. It was about getting to know them, hanging out with them, talking to them. Maybe getting a snog. Then who knows?

  Also, for some unknown reason I simply found a very different kind of woman attractive. Whilst it seemed as though the majority of my peers adored Olivia Newton John, Farrah Fawcett and the like - not to mention the soft-focus women in the aforementioned magazines - I could never see the attraction. They all seemed so bloody wholesome and boring. Even the ones in the magazines – once they got dressed again I was sure they’d be indistinguishable from anyone else.

  One of the schoolboy purveyors of this creased glossy smut had originally started out as a friend. However he seemed very disappointed that our shared enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings didn’t mean that I shared his fascination for all things pornographic. Despite his amassing a vast collection (on which he cunningly used to swap the covers for those of more innocent magazines to avoid parental detection) I never wanted to borrow any of them no matter how many times he offered. Eventually he decided it would be easier to simply stop being my friend.

  Due to my lack of enthusiasm for these traditional teenage boys’ fantasies, I was often branded a “bender” or a “pervert”, although despite what these bigots might have been implying here, I actually thought women were brilliant. However, the only ones that sent my stomach on a rollercoaster ride and made my viscera turn somersaults were the scary looking ones I’d seen on TV and in the Kings Road or West End when I’d made my solo trips into town to visit Forbidden Planet in Denmark Street or the Museums in South Kensington.

  Punk girls.

  I don’t know what it was, but there was something about the combination of torn fishnets, leather jackets, extreme makeup, unsuitable boots and brightly coloured scruffy hairdos with shaved sides that seemed to press all my buttons simultaneously.

  This raises the question, why? It’s not as if I was remembering something from deep in my childhood. Punk was a relatively new phenomenon and back then you could hardly escape the media coverage. The tabloids were full of it, implying that it foretold the beginning of the end of civilization as we knew it. I didn’t mind. I’d have been more than happy to live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia if all the women looked like that. But to this day I have no idea why my brain decided I would be attracted to fierce, frightening-looking women.

  It was at the bitter end of the nineteen-seventies. I’d admired these scary punk girls from afar for a little while now, but as a small SF geek shopping for Blake’s 7 / Star Wars crossover fanzines I had absolutely no idea about how to go about getting any kind of girlfriend, let alone a punky one. There was no way any of those beautiful beings would be remotely interested in a short spotty nerd in a white arran-knit jumper and purple corduroy trousers clutching a copy of Doctor Who Weekly.

  I’d have to radically change my image if I was to stand a chance against the competition, which at the time seemed to largely consist of blokes eight and a half feet tall (if you included the extra two foot of Mohican) with arms like tree trunks, complex tattoos covering 98% of their skin surface and half a pound of scrap iron embedded in their face. I didn’t think this kind of thing would go down too well at school.

  I didn’t yet have a pop star idol either. Like many boys my age Kate Bush’s Babooshka video had made me feel all hot and bothered but despite the fact that I liked some of her songs Kate just didn’t do it for me. Not odd looking enough, not punky enough, although the atmosphere she carried around with her was more interesting than most of the female pop stars on TV. Interesting women singers were few and far between although in retrospect it’s obvious that I was simply looking in the wrong places and had missed Siouxsie and the Banshees on Top of the Pops although do remember catching X-Ray Spex at least once.

  It was a very different time and there was far less entertainment around. No one I knew had a video yet, there were only three channels and so if you wanted to watch TV you just had to make do with what was on. As a result you often ended up watching any old thing. So it was that on 2 December 1979 I found myself watching Shoestring, the BBC show starring Trevor Eve as a private detective who worked for a local radio station and who was therefore somewhat irritatingly known as a “Private Ear”. It was one of those shows that was always on a Sunday evening with all the associated depression involved; there remained nothing else between now and being back at school bar sleep. Often you hadn’t done your homework, but it was too late. Even the man with the moustache investigating crime couldn’t take your mind off the inevitable horror of the week ahead.

  The previous day I’d watched The Doctor grapple with the Mandrels, today Eddie Shoe
string was looking for a missing beauty queen only to be blocked at every turn by a cast of characters including a sinister Christopher Biggins, pre-Eastenders Peter Dean and a young Lynda Bellingham who was still a long way from the cornerstone of the Oxo family who’d mysteriously moved to Gallifrey to put The Doctor on trial…

  Personally I thought the punk girl Toola in the story was far more attractive and interesting than the woman who’d disappeared, beauty queen or no. Toola was striking and angry, somehow familiar looking. There was a certain melancholic air about her as well that contrasted with her enthusiasm and fire, resulting in a character I found captivating.

  If I ever have a girlfriend, I thought, I’d like her to be like that.

  I enjoyed her music as well (she was the singer in a band which was all part of the plot), but I had absolutely no idea that the band, and therefore Toola, was real.

  Shoestring solved the case, although at a cost. It turned out that the beauty queen was dead and her boyfriend Mole (played by the late Gary Holton of Auf Wiedersehen Pet fame) was murdered in the attempt to expose her killers - quite a high body count for such a cosy little show. Toola dedicated the haunting song she sung over the end credits to the dead Mole and as such I was concentrating on her and the music so much that I didn’t have the wit to check the cast list (quite daft in retrospect when watching it again now). With no videos and no Internet that was it. I had no idea who she was. She’d gone.

  A new decade dawned, the futuristic sounding Eighties with the result that calendars started to look like props from science fiction films. I turned 15 and continued to have a thoroughly miserable time at school in the run up to O levels. Pornography continued to change hands between gawky juveniles who persisted in thinking this made them grown-up and somehow edgy. One boy had got hold of a number of Debbie Harry posters that he tried to sell during break. I wasn’t interested – I liked some of Blondie’s music and she was undoubtedly an attractive woman but despite her punk credentials she looked too normal for me. She was no Toola.

  During the summer holidays I took to wandering around the local area looking in the record shops, in particular Harum Records in Muswell Hill Broadway. I still wasn’t sure what kind of music I liked, but they had a lot of interesting looking punk records in there, especially from the handful of bands that counted women amongst their ranks. At first I thought the section in 7” singles labelled INDIE was something to do with Indian music but soon realised it stood for Independent as in record labels. This was where the records with the interesting sleeves were usually to be found.

  And what was this? Sheep Farming in Barnet? A hand written sticker affixed to the transparent PVC sleeve said that it was music from the BBC TV series Shoestring, the sleeve itself said that it was a Safari Alternative Play Record, a seven inch single playing at 33RPM with a further printed sticker claiming “ALTERNATIVE PLAY: 6 tracks 20 minutes max price £1.50”.

  But what stopped my heart for a second and made me feel like I was falling was that there on the sleeve was Toola looking cool and punky in a pair of shades as she posed in front of a science fiction landscape that looked like three giant golf balls (although I could now see that her real name was Toyah - was that Russian? I wondered at the time).

  I bought it of course and there was a certain illicit thrill doing so. Part of it was “ooh, look at you, buying indie records”, but most of it was because I’d bought a record and I liked the girl. I was simultaneously embarrassed and excited by the fact. I could almost hear my inner monologue teasing me: You like her. You fancy her.

  Naturally I couldn’t tell anyone for precisely this reason. I hid the record in my bedroom and only played it when I was alone in the house.

  Nowadays of course I’d have known everything there was about her in an instant, but hard as it is to imagine life without it now, there was no Internet – we didn’t even have CEEFAX in our house let alone a video. Would I have to wait for fate to toss me another morsel by chance? Who knew how long that would take? Until then Toyah Willcox, which was her full name, was a mystery to me.

  Determined to find out more, I returned to Harum Records. Now I knew what to look for and where to look. It turned out that Toyah had a handful of records out already; in particular an LP called The Blue Meaning the cover of which had what looked like a haunted house on the cover. This appealed to my interest in the supernatural and uncanny, in ghosts and astral projection.

  I didn’t know if anyone else had the same experience – and perhaps it was a form of record sleeve synaesthesia peculiar to me – but I felt that the picture on the cover of an LP reflected the feel of the music. In some way they were the same thing. Of course the bands and the record companies would chose an image that they felt fitted with the contents of an album, that much was obvious, but for me there was something more to it than that. In my head the sky blue and white sleeve of the Sheep Farming in Barnet AP (and, as I later discovered, an LP with extra tracks on it) felt like it was the visual equivalent of the bright fast synth punk of the six tracks therein. And so, before having heard a single track, I am fairly sure that I had an inkling of what The Blue Meaning would sound like before I bought it, although as I didn’t have a lot of money in those days it took me a while to save up the £4.99.

  Eventually I had enough and my own copy of The Blue Meaning joined Sheep Farming in Barnet in its hiding place. I played it whenever I could and it probably played a major part in the formation of my fledgling musical taste. As I had half gleaned from the cover the music was dark and sinister, these days you would probably call it proto-goth, but back then the only goths I’d heard of were characters from Asterix the Gaul. It was haunted, frightening and quite brilliant. Parts of the track-list sounded like a dramatis personae from an extravagant horror film – Ghosts, Mummies, Insects – and the shadowy subject matter of the lyrics contrasted with the lurid pink on blue of the inner sleeve on which they were printed, words burning unforgettably into my retina.

  Black hollow eyes

  Spiky, unfurnished, unthinking eyes…

  The centrepiece of the album was the eight minute epic Ieya, the like of which I had never heard before. It was as far from the two-minute three-chord punk songs as they’d been from what had come before.

  If you wanted to know what was on all three TV channels you had to buy both the Radio Times for the BBC and TV Times for ITV. In our house we never had the TV Times. For a start my dad worked for the BBC and as a perk got the Radio Times free - most of the time. Sometimes it didn’t appear – perhaps due to a strike or a shortage of copies – and when that happened we had to take potluck as to what was on; it wouldn’t have occurred to my parents to buy a listings magazine. As such we never knew what was on ITV although my parents said that this didn’t matter because ITV was rubbish.

  I hadn’t seen enough of it myself to really form a coherent opinion (although I had been fond of The Tomorrow People) which meant that it was purely by chance that in late December 1980 I happened to catch the second half of a whole documentary dedicated to Toyah on ITV. Even though I missed a lot of it (and wouldn’t get the chance to catch up on what I had missed for years) what I did see went a long way to satisfying my curiosity about that this fascinating, bewitching woman who spoke with a punk accent. It turned out was an actress as well as a singer (to be honest, the Shoestring appearance should have given me a clue) and was fascinated by many of the dark and mysterious things that I was. She came across as fierce and frightening, but in my eyes that simply made her more appealing. An article about her in Smash Hits that came out at around the same time reinforced this image of her in my head.

  But how could ever I get to meet her? Oh it was hopeless...

  2: Somewhere in the distance

  It was 1981 and against all the odds this meant that I had become sixteen. Technically I was nearly an adult.

  I didn’t feel like one. Back at school after ‘O’ levels not much had changed – I was still smaller than average and being in th
e sixth form simply meant that my contemporaries were able to come up with ever more inventive and psychologically effective ways of making life hell. There was a particular group of them - all tall, early developers who wore their ties loose with their top shirt button defiantly undone – that in the privacy of my own head I’d nicknamed The Fuckers. They delighted in tormenting me with merciless punches that astonished me with their strength and vicious hard pinches delivered under the desk when no one was looking.

  I escaped into fantasy. My infatuation with Toyah was an exciting little secret. Not only had I kept this from family, friends and acquaintances alike but also even though there was now a definite buzz about her, Toyah wasn’t yet in focus under the full glare of the public spotlight. True there were frequent articles in the serious music papers Melody Maker, NME, Sounds and Zigzag (and in the not so serious Smash Hits which had caught on early) but someone as immature as me would have been hard pressed to find out anything more than what I already knew as I couldn’t afford to buy all these publications all the time on the off chance of an important discovery. And whilst many other people my age had been going to gigs for years, my only experience of music was on television.

  This meant Top of the Pops. It was an interesting time to be watching. Suddenly there were a lot of fascinating bands with odd ideas and extreme makeup appearing between the disco acts and novelty songs that had become the programme’s staple over the past few years. Despite the way people looked down their noses at it, Top of the Pops was the main channel of information about fashion, style and music for the young and, despite being at an all-boys school, it was still what everyone talked about at break time on Friday mornings. On one memorable occasion one of the Fuckers – a classroom porn merchant and homophobe, one of the chief exponents of the “Limb is Bent” chant - opined how much he fancied that singer, the girl in Culture Club…