I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan

by Chris Limb

  That evening I watched her live on stage but I got a much better view of the following night’s concert – I watched it live on television. It was Christmas Eve 1981. On the heavy glass cathode ray apparatus the bright image of a woman like a gynopomorphic personification of fire gambolled and twirled, singing as she did so. I knew that my life would never be the same again.

  The planet turned, a new year began.

  4: New beginnings, new surroundings

  1982 was different. In my head it felt like walking through the nightclub exit the morning after the non-stop pop party of 1981 and out into the cold grey morning light of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Why it felt this way to me I have no idea. Was it part of growing up? Was I trying to rationalise the rollercoaster ride of the previous twelve months into a more realistic worldview?

  It all started well. In January Toyah was awarded Best Female Singer at the British Rock and Pop Awards (the forerunner of today’s BRITS). The evolution of her image over the course of 1981 seemed to have reached its peak on the night she picked up the award; her hair now worn in futuristic cornrows, her makeup design evolving past punk shocker scary stare and into something a more tribal, illustrative and alien.

  After that things went quiet for a while. At school I was carried inexorably towards the A levels, beyond which I could just about glimpse the lights of the last exit from hell. But such release still felt like an unreachable dream.

  Pictures of Toyah covered the walls of my bedroom. The idea of a teenager’s wall covered with posters of pop stars is a commonplace one but oddly the most familiar iteration of this meme is a girl’s bedroom with male pop stars staring moodily down at the inhabitant. Boys’ bedrooms were supposed to have pictures of football teams and warplanes on the walls weren’t they?

  Nevertheless I am sure that the decor in my bedroom reflected that of a million teenagers across the country, both boys and girls. The image of Toyah was the first thing I saw when I awoke in the mornings and the last thing I saw when I fell asleep at night. My obsession compelled me to decorate my bedroom in this way and the decor thus served to reinforce the obsession. Unwittingly I had set in motion a mental positive feedback loop.

  After the vast output of 1981, the lack of new Toyah music at the beginning of 1982 made me feel bereft, but at least it gave me the opportunity to get to know the back catalogue a little better and delve into some of the other areas in which Toyah had made her mark. There had been countless roles in TV drama both before and after Shoestring, but it was only now that I was getting to see some of them.

  This was partly to do with the transmission schedule. A Tales of the Unexpected episode Blue Marigold had been filmed before Toyah’s rise to fame the previous year but was only now appearing on our screens. Almost unrecognizable under a blonde glamour wig Toyah put in a fine performance as the fading perfume model and, whilst perhaps not worthy of Dahl himself, the twist in the tale was still unexpected enough to justify the play’s inclusion in the series. I wondered what had happened to the billboard sized posters of Toyah as “Myra” that had been used in the filming. I consoled myself with the fact that they’d have been too big anyway even if I’d used one to wallpaper my entire bedroom...

  Two metallic guitar chords echoed into a melancholic soundscape signalling a return to music with the single Brave New World. I caught it on the radio once or twice and as a result took to haunting the Indie racks in Harum Records, waiting for the single to appear. I could of course have asked one of the shop assistants behind the counter when it was due out but I feared their scorn. Now that she was a definite success and had an award to prove it the serious music press had started to get bored with Toyah. I found myself very upset by some of the vitriol now appearing in the pages of the NME, Record Mirror, Sounds and Melody Maker. The assistants in Harum were cultivating the kind of cool that looked like they’d probably side with the more splenetic of the journalists. Far easier to take the sleeve up to the counter and buy it under the withering eye of just one of them than risk asking for it out loud and summon the derision of the entire shop down upon my head.

  Perhaps I was overthinking it. One of my classmates at school had not long before proudly proclaimed that his favourite band was Bucks Fizz and had completely failed to be embarrassed despite the hoots of contempt this provoked from the more energetic of the Fuckers and their ilk.

  The image Toyah bore on the sleeve of Brave New World went far beyond mere makeover and deep into artistic territory. Contact lenses turned her eyes into deep black pools around which flocks of birds swooped, a mass of bright pink hair rising over the ensemble like a thunderhead. She no longer looked real. But what was even more astonishing was seeing this fantasy figure in motion in the video that accompanied the single. It was directed by the person responsible for Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video and as such seemed to take place in the same universe, a stark beach lit by unreal frequencies of light on which Toyah emerged fully made up from a bright pink sea…

  This image became an iconic one, appearing on the front of not only Smash Hits but also Time Out, and even though I seem to recall the latter was to illustrate a cynical article (about how pop stars were – shock horror – making money!) that didn’t lessen its impact on the public consciousness.

  However, Brave New World didn’t seem to make as much of an impact on the charts as I felt it should have. As a rather anal teenager I noted down the line-ups and analysed again and again what I saw as the workings of Top of the Pops, which in those days was the engine that drove the mechanism of the top forty. Unless a band was at number one they never appeared on Top of the Pops two weeks in a row (except – mysteriously – for a band called The Polecats who not only clocked up Top of the Pops appearances on consecutive weeks but also appeared on Jim’ll Fix It in the same period and yet still failed to dent the top thirty with their single Rockabilly Guy). Bands also never seemed to appear until they were already in the top forty. So for a single to get two appearances on Top of the Pops it would have to increase sales not just after the first appearance but also after a week of no exposure.

  I don’t recall the chart trajectory of Brave New World in detail now but after one airing of the video Toyah didn’t return to perform in the studio as I’d been expecting with the result that the single peaked at a the rather disappointing 21. Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t poppy enough for the record buying public? Still, never mind all that, I told myself. The new album was due out shortly. That was much more exciting than the analysis of chart positions.

  The sleeve of The Changeling was dark. I felt it belonged in the same fictional world as the predominantly blue Anthem sleeve but a world that had moved on to the next volume of the story, a bleaker chapter. A now horned Toyah – photographed this time but in such a way as to make the sleeve appear like a painting – regarded us soberly from her perch on top of a rock. The peaks of the castle behind her echoed the turrets atop the mansion on the sleeve of The Blue Meaning.

  And such song titles. Creepy Room? Angel & Me? The Packt? Like the unexpected discovery of a mysterious new room in a house, I had no idea what to expect of this suddenly expanded universe. I read the lyric sheet, once again getting the rare chance to read the lyrics as poetry with no knowledge of the melody. And what was this? Between the lyrics were other snippets of verse, poems by Toyah which not having been set to music would always retain their initial impact.

  My mind is rare

  My eye is psycho

  My mouth holds the secrets

  You all want to know

  I placed the record on the turntable and the music burrowed into my primary auditory cortex. The music matched the sleeve. It was dark and haunted, somehow twisted making no concessions, no compromises. I loved it all, especially the way the penultimate track Run Wild, Run Free segued neatly into an extended Brave New World. But for me the highlight was the track Angel & Me that closed side one. It began melancholic and quiet as Toyah sang sad lyrics over a plaintive piano backing befo
re the song slipped unexpectedly over the cusp of a catastrophe curve and lunged violently at the listener, laughing psychotically even as the wardens dragged it off and into a straitjacket…

  In my opinion Toyah’s new album was brilliant, no matter what some cynical coked-up journo might think.

  I had absolutely no idea at the time, but I was soon to get the chance to tell her this in person.

  Come and join me on my cloud

  Come and ride on my wave

  Cascade into night flight

  5: It’s the angel and me

  It was a dull grey day in June 1982. A weekday, so I’d been at school earlier on. However, I was now in my bedroom listening to Capital Radio. I don’t remember what the show was, but I seem to recall some undemanding discussion programme. Today the panel consisted of a load of men clumsily flirting with Toyah.

  I knew where Capital Radio was - that huge blocky tower opposite Warren Street tube that dominated the London skyline and seemed to be challenging the skinny Post Office Tower to a fight. What’s more it was only a few stops away on the tube. Could I? Dare I?

  Half an hour later I was standing outside the revolving doors on a deserted Euston Road listening on my green transistor radio as the men on the show clumsily flirted with Toyah. My heart was beating fast. She was in there and would be coming out through here. This door here. The one I was standing next to.

  “All right mate? Are you waiting for Toyah?”

  I looked up. A bespectacled young man in an anorak brandishing a camera had joined me. He looked more like one of my erstwhile fellow nerds from the aisles of Forbidden Planet than a Toyah fan, but I said hello anyway, and we conducted an awkward conversation. He was called Grant. He said he’d take a picture of me with her and post it to me if I took a picture of him.

  He seemed friendly and personable but to be honest I couldn’t really concentrate on what he was saying. The radio show had ended and she’d be coming out any minute. Down those stairs at the back of the foyer past the huge painting of her by Dexter Brown that the station proudly had on display.

  I peered through the door. There she was - I could see the bright pink mop of her hair bounce as she descended the stairs.

  “OK, here I am!” She was outside and standing right in front of me.

  She was small. I’d seen her live and on TV, but hadn’t quite been prepared for how diminutive she actually was. Her hair was bright, her skin pale, her features precise and perfect. She seemed far more there than anyone I’d ever met before, her personality burning through the skin of reality. Or was that just in my head, my own exaggerated expectations of her being reflected back at me?

  Grant was talking glibly to her, taking record sleeves out of his rucksack. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring anything along to be signed. I’d just wanted to meet her, to talk to her. A blonde man - obviously Toyah’s boyfriend and bodyguard Tom about whom I’d read in the music papers and in the Intergalactic Ranch House Newsletter - stood at a slight distance to one side.

  She asked if we liked the new album.

  “It’s brilliant!” I blurted before I could stop myself. She looked at me, surprised and pleased. I wondered why my opinion mattered.

  “I’m so glad!” she said, “I worked my bollocks off on that album and all the press have done is slag it off!” I started to talk to her about some of the songs, in particular about how much I loved Angel & Me. Grant meanwhile was lining up the shot of her and me.

  “Say cheese then!” he interrupted. I’d have been happier with just a picture of us in conversation. Because we were in conversation. I was having a conversation with Toyah. Inside my skull my brain giggled at how fantastic this was.

  “Cheese,” she snapped, almost as if she was annoyed at the interruption too, I imagined.

  Grant took his place next to her whilst I fiddled with the camera. Rather than talking to her, he put his arm round her shoulders. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Tom. I wondered why he hadn’t asked Toyah if she minded.

  “Yes,” growled Tom. I took the picture and Grant let go of her. Toyah said goodbye. She and Tom got into a small white Volkswagen Polo parked at the kerb and drove off. I exchanged contact details with Grant and caught the tube home.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. In my diary I wrote in two inch high letters that took up the entire page TODAY I MET TOYAH. What else was there to say?

  “Sorry mate, bad news I’m afraid.”

  I was talking to Grant on the phone. Apparently the photos hadn’t come out, it had been too dark and he hadn’t used a flash bulb. A shame, but never mind. I would get the opportunity to take my own photos, because I had discovered a new purpose.

  Meeting Toyah.

  After all, how difficult could it be? I just needed to keep my ear to the airwaves listening out for any TV or radio appearances, plus there were the summer gigs coming up...

  Back in 1982 no-one talked about “stalkers” but even if they had I’d have been shocked and insulted at any suggestion that I was turning into one. I was just going along to public places she’d be and saying hello. Maybe next time I’d actually remember to bring something along to be signed.

  I discovered that I wasn’t alone. The next opportunities to present themselves were the four (count ‘em) sell out shows at the Hammersmith Odeon the latter two of which would be recorded and turned into Warrior Rock, one of the final - and one of the finest - examples of that now lost art form, the Double Live Album. I went to one of each of the pair of gigs, but turning up at the stage door for the first one with a carrier bag full of album sleeves and a borrowed camera, I was perturbed at the number of other people who’d obviously had the same idea as me. How dare they? This was my plan.

  Any disappointment I might have felt was dispelled at the sight of a white VW Golf pulling up the access road beside the Odeon, a familiar pink haired figure in the passenger seat. My heartbeat increased, I got my borrowed camera ready. Years later I came across a photo of this moment in the background of which someone had unwittingly captured me. I was grinning like a loon.

  “Hi there…” Toyah’s voice was unusually quiet, “I can’t talk!”

  Tom explained that she’d come down with laryngitis and was resting her voice in preparation for the show that evening, but this didn’t seem to have brought her down at all. If anything she seemed in a more mischievous mood, clowning about and ignoring Tom’s protestations that she go inside, instead making sure that everyone who wanted something autographed got it. This was just as well – people were pushing and shoving a bit and I didn’t think I was going to be able to get her to autograph anything. But at the last moment she spotted I’d been left out and grabbed my ticket and started scribbling her autograph on it just as Tom picked her up bodily and started carrying her inside.

  “That’s it, you’ve lost your ticket…” Tom deadpanned, but at the last moment Toyah struggled free and gave it back to me with a silent grin.

  It was a hot afternoon and there was nothing to do. A couple of girls turned up who were disappointed to have missed Toyah’s arrival. A few of us wandered round the access roads to the other side of the Odeon. At the sound of a rusty hinge we looked up. A tiny first floor window had swung open and Toyah was leaning out.

  “Hello!” she whispered. We jumped up and down waving and saying hi. One of the girls who’d arrived late burst into tears.

  “Why are you crying?” Toyah seemed genuinely puzzled, and then with a quick look over her shoulder into the room waved goodbye to us, “Sorry, got to go now.”

  The show itself was spectacular and I enjoyed every minute of it, despite the bouncers. Afterwards I wanted to hang around to wait for her to leave the venue as well. The access road was crowded with fans who’d just experienced a huge, impressive concert; the night was electric and exciting. Eventually the word got around (although whether this was true or misdirection I never found out) that Toyah had left by another exit. Many continued to hang around, but I gave up, and
with a few wistful glances back at the venue, made my way under the flyover and across to Hammersmith station only to discover that the tubes had finished running for the night.

  I hadn’t heard of night buses and even if I had would have had no idea from where to catch one; besides, the network was probably a lot less comprehensive in those days. For a minute or so I panicked before stoic realization set in. I was going to have to walk home.

  I knew the general direction in which I wanted to go and set off down Hammersmith Road. It was surprisingly deserted and I kept thinking that someone was following me. Eventually I seemed to shake him off just as Hammersmith Road turned into Kensington High Street. Hyde Park came into view and I made my way along its southern border. At Hyde Park corner I made an error of judgment and rather than heading up towards Marble Arch and thence Oxford Street I dithered and eventually took the route that involved the crossing of less roads. This took me past the walls of Buckingham Palace (where a policeman asked to look at my carrier bag full of album sleeves - he came across as a bit of a fan, asking me what the concert had been like) and eventually Parliament Square where the face of Big Ben beamed down like a vast, close moon. North to Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road across Euston Road and into Camden. Then through North London, and the streets became more residential. Kentish Town, Tufnell Park and Archway. Highgate.

  I was on the home stretch. When I reached Highgate Station I could have taken a short cut through the woods, but considered that it might be a bit scary at this time of night. Instead I decided to go the long way around and walked along Muswell Hill Road and down Cranley Gardens to number 131 where we lived.