I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan

by Chris Limb

  And so it begins...

  Mid-week, early-afternoon, late March. A Wednesday. Hayley and I arrived at the Mermaid Theatre and met up once more with Alison and Linda. Today was the first day of previews for Tanzi before the official opening a few days later. I can’t remember how long we waited but eventually a car drew up and Toyah emerged, dressed in a grey tracksuit. She looked very young for some reason... it took me a few seconds to realise that this was because she didn’t have any makeup on.

  She seemed a little surprised to find us waiting there - aside from Alison, Linda, Hayley and myself there were a couple of other fans around and Toyah spent five minutes or so chatting, posing for pictures, signing autographs and answering questions, staying outside for far longer than most people would have done, despite having to go to work...

  At one point she said hi to me and asked how I was - another indication that she was beginning to remember me, I thought.

  I wasn’t going to see the show that night - even back then theatre tickets were expensive, but I had already bought tickets for performances in both April and in May on Toyah’s birthday. Not having tickets didn’t stop us going back to the theatre and waiting outside the next day. And a few days after that. More people began to appear and hang around and after a surprisingly short while a close knit gang of regulars began to coalesce from the more disparate pairs and trios who’d been turning up off their own bat. Toyah got to know who we all were, including me.

  And this was how she eventually made the connection between the spotty peroxide teenager Chris and the author of the embarrassing fan letters from a couple of years earlier.

  We started going to the pub opposite the theatre whilst Toyah was engaged with the play. During the interval we made our way back to the stage door – now increasingly covered with Toyah-related graffiti - when Toyah always made a point of popping her head around the door to say hello and sometimes even coming out into Puddle Dock and larking around in costume for a few minutes. We all started to get to know each other as well as the cast and theatre staff.

  After a while we thought we should probably give our small group a name. A gang. We discussed possible titles drawn from the Toyah canon before eventually settling on Angels and Demons. Nothing to do with Dan Brown (who would only have been about 18 at the time anyway) this was track four of Four From Toyah, a haunting slow song with lyrics loosely based on the Arthur C Clarke novel Childhood’s End.

  Toyah adored the idea of a little gang and insisted that she was one of us as well. We’d already tasked one of our number - Bob who was very good at drawing - to design a logo which we all faithfully copied onto the back of our jackets in gold and silver marker pen. Toyah then arrived with a new jacket of her own and gave it to Bob to draw the logo on it for her. Once he’d done so she added her own tagline – part of the lyrics to We Are – beneath it:

  The Chosen Ones

  and put it on. We all felt very proud.

  Listening back now to some of Hayley’s recordings of these early days (although she stopped documenting our summer in this way fairly early on thank goodness) the overriding impression you get is how damned patient Toyah was with all of us. There she was surrounded by hyperactive teens babbling incomprehensible questions at her from every angle and she took it in such good spirits, making a point of spending time with us where so many other celebrities simply wouldn’t have bothered. When she had the sides of her hair cut short for the photo shoots for the forthcoming album and single she arrived at the theatre the next day with a carrier bag full of hair and gave each of us a lock.

  And we were so energetic. High on nothing but youth and alcohol, we were a strange collection of individuals. There was Toyah of course, the Boss. Hayley, Alison and Linda who I’d known before Tanzi started. Bob the logo designer and his friend Lee who even had a car (he got Toyah to autograph the bonnet). Steve. Eddie and Simon who were tall, cool, slightly gothic and knew about all sorts of exotic sounding clubs and bands such as the Batcave, Specimen and Sex Gang Children. Bill who was into heavy metal as well as Toyah. Eddie’s friend Mark. Kev from Watford and his mate Russ. Trevor. Lunar the outrageously tall thin man who was older than Toyah and claimed to be able to do black magic. The other Chris who was also older than Toyah and bore a slight resemblance to David Bowie. Zetta. Abi and Jenni the “munchkins”. And me.

  There were others too who came and went; over that year alliances were forged, friendships created and enmities formed. Certainly there were a few more than those listed above who bore the legend Angels and Demons on their backs but we consisted of the central core.

  Spring became summer. In an article about the play in Smash Hits rival Number One Toyah’s co-star Neil McCaul (who went on years later to star in a plethora of TV shows including Father Ted and the controversial Heil Honey I’m Home) was quoted as saying “We get punks camping out around the theatre. It’s like a new wave Greenham Common.”

  We hadn’t actually camped out, but the quote was all the encouragement that we needed to do so. The following Saturday we all turned up with our sleeping bags and after saying goodbye to Toyah when she left the theatre set up camp in Puddle Dock and went to sleep for the night.

  This became our weekly ritual. When Toyah began recording her new album at the Marquee recording studio in Wardour Street we extended these habits, catching the last tube from Blackfriars to Leicester Square after the play and hanging around outside the studio until she finished for the night before walking across the West End back to the Mermaid and crashing out for a few short hours.

  There was something strangely calming and surreal about half-waking at 4.30am in the centre of a totally deserted city, tucked away from general view in an industrial cul-de-sac, the desolate sounds of lonely vehicles passing occasionally through the nearby tunnel which we’d christened with our name in two-foot high letters. The oddness of realising that I had been unconscious in such an unusual situation. When I fell back asleep again the dreams always had a different quality and were inevitably followed by the weird sensation of starting to wake up again and realising that it was far colder than I was used to, that there were more strange outdoor noises and that there was no ceiling above me, only the infinite universe going on for ever.

  I never slept as deeply as normal, I felt that on some level there was a mental hair-trigger poised to awaken me in case of any danger. I realized that this was probably how our ancestors felt all the time, asleep in their caves on the African veldt, half an ear cocked for the sound of approaching lions.

  Sundays were usually spent at home recovering.

  Even though most of us spent most of the weekends there, it was never enough. An evening spent at home meant that I was always aware that there was a party going on down in EC4V that I was missing. Still, I’m sure that on the days when hardly any of us turned up Toyah must have breathed a sigh of relief.

  Toyah had taken on the services of a new PA/Manager (I never could work out which – and at the time probably couldn’t have told you the difference between the two jobs), Kate. Kate was earnest and efficient but most importantly of all did seem to take us Angels and Demons seriously; this was not only pleasant but also felt like a departure from usual record company policy. I suspect that Toyah had a lot to do with this. She brought Kate along to the Mermaid Theatre one day during Tanzi to meet us and we’d all gone and sat outside a nearby pub where Kate had asked us questions, seemingly quite interested in us and our relationship with her new charge.

  Shortly afterward she arranged for us to be interviewed for an article in the Daily Mirror. Photographer and reporter Joe Bangay turned up and took a lot of pictures of us posing outside the stage door, telling the girls to look “chirpy”. He then started to talk to us about what we were doing and this is where I think it all started to go wrong because of Preston.

  Preston had started hanging round with us, following us around and had become one of the Angels and Demons simply by constant proximity. This wouldn’t have been a
problem if he’d been a nice guy. But Preston wasn’t.

  Preston was a stereotypical school bully. Not one of the calculating psychopathic types like the Fuckers who’d tormented me up until the previous year (how long ago that now seemed) but the stereotypical Fat Boy who turned to bullying to prevent himself ending up on the receiving end of persecution. Preston wasn’t just fat, he was tall too, and his sheer bulk meant that we were all a little scared of him.

  Unfortunately Preston elbowed his way to the front when the journalist was interviewing us and started spouting a macho manifesto that made us sound more like some pathetic gang of troublemaking youths, stuff about people “starting” and us knowing how to defend ourselves. This wasn’t what we were about at all and whilst it might have made for an effective “what are the youth of today coming to?” moral panic article, that wasn’t what the Mirror was after on this occasion and the piece never appeared.

  On another occasion a rather scary looking punk in shades interviewed Toyah herself. She invited him back stage where they sat on the stairs whilst she answered his questions. On the other side of the door we seethed with curiosity and a slight sense of jealousy – who was this guy? Who did he think he was? What was going on? Why weren’t we involved?

  As it turned out this was the mysterious figure known as The Elusive Stranger who had occasionally contributed to the Intergalactic Ranch House newsletter, reviewing gigs and the like.

  I had no idea that eighteen years later – my entire life all over again! - he and I would be in a band together and that we would record a single with Toyah.

  Whilst it could be argued that I am now viewing this summer through punk-tinted spectacles, it felt like a long hot one, a positive time. The country may have been groaning under the yoke of Thatcher who had tightened her grip on its throat at the recent election (the first in which I had been able to vote), but never mind, David Bowie had a new album out and was touring for the first time in years.

  This seemed to excite Toyah. She seemed as enthusiastic about Bowie as we were about her and this made us happy. She was like us. We brought in cuttings about Bowie from the newspapers and magazines to give to her and to her credit she always said thanks and seemed pleased even though in retrospect I imagine she’d probably outgrown pop pinups by that stage…

  We did occasionally go and see the play, which was a lot more enjoyable than you might think. It was massively unconventional and had a bright optimism and humour that made the feminist message clear and rational. Toyah was superb in it and whilst she might have been used to singing and acting she took to the play’s third strand – faux wrestling – like a natural.

  On those nights we weren’t watching we found ever more ingenious ways to amuse ourselves. One evening – I can’t remember whose idea it was or how it started – several of us ended up swimming in the Thames in our underwear and had to be let in to the stage door by concerned Mermaid Theatre staff to dry off. On another occasion we skipped over the fence at London Zoo one afternoon and spent a few hours looking at the animals. We investigated the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral. And we went to the pub. We went to several pubs. We went to a large number of pubs, repeatedly, and drank ourselves stupid. Back then hangovers seemed to be something that only happened to other people.

  There were bad times as well; people had arguments and the occasional fight – most of which thankfully remained non-physical. Preston continued to be a large thorn in our collective side until the older Chris took it upon himself to tell him to stop hanging around with us.

  This didn’t go down too well. After a series of mumbled threats Preston wandered off and over the next few weeks made a point of ostentatiously jogging past on the Blackfriars Overpass near Puddle Dock, allegedly getting fit in preparation for some unknown future event (I think he was trying to imply that this would be “beating us all up”). Badly executed graffiti started to appear claiming that a shadowy and unseen gang known as the Warboys were going to “get” the Angels and Demons.

  This state of affairs didn’t last. Preston couldn’t keep up the aggressive pretence and somehow managed to worm his way back – if not into our affections then at least into our grudging tolerance. We even had to tell him to go away again at one point – this time it was Lee who braved the man-mountain’s impotent fury. And yet it wasn’t long before Preston was back yet again. Even if we weren’t that keen on him, he seemed to like us.

  Never mind. There were much more exciting things going on to concern ourselves with than a bully’s hang-ups.

  As has already been mentioned Toyah was burning the candle at both ends this summer. As soon as she finished the evening at Tanzi she would cross town to the Marquee recording studio in Wardour Street for the recording of the new album. We’d arrive shortly after that and set up camp in an alcove in the alleyway between the door to the studio and the back stage entrance of the gig venue. Toyah and her guitarist and long term musical collaborator Joel used to come out for a chat in between takes. During the takes if we were lucky we could hear brand new Toyah tracks leaking out through the cracks in the doors. This blew our minds.

  Of course sometimes real life got in the way of this unorthodox idyll. Several of us had to go away on family holidays and missed a week or so of the unrepeatable experience. I was particularly lucky yet very unfortunate - my parents had arranged for me to spend time in Mexico spending five weeks travelling around and staying with a friend of a friend of the family.

  Mexico was amazing, but I was so upset to be missing the party. I sent postcards on a regular basis back to Toyah and the rest of the gang care of the Mermaid Theatre.

  Nevertheless I managed to put a Toyah spin on my holiday. I caught an overnight coach to Guanajuato, home of the infamous Mummies from the eponymous track on The Blue Meaning.

  I had no idea what to expect. My interest in Ancient Egypt, the plot of a couple of Tintin books and an erroneous sentence in the unofficial book “Toyah” by Mike West had led me to believe that the Mummies had to be those of ancient Aztec kings, but the truth was very different.

  My guidebook informed me that the mummies all dated from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and had been formed by a curious combination of circumstances - unusually dry conditions in the soil surrounding the city and the imposition of a grave tax. If the tax wasn’t paid by your relatives then up you came. It was at this point that it was discovered that some of the defaulting dead had been naturally mummified so their bodies were stored in a barn like structure in the cemetery grounds. After a while cemetery works had begun charging entry to this grotesque freak show. When I later asked Toyah how she knew about it she said that someone had given her a book about this place back in the late seventies and she had become fascinated by the surreal tale.

  My heart started beating faster as I entered one end of the long low building in which the mummies were now housed. I felt as if I was about to meet fictional characters and the Toyah song looped through my head…

  Forgive my begging lunacy we crave identity…

  The “glass house” in which the mummies lived turned out to be a long row of tall glass fronted cabinets stacked against the outside wall of this annex. Inside strange post human creatures were propped, faces dried and twisted, eyes missing or screwed tight shut, some still dressed for their own funeral in Sunday best. Bellies were distended. Arms and legs distorted like tree branches. Necks craned. Mouths open in silent screams. No wonder, I thought, that there was something about Mexico that felt as if it had one foot in the next world. The attitude to death here was… different.

  Our faces have grown so thin, our skins are cold to touch…

  Then I felt as if the floor had dropped out of the bottom of my mind. There in front of me was the grim figure from the sleeve of Toyah’s first single Victims of the Riddle, something I had always previously taken for a fire damaged Victorian doll. But no. It was a mummified baby in a lace-fringed dress. The faded brown ink on a piece of card propped up next to the m
iniature husk informed me that when she had been human her name had been Magdalena Aguilar.

  Tormented voices through the skirting board…

  Outside in the hot sun my head reeled. Cheerful salesmen manned stalls selling mummy candy and mummy key rings. I bought a handful of the latter to give to everyone back home.

  Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t have nightmares.

  When I returned to the UK there were only a couple of weeks of Tanzi left. I’d missed some amazing things; apparently one night at the Marquee Toyah and her guitarist Joel had asked the members of the Angels and Demons who were outside that night in to record backing vocals on the title track of the album Love is the Law. I’d also missed some trials and traumas too but the good thing was that everyone seemed pleased to see me back including Toyah. I didn’t have any photos from Mexico to show as I didn’t have a camera, but I had bought loads of postcards, books and maps.

  The last night of Tanzi felt like the shindig at the end of the world. It was a night matched only by the huge celebration that had taken place a few months before on Toyah’s birthday when we’d persuaded the show’s keyboard player to play happy birthday to her at the very end of the show. Then as now it seemed as if the entire audience was made up of fans.

  The play had been spectacularly successful and over the summer we’d seen a number of famous visitors including Tracey Ullman and Rik Mayall. Toyah had been asked to stay on but was unable to as not only had she a tour coming up at the end of the year, but was also flying off to France immediately after the end of Tanzi to make a film, The Ebony Tower, with Lawrence Olivier and Greta Scacchi.