I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan

by Chris Limb

  Sheffield City Hall. By now there was a danger that I would start to find all the gigs blurring into one. Even Toyah seemed a bit zoned out when she turned up and said hello at the stage door. Joel meanwhile had started referring to Lunar as “Lulu”. I do remember the show being a good one though, although afterwards the prospect of a third night out in the open was less than pleasant. As it turned out we didn’t get any sleep at all - having just bedded down for the night in Sheffield coach station we were awakened buy three or four local teens who seemed a little perturbed to find us there and suggested (politely, mind) that we go elsewhere. They obviously had other plans for the place that evening. Lunar and I wandered the streets and eventually ended up in an all night cafe where we spent the remaining hours until daylight making an egg sandwich and several cups of tea last as long as we could.

  Once on the coach I slept all the way to Crawley. Despite the fact that I must have changed at Victoria Coach Station, I don’t remember the interruption to the journey.

  By the time we arrived at Crawley Leisure Centre it was already dark again. Lunar and I re-joined the rest of the tribe all of whom in contrast to us were bizarrely energetic and perky. I was disappointed that most of them didn’t seem that interested in hearing of our experiences in The North. However, Hayley didn’t let me down. She was very curious and listened intently to my recounting of the tale paying particular attention to the bits with Toyah in them.

  Security at the Leisure Centre left a bit to be desired. A handful of us discovered a doorway which led to a darkened staircase at the top of which was a glass fronted room looking down on the auditorium in which Toyah was currently sound checking.

  It was weird. She was just wandering slowly around the stage in a coat, singing Rebel Run in a low voice. A million miles away from the hyperactive bounce! bounce! bounce! bounce! of her usual performance. She looked frightening and serious. In a way we were peering behind the curtain at the mechanism of the music business, the checking of the sound divorced from the light and fury of the actual performance and were disconcerted by what we’d discovered.

  Next she rehearsed The Vow with the added instrumentation of a saxophone, borrowed along with the musician controlling it from the Silver Spurs. It sounded great like this and Toyah could be heard cursing the fact that they hadn’t thought to include a sax on the original recording.

  Eventually a member of the Leisure Centre personnel caught us. They didn’t seem that cross though and merely escorted us back to the public area where we waited for the gig proper. The main thing I remember about it now was the fact that the stage started to disintegrate under the pressure of the audience pushing forward and the road crew had to perform emergency maintenance during one of the songs. Afterwards out in the car park Toyah spent a few minutes leaning out the window of her coach joking with us before driving off.

  The following day was the last date of the main tour at Reading Hexagon. Reading wasn’t too far from London, so once again most of us made it. This was notable for the Silver Spurs joining Toyah onstage for an encore of I Want To Be Free along with our fellow Angel and Demon Abi. She’d been starting to suffer from barrier crush and had been close to passing out before being dragged to safety by the bouncers. Recovering in the wings with a glass of water, she’d been spotted by Silver Spurs frontman Jonathan “Perky” Perkins who’d dragged her onstage with him for the encore much to Tom’s chagrin.

  Toyah finished the gig by introducing both her band and the Silver Spurs before turning her attention to Abi (perhaps the only member of the Angels and Demons even shorter than Toyah).

  “And this,” she said, “Is a munchkin who sneaked on stage! Naughty little Abi!”

  Apparently Perky had also attempted to take her backstage to the party afterwards but Tom had put his foot down and she’d been unceremoniously ejected via the stage door where we discovered her afterwards.

  We’d learned at Reading that two more “secret” dates at The Marquee were to follow a few days later, a Christmas party, a thank you to the fans from Toyah who’d had a great year. Afraid that it would sell out in seconds we all trouped down there the next day and bought our precious tickets. It was going to be great. It was going to be even more like the mythical “old days” that none of us had actually experienced. A small club venue!

  Admittedly, it did feel very different, hot and sweaty. This incarnation of The Marquee, in Wardour Street, had a much lower stage than we’d been used to and it was more difficult to remain upright with the pressure of the crowd bearing down on you from behind. The first night I found myself next to fellow Angel and Demon Bob. After a few minutes chat he suddenly asked me if I was gay.

  At first this seemed a bit of a non sequitur as we’d been talking about the fact that we were about to experience one of the most potentially exciting gigs of our lives so far. What did my sexuality have to do with anything? It then turned out that apparently there had been some debate about this amongst some of the other male members of our little gang and Bob had been the one who’d drawn the short straw and had been forced to ask me.

  The debate about my sexuality settled (I clarified that even though I might have appeared feminine and camp at times, I did fancy women a lot more than I did men) we settled down to enjoy the show which was as exhilarating as we had every right to expect a recreation of “the old days” to be, wild, loud and passionate.

  The second night felt even crazier.

  “Are you pissed already?” asked Toyah when she turned up to find us colliding out of control in the alleyway by the stage door. During the show Toyah seemed to have readjusted to playing at smaller venues and it felt like the best gig of the whole tour. Afterwards we all hung around in the bar, including, for some of the time, Toyah and the band plus Jonathan Perkins and the normally serious Kate who was obviously very drunk and started being oddly flirty and affectionate with some of us in a way that felt a bit... inappropriate. Eventually they all disappeared backstage again to continue the party and we made our way outside to do the same.

  A couple of us got arrested for being drunk and disorderly. When Toyah eventually emerged in the small hours she looked spaced out and tired. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the end of an era. A handful of us trouped back to Abi’s flat (she lived relatively nearby) and crashed out.

  Aside from the arrests at the very end, it had been a great tour. Hopefully the next one would be even better.

  We had no idea there wouldn’t even be another tour for ten years.

  8: So much more to 1984

  “Toyah Toyah Toyah - startling new album - all the hits!

  Toyah Toyah Toyah - also a spectacular video!

  Toyah Toyah Toyah - more Toyah than you've ever had before!

  Toyah Toyah Toyah - exciting album and video out now!”

  1984 advert for K-tel compilation LP

  Ironically 1984 would see less Toyah than I’d had for a very long time. I was hoping that her release from the five year contract with erstwhile record label Safari and signing to Portrait Records would result in more music quite soon - after all she’d been releasing albums at a rate of one or two a year since 1979, surely any record label worth its salt would be keen to take their new signing for a spin around the charts? If nothing else I felt it was high time that the music journalists gave her another chance; by the close of play in 1983 virtually everyone in the music press had their knives out for her, even Smash Hits. Half the time these criticisms seemed to revolve around the fact that she had a lisp (which I never thought was that noticeable myself) – constantly pointing this out was irrelevant at best and spiteful at worst. I wondered if there was another agenda at play here.

  Whatever the reason, this press hostility was a problem. As self-styled arbiters of coolness, the music papers often dictated what people “should” like, meaning that in an attempt to appear with-it people would stop liking the bands or singers that the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds had decided were on the way out at the mo
ment, whatever their merits. If enough people stopped liking things, their popularity would decrease in real terms and the music papers would congratulate themselves on having the foresight to predict such falls from grace - whereas in fact a lot of the time they’d caused them.

  Sometimes bands managed to achieve longevity by exploiting the rivalry between the publications (were you an NME band or a Melody Maker band?) but even so music journalists wielded a lot of power back in those days. Or so it seemed to me at the time.

  Perhaps a new album from Toyah on a new label would help the magazines and weeklies see past their what’s hot and what’s not attitude? Unfortunately it turned out that aside from the K-Tel compilation LP, there’d be no music from Toyah at all in 1984. Quite what her new record label was playing at I had no idea, but in the meantime I’d have to find something else to listen to.

  I was in the right place for it. I was a first year undergraduate at a university where they still put numerous bands on. For a little while now my tastes had been drifting away from what was in the Top 40 and I’d been experimenting with alternative bands and their records, playing them on my weekly student radio show. Liking Soft Cell had certainly helped - their unconventional approach, dark themes and artistic side projects had exposed me to such bands as their label mates The The, Foetus and Psychic TV amongst others.

  The bands playing at the university - from Killing Joke to Spear of Destiny via China Crisis and Amazulu - helped broaden my horizons, as did the musical tastes of my neighbours in the York House hall of residence. I taped my copy of The The’s Soul Mining for them and they reciprocated with stuff like Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division and the original incarnation of Ultravox.

  And there was new music coming along all the time as well. One band we all started to get excited about were The Smiths. They’d been on Top of the Pops in recent months; their lead singer was fascinating - a bizarre bequiffed gangling geek in NHS specs flinging bits of plant everywhere. He was a million miles from both the recently departed New Romantic icons and the dull blue denim pop stars who’d taken their place.

  Me and my fellow York Housers all bought tickets for their gig down the road at Brighton Polytechnic. The band’s debut album came out only a week beforehand, so we all had to spend hours listening to it in order to familiarise ourselves with the songs (even so they threw a couple of unfamiliar numbers into the mix including one rather amusingly called Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now). The gig itself was great. At the end the people running the Polytechnic told the band that they had to stop playing as their allotted time was up. The band refused and came back on for several more encores even though the house lights were now up. Remembering my regrets at not documenting the Toyah gigs the previous autumn, I’d borrowed a camera and took some pictures. A few of them even came out.

  I was surprised but very pleased when Toyah wrote to me again at university - this time out of the blue and not in response to anything I’d sent her.

  I bought a wonderful crystal ball the other day, she wrote, it weighs a ton. Some of the girls have started following the Eurythmics a lot thank god, it gives me some peace and quiet for a change!

  It was true. In the absence of Toyah gigs or even any appearances at TV or Radio studios outside which we could wait some of the girls - mainly Linda, Alison and Abi and occasionally Hayley had taken to going to as many dates on the Touch tour as they could manage and getting to know Annie Lennox into the bargain. I had yet to find a full time distraction to occupy me during Toyah’s sabbatical. The Smiths were good but gave off a bit of an aloof aura, and besides they were all men. In my mind a band could only really be interesting if there were women involved in some way.

  It wasn’t long before I found another band to like. The previous December Channel Four’s flagship music TV show The Tube had screened a Hull music special. A filmed segment had presenter Jools Holland using a public urinal whilst uttering the cryptic words “...maybe I’ll be lucky enough to see Indians in Moscow?” What did this mean? Was it an expression meaning something very unlikely along the lines of “once in a blue moon”?

  No, it meant Naughty Miranda, the debut single from Indians in Moscow, a synth-punk band fronted by Adele, a crazy looking girl with tangled blond hair and a line in darkly humorous lyrics. Pete and Stuart provided the driving synthesised accompaniment and even the drums bashed by Rich were electronic.

  I liked the video and had already bought the single when one afternoon in early 1984 I popped into the student radio station only to find a poster and a couple of records on the table. It turned out the band had been there only ten minutes before hoping to drum up an audience for their show that evening at The Ship in Lewes Road. That was just down the road (almost opposite where I’d seen The Smiths) so I popped down there on the bus.

  It was a great show, all of the other songs just as memorable and quirky as Naughty Miranda. I was pleased to hear that they were going to be playing the following night as well at The Old Vic in town. The next day when I turned up, one of the first people I saw was singer Adele sitting at the bar. Despite my natural shyness I struck up a conversation with her and we spent the whole of the rest of the evening talking (aside from the time she was actually performing onstage).

  My adventures with Indians in Moscow are perhaps worthy of a whole book themselves, despite the fact that they lasted barely eight months - the band split up at the end of August. I came out of this time with more exposure to travelling around the country to see a band play (this time hitch-hiking a lot of the way), further insight into the machinations of the music industry and (perhaps most important of all in retrospect) the experience of selling merchandise for a band and of running their fan club.

  I also knew some of my fellow Angels and Demons a lot better, as Bob, Lee and Kev had all joined me in following the band around the country and almost all of the rest of the ensemble had been to at least one of the London gigs at some point.

  I also settled on one of my signature “looks” during the time, having gone from the awkward-schoolboy-with-clumsily-dyed-black-hair to the spiky peroxide Billy Idol-ish “do”. I felt a lot better for it.

  Finally Toyah reappeared on our radar. She was a contestant on Pop Quiz at the BBC Television Centre, so we duly trouped along to White City and hung around outside the gates. Eventually she turned up in a car with Tom and Kate... and with blue hair. This was a first. We didn’t have tickets for the show so had to watch it on TV. Amongst her co-stars on this occasion were Paul Young, Drummie Zeb and Gary Glitter.

  It was good to see her again, albeit briefly. Despite my dalliance with other bands she still held pride of place in my mind.

  1984 rumbled on and the pop charts quaked at the onslaught of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. My own two tribes of University friends plus Angels and Demons collided on one memorable occasion when the latter came down to stay with me for one night towards the end of the summer term. Rosie, the girl in the room next to mine in York House, never spoke to me again - in a moment of drunken overenthusiasm Russ had sneaked into her room and written “NICE ONE” in marker pen on a pair of her knickers.

  My second university year began in October 1984 when I moved out of halls and into a shared flat in Portland Road in Hove, my flatmates four girls. This meant that my Toyah posters drew sharp criticism from the various associated boyfriends who frequented the flat over the year flexing their cool, but I seem to remember quite a crowd in front of the TV when The Ebony Tower was finally broadcast.

  There was a lot in the press about this at the time, primarily because the film contained a nude scene. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about myself – I was more interested in the fact that Toyah was in a film with Lawrence Olivier and that she was on the front of the TV Times than in the fact that she and her co-star Greta Scacchi spent five minutes or so in the film naked. If anything it simply made me feel uncomfortable watching it with a group of people all of whom knew I liked Toyah because of what I imagined they might be thinking
I was thinking, even though I wasn’t…

  Christmas came and with it another appearance on Pop Quiz, on this occasion held at the TV Theatre in Shepherds Bush. We had tickets now so after seeing Toyah on arrival (her hair now in short orange spikes) we all watched the show from seats somewhere near the back. This time Toyah shared the show with such luminaries as Meat Loaf, Noddy Holder, Nasher from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Roger Taylor from Queen and Green Gartside. It was all rather cheesy to be honest, but afterwards we all gathered in the alleyway to say hi to Toyah when she departed.

  Meat Loaf emerged first and stomped off down the alleyway towards Shepherds Bush Green. Having read somewhere that his real name was Marvin but that he didn’t like it when people used it, I jokingly called out “Bye Marvin!” in a voice just too quiet for him to have been able to catch.

  “I bet you wouldn’t say it to his face!” hissed Lee gleefully. Damned right. I wouldn’t. Back then Meat Loaf was still rather scary looking - like a supervillain version of Mel Smith.

  Toyah then appeared. It felt a long way from the previous Christmas at the Marquee - the Eighties had so much more time in them than modern decades. She was genuinely pleased to see us and stayed chatting for a while despite the cold.

  I’d entered a proto-goth phase, my short spiky hair now black, and I’d acquired a second hand leather jacket. It was obviously a look that worked at the time, because as she left, Toyah remarked, “Doesn’t Chris Limb look hunky!”

  Perhaps the word “hunky” wasn’t the one I’d have chosen but even so - it was a marvellous Christmas present.

  9: Trash and tease it

  I didn’t like what I was hearing.

  I was speaking to fellow Angel and Demon Bob on a payphone in a corridor at The Portland pub in Portland Road, Hove in spring 1985. He’d just played me Toyah’s new single down the phone.