by Chris Limb
I didn’t like it.
It was the chorus that just didn’t do it for me. It sounded too poppy, too commercial. Too major key. The verses were OK. But the chorus... It was the kind of chorus I could have imagined Cyndi Lauper having in one of her songs and that didn’t sit well with me. Bob and I spoke in hushed tones, it felt like the end of the world. Listening to us, anyone would have thought that somebody had just died.
Whilst some of this extreme reaction was due to the glossy production and “chart hit” nature of the song, I’m sure a lot of it was down to a change in my own taste as well. I was now coming up for two years at university, two years out on my own, and had been exposed to a vast range of diverse influences. In those days Sussex University had not one but two music venues on campus. Aside from the Mandela Hall where the larger bands played, student union building Falmer House also contained The Crypt, a small nightclub where I had not only DJed a couple of times but also seen such acts as Porky the Poet and Attila the Stockbroker not to mention Captain Sensible putting in a cameo appearance when Dolly Mixture played. In town were the Zap Club (where amongst others I’d watched Bone Orchard, NON and Tools You Can Trust) and The Escape where I’d seen Flesh for Lulu.
Positive Punk was now Goth and I was probably becoming a bit of a musical snob. Nevertheless it was true that Don’t Fall In Love, as Toyah’s single was called, was extremely polished and commercial, probably the most blatantly poppy thing she had ever done.
Well of course I still bought it. On both seven and twelve inch in vinyl, plus poster sleeve. I drew solace from the fact that the extra track on the twelve inch, Kiss the Devil, sounded a bit more like the Toyah of old. The thing was despite that fact that on the whole most of our little group weren’t too keen on this particular single, we were still loyal fans and fully prepared to support her in whatever endeavours in she got involved in. Besides, this was the first single she’d released for nearly eighteen months. We all bought it and decided that we’d definitely still be turning up to say hello where we could at any TV shows she might appear on to promote it.
I’d taken it quite personally that she hadn’t been on Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas back in December 1984. Quite apart from the charity single’s important and historic purpose it had almost seemed like a party for all those early eighties bands with almost everyone who was anyone taking part. Why hadn’t Bob Geldof asked Toyah to join in?
I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently he had asked her and furthermore she’d been keen to take part. However, for reasons known only to themselves her management at the time had made a monumental error of judgement and said that they didn’t want her involved in charity work.
The album Minx that followed Don’t Fall in Love also felt like a bit of an error of judgement to us. Eddie called to say that he’d managed to get hold of an advance copy at the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill; needless to say me and a couple of others piled round to his place in double quick time to listen to it.
“It could have been worse.”
Eddie’s opinion reflected what some of us were feeling. Whilst containing some examples of what we felt were yet more glossy commodity-pop songs (including what seemed like an odd choice of a cover in School’s Out – back then the Alice Cooper version was still definitive), the album was more than just a collection of Don’t Fall In Love clones. There were a number of songs that were recognisably Toyah, containing lyrical themes and leitmotifs that indicated she was still following her own unique artistic path. Nevertheless, it wasn’t quite enough. It seemed constrained to me, like some Major Label Suit’s idea of Toyah; punk woman as business asset. The large number of cover versions included seemed to indicate a shift in attitude towards the albums, moving away from the idea of them as entities in themselves, individual works of art from the mind of Willcox, and towards the idea of them as marketable product.
Of course looking back I can now see that I was somehow managing to be simultaneously naive and cynical. All record companies (indie cachet notwithstanding) operated like that and just because I didn’t like the album, it didn’t necessarily follow that it was all an Evil Plan masterminded by Major Label Man. It was simply very much an album of its time, grandiose and glossy.
We were devoted fans and kept the faith. I was still in correspondence with Toyah even if I was sending her far more letters than she ever had time to reply to. For some reason I’d got the idea into my head that I wanted to be a comic book artist and decided that my first attempt would be The New Adventures of Toyah; her career re-imagined as that of a 21st century superhero in the year 2085...
Finally there was news of something she was appearing at that we could go along to. Pebble Mill at One. It was in Birmingham, which was a fair old distance, but even so I hoped to make it on time. As it turned out I was a little late and ended up being absent from something important. I knew I was probably going to miss the recording of the show itself; that much was clear. However, we hadn’t been expecting to get in anyway and whilst it might have been nice to see Toyah arrive, getting from Brighton to Birmingham New Street in time for noon just wasn’t going to happen on my temporal budget.
I rolled up at BBC Pebble Mill studios just in time to see Toyah emerge from the studios. When she saw me her jaw dropped and she looked shocked.
“Oh no! Chris! Where were you? You missed it!”
It turned out that she’d recorded a special video for Don’t Fall In Love outside Pebble Mill and had asked for the Angels and Demons to be included in it where they’d taken pride of place in the end sequence. I was gutted. This was the second time I’d seriously missed out (the first being the Love is the Law backing vocals two years previously). I think my disappointment must have showed on my face as Toyah did pay me a lot of attention in the few minutes before she had to depart. I’d brought along a copy of the initial pages of my comic, which I gave to her. A small consolation prize was the fact that a photographer covering her appearance for the local paper used a snap featuring me prominently to illustrate the short item.
The academic year nearly over, I was due back in London for the summer, at least temporarily, and was making plans to go and visit Bob to watch Live Aid on TV with him and Lunar. When I spoke to him on the phone a week or so before he had some exciting news. Apparently Toyah’s old record label Safari had released an album of old material from the vaults, entitled Mayhem. Bob sounded excited, I certainly was. It was a dream come true, the kind of thing we’d fantasised about; the fabled “old days” within our reach once more. I arranged to come over as soon as I could in advance of our planned Live Aid gathering.
Needless to say, the first thing I wanted to do when I got to Bob’s house was listen to it.
“What?” he seemed surprised,” You didn’t fall for that did you? I was joking. Come on, as if that was ever going to happen. Unheard old material indeed!”
I didn’t know what to say and felt a crushing disappointment. Ridiculously I felt close to tears. We watched TV in silence for ten minutes, but I couldn’t really concentrate on what was on the screen. Bob jumped up.
“Come on, do you want to listen to Mayhem then?”
Ah, a double bluff. I had indeed fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. Luckily I was too excited and relieved to be annoyed.
The LP certainly looked the part, with a dark black and white photocopy effect sleeve, the original Toyah logo, album title in a similar typeface as that used for Anthem.
Yet the album was rather underwhelming. Whilst it was exciting to hear this “new old” material, these variants, sketches and demos, given the nature of the collection there was understandably little coherence to the album. In some cases it was clear why these songs hadn’t been granted a more official release. Nevertheless, there were a few classics in there and being offered a glimpse into the evolution of some of my favourite music was fascinating.
My presence in London for a couple of months meant that at least I’d be more convenientl
y placed should Toyah make any more appearances to promote Minx and the singles that followed. One thing I’d noticed was that Tom no longer seemed to be in attendance on every occasion that she did - a lot of the time she turned up only accompanied by Kate. Perhaps they felt she no longer needed a bodyguard per se and it was easier for E’G Management to pay for a driver. This was the case when I met Toyah by accident one afternoon in the West End.
I was also into Marc Almond at the time whose solo career was now taking off after the demise of Soft Cell, and sometimes used to hang out with some of his fans - there was a little bit of crossover between the Angels and Demons and Marc’s fans the Gutterhearts, even if the latter were far more numerous. One afternoon one of them - Sam I think his name was - said that he’d heard that Morrissey was appearing on Radio One that evening and did we want to go up there and meet him?
I certainly did. I thought the recently released Meat is Murder album was fantastic and it had probably been instrumental in my recent conversion to vegetarianism. So it was that Sam, another boy and myself trouped up Regent Street to Portland Place to wait outside BBC Broadcasting House.
There didn’t seem to be that many Smiths fans around, just two girls. Unusually we were permitted to wait inside reception and it was whilst sitting there that I spied Toyah and Kate emerge from the interior of the building.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I jumped up and scurried over to them. Toyah looked round.
“What are you doing here?” she replied. I explained about Morrissey, and she revealed that she shared my admiration for Meat is Murder.
“I think they’re going to be the biggest band in the world! Tell him I love the album, even though he’ll probably just say ‘Her? piss off’...” she managed a passable imitation of Morrissey’s lugubrious tones. Sam and the others got Toyah’s autograph and took a couple of pictures before she left.
“Why have you got such a big grin on your face?” one of the girls asked me.
Morrissey didn’t show up.
I was to return to Broadcasting House again later that summer in the company of the Angels and Demons as Toyah made a couple of appearances on Radio One’s Roundtable. On the latter of these two occasions whilst waiting outside I spotted a couple of my friends in the distance as they rounded the steps at the bottom of All Soul’s Church. I waved at them. I hadn’t seen Paul Gambaccini walking past in between them and me but for some reason he thought I was waving at him and waved back.
I felt obscurely embarrassed. I’m not sure why. I knew I was waving at my friends. He thought I was waving at him and seemed happy with that. Where was the embarrassment there? Logically nowhere as far as I could tell. However, I’ve always had a uneasy relationship with embarrassment and as a result have never been able to look at Gambo in the same way since.
By now the Angels and Demons all seemed to have grown up a little – and photos from this time reveal that we seemed to have become a lot more flamboyant and confident in our looks. When we walked down the street in the West End on the way to or from meeting Toyah at the BBC, tourists took photos.
After the second of these Roundtable occasions Bob came back down to Brighton with me to stay for a couple of days in the new flat in Goldstone Road, Hove, into which I’d moved in preparation for my final year at university. We had an expedition planned.
For some time the house on the cover of The Blue Meaning had exercised a fascination over fandom and one of the many holy grails we aspired to was to track it down and have our pictures taken there… When questioned, Toyah had said she thought it was “somewhere near Brighton”.
Access to a university library was not without its benefits; an afternoon spent looking through leather-bound volumes dealing with the architecture of Victorian gothic follies had enabled me to finally identify it as Wykehurst Place, near Bolney.
This was about ten miles north of Brighton. Our adventures with Indians in Moscow the previous year meant that we thought nothing of hitching such a short distance and it wasn’t long before we arrived in the middle of nowhere, just north of a Little Chef. The entrance to the grounds of Wykehurst was on the main road to London, gates overlooked by a now derelict lodge. We passed though and walked up the long driveway towards the house proper, which was shielded, from view by a small copse of trees huddling together against what now seemed like a rather spooky grey afternoon. A sinister silhouette swam into view through the branches and then there it was. The Big Grey Building. An archetypal haunted house, terribly familiar to me from years of staring at the sleeve of one of Toyah’s darkest and finest hours.
Crystals form in the grey building’s hollow eyes…
Not for the first time I felt had stepped into the world of Toyah’s fictions and was once again face to face with one of her record sleeves. Bob took pictures and shot footage on his second-hand cine camera, the house every bit as photogenic as you might think, its windows unnaturally dark, a blackness that sucked at the eyes and made you feel nervous about approaching too closely.
That big grey building breathes grey vapours into icy skies…
The illusion was spoilt a little when a man came out of the house and asked us what we were doing. However once we explained that we were just taking pictures (and that his house had appeared on an LP sleeve five years previously) he seemed quite happy for us to continue.
Eventually we made our way back away from the house and down to the main road and walked back down into Bolney, going for lunch in the Little Chef. On our return to Brighton we spent a lot of the rest of Bob’s visit putting together a photographic record of the past couple of years following Toyah around, a photocopied picture book that we called Angelic Days and Demonic Nights. We only had the time and money to run off two or three copies, one of which eventually was passed on to Toyah some years later…
1985 moved on into autumn and my final year at university started. Toyah wasn’t around much. The third single from Minx had failed to dent the Top 40, and the tour we’d all been looking forward to didn’t materialise.
Then one morning in a newsagent in Hove the cover of a tabloid newspaper caught my eye and stopped me in my tracks. It was the headline that did it.
Toyah jilts her lover Tom.
10: Which came out of the opened door?
I’d never bought The Sun before and was uncomfortable about doing so now. It held all sorts of negative connotations for me. Recently I’d been supportive of the rather earnest (but successful!) student campaign to get its sale banned from the campus newsagent (mainly because of page three and its offensiveness to women) but it ran deeper than that. In my head The Sun would always be associated with The Fuckers at school, the bullies. They’d bought it regularly, imagining this somehow made them adult and daring. They’d subsequently sellotaped an endless parade of monochrome newsprint breasts inside their desks and - on one memorable occasion - to the blackboard during an RE lesson.
So I was in a quandary. Tom had sold his story to The Sun and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to read it. You will have to take my word for this - and some of you may be cynical - but this wasn’t in a lascivious “I want to get to read all Toyah’s secrets” way. I just wanted to know what he’d said. I wanted to know how upset and offended I should be.
To be honest I had never been entirely comfortable around him. This was because he seemed to carry an aura of aggression around – although I reasoned that this was partly because it was what people in the bodyguard business had to do by necessity. It was all part of the job. Nevertheless I’d overlooked these initial instincts and given him the benefit of the doubt because he’d been Toyah’s boyfriend. If Toyah had liked him, I reasoned, he must have been all right.
And now that certainty had been thrown into disarray.
The journalist concerned must have been laughed out of the newsroom when he’d filed his story back at Fleet Street. Unfortunately for Murdoch’s Minions, Tom didn’t really have any dirt to dish. All anyone reading the st
ory would have got out of it was that (a) Toyah was ambitious (b) sometimes they used to have sex (c) sometimes Tom had to do the housework and (d) they’d now split up.
I don’t know whether it was the subject’s naivety or the journalist’s subsequent spinning of what to his chagrin had turned out to be a rather lukewarm exclusive, but Tom ended up coming out of the whole process looking like a buffoon. The tales about groupies coupled with complaints about having to wash Toyah’s smalls gave the entire piece a distinctly male chauvinist whiff. The revelations about “the day my outburst stunned Olivier” were frankly embarrassing (apparently he’d thrown a jealous fit during the filming of Toyah’s nude scene for The Ebony Tower). The less said about the testosterone-laden assertion that “I really ought to go and do this guy Fripp in” the better.
Like all exclusives of this kind it had a short shelf life. The tabloids relied on Toyah and her ilk to sell copies, celebrities were their lifeblood and it wouldn’t do to rub them up the wrong way for too long. Such revelations might provide a short-term vicarious thrill for their readers but in a year’s time almost everyone would have forgotten about them.
These events did rock the fan community though - and in particular the Angels and Demons were never quite the same again. The reunions started to become less frequent and cracks appeared in our hitherto close-knit community. This may well have been because the news had hammered home the truth that for all our posturing we didn’t know Toyah nearly as well as we imagined. These revelations had come out of the blue, blindsiding us.
The information that Toyah was now involved with guitarist Robert Fripp was about the only useful thing to come out of Tom’s kiss-and-tell. I was already aware of Fripp but knew next to nothing else about him other than that he’d played that mad hurtling guitar on Bowie’s Scary Monsters that sounded like someone completing a intricate Chinese puzzle whilst riding a rollercoaster. I also recalled that he’d been in King Crimson, a band that a hippy called Charlie had played me during an experiment with LSD towards the end of my first year at university (during the hallucinogenic experience I could have sworn I’d heard a voice calling me from deep in the soundscape).
