TOYAH ON ITV UNSCRIPTED WITH NINA NANNAR 23.7.2021
NINA: I'm Nina Nannar. My guest is singer, actress and all round 80’s legend Toyah. We talk punk, "Posh Pop", growing older and more cautious and trending globally on YouTube. Toyah Wilcox, what an absolute delight to see you. Thank you so much for joining me. We are just emerging from this lockdown world ... I know you've been incredibly busy during the last 18 months. You've got a new album out. The first sort of new music for 13 years, so lockdown seems to have inspired your creative juices if you like TOYAH: Lockdown, initially was absolutely terrifying. My husband’s 75, and I was so frightened for him. I'm 63. And we only thought the lockdown would last three weeks and the way Robert (below with Toyah) and I, my husband's called Robert Fripp, we looked at this and we thought we're not gonna sit and wait, we're going to make contact and we started to put very beautiful films out, fun films, completely ridiculous films, and we went from 100,000 to, I think, in the last six months 40 million people have seen us.
And this was so inspiring that we realised that this very unique time was an opportunity to have more contact with people around the world than we ever could through touring. And at the same time support our industry and the people in our industry that the audience never see. And that's the people that do the hard lifting. And I became super super creative. I've always written with my writing partner Simon Darlow in the last 30 years and we locked ourselves away. We became a creative pod. We got my husband into play guitar and this album has been created in the unique history of lockdown. I've made ten videos to accompany the album that we shot in the house. That was very deliberate - saying that creativity starts in the home. Creativity isn't a 100 million budget. It isn't about living in Beverly Hills. It starts in the home.
NINA: We've had a really good look at your beautiful home, all the astonishing videos that you talked about. We'll talk more about “Posh Pop”, which is the name of your new album, which is out in August, a little bit later. You mentioned Robert. It must be really handy if you're a musician and a creative that your husband happens also to be an incredible musician and a creative. Of course, Robert Fripp, the founder member of King Crimson and very established successful musician in his own right. So is that the sort of thing you talked about all the time, creativity and music over the dinner table?
TOYAH: I love your phrase “very handy”. Because in lockdown I taught him how to cook because I'm going to be stuck in cooking all the time. My husband and I, we talk about the industry a lot and we talk about potential. We feel that at our grand ages in an industry that ain't fond of our age that we still have so much potential and so much to do. So we talk about that. Yes, it is very handy having a brilliant guitarist to hand and a guitarist I love and I love his work. He is a romantic husband but when he plays guitar he's a warrior. It is very useful being in lockdown with someone who is as talented as he is, yes. But in the kitchen? No. NINA: You touched on being a more mature member of the rock establishment, yourself and Robert. How do you feel? About freedom completely having returned? I speak as someone who is the wife of someone who is extremely vulnerable and has been more or less shielding for the past 18 months and I'll be honest ... I'm scared. How do you feel about it? How does Robert feel about it?
TOYAH: Robert is in America. He's now in the USA for two months and I'm terrified for him and he says there's virtually no mask wearing and none of the procedures were used to being in public like hand sanitizer. So I said whatever happens, you keep the procedures up. I've started concerts, I have sent email out all the venues and one of those is a rock club, an enclosed rock club. The majority are open air festivals and I said please respect the fact that I am still shielding. I will be in a face mask. I won't share microphones. I will be using hand sanitizer and I will only mix with people in the open air. I'm going to be very, very careful. I want to promise my audience, my venues, my promoters that I'm in peak health and I'll still do the shows because the venues and the staff need me there. NINA: Can you see our music industry really getting back to our pre-Covid lives if you like, which is the line that we're hearing - we're going back to how it was before Covid. Has something changed permanently in music ... Do you think, Toyah?
TOYAH: I think there's been a revolution. Within the last 15 months, there's definitely been a revolution. And thank goodness we have this technology to make that happen. The smaller venues that can't do the social distancing are the ones that have decided not to open til next year. I'm doing quite a lot of art centres this year and big big open air festivals. What will have changed is the audience's perception and fear of going there and I think to a certain extent we need to acknowledge people want to be safe in a large crowd. I think what you're asking is will audiences return? I like to think they will. I think the winter time will be the challenging time for the venues. Artists like us who are desperate to work and we worked live in front of audiences all the time, we’ll do what we can to make it happen. God bless the Royal Shakespeare Company that's put up an outside arena, outside the theatre. If we have to do that, we will do it and I will be there because performers need to perform and audiences want to live a relatively normal life. We will find a way.
NINA: You have certainly found the most astonishing way of reaching audiences during lockdown. I am of course referring to "Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch". Those people that won't have experienced it, and many, many millions around the world have, you’ve been trending globally with this. This is where yourself and Robert take a classic rock song and perform an excerpt of it in your house. I mean, they are absolutely incredible. One of my total favourites was when you did Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”. You were on your exercise bike in the kitchen. Robert was playing his guitar. I mean absolutely brilliant. How did you not crack up when you were doing it because you are completely serious during it? TOYAH: I remain serious. My husband is quite a serious man and he's been through a revolution in the last year. He's now got a mohawk haircut and he's on the road with King Crimson. It took a lot of time to get him to that point. When we did “Enter Sandman”, it reached the world press and it reached 40 million people. And suddenly people saw that what we were doing was actually art above everything else, which was a lovely lovely compliment and we do push the barriers out.
What we wanted to say to people is that music is for everyone. Music is for every level. We’re giving you this for free. We're not asking you to buy £250 ticket, this is on the ground. We are on the ground with you. Robert very quickly realised the power of this and how much people were looking forward every Sunday lunch to what we were going to give them. I mean, people were outraged, people were laughing and believe me we are laughing as well, but were laughing at ourselves
NINA: You've got some response, didn't you? A lot of response from the original artists, people like Robert Plant and Judas Priest?
TOYAH: I know! I mean my goodness, Alice Cooper watched it live online and I was like oh no! And then Robert Plant, when we did “Whole Lotta Love” Robert Plant texted “well that's a whole lotta laughs”. Bless Judas Priest, Birmingham boys like I'm a Birmingham girl, said “thank you so much, that's the best publicity we've had for our tour in a long time”. And we're getting wonderful beautiful responses of people. NINA: They are just incredible. I was very interested to read was one of the reasons why you decided to do this and of course it was about reaching out to the creative community but is also there was a physical need to do something and I think that was one of the things you've spoken about before?
TOYAH: My husband says that he went into deep meditation in the first lockdown. Well, from a wife's point of view he wasn't moving enough. And I started to teach him to dance and we put a 30 second clip out of me teaching one of the world's greatest guitarists, who can play 11 notes a second, teaching him to jive. He couldn't tell his right foot from his left, and this went viral. It went viral immediately. Within 5 minutes we were getting messages from the Philippines, from New Zealnd, from Japan and we were looking at this coming in and going my goodness! So I spent a good three months teaching him to dance and then it slowly evolved into rock music just to keep him connected. But also people connecting to us via the films were saying that they were giving up on life and these were people who were alone and we felt very, very ... well, we felt lots of love towards them, but a responsibility to say "we see you, we recognise you, we hear you" and a lot of our creativity came out of that. And I think artists need to perform and we need to be moving and so that's what the last 15 months became for us.
NINA: Has it certainly helped with your mental health and Robert's mental health? TOYAH: Yes, I really think for me it's done me the world of good. I don't know what I would have done if I had nothing to do for 15 months and no connecion for 15 months. I would have been lost. So it's very much helped my mental health. With Robert it has broadened his horizons hugely. Robert is a very intellectual, control freak over his music and now he's playing other people's music. He's broadened his attitude to performance, his less precious about it. I think it has made us better people NINA: “Posh Pop” then. What is posh pop?
TOYAH: Well, “Posh Pop” is a joke. The name is a joke because I knew Robert was gonna play on it. If it was just a Toyah album with Simon Darlow playing all the instruments, my co-writer, and me singing, it would be a pop album. Put Robert Fripp on it it’s suddenly posh pop, so that's my comment on it. But it's also a very accessible album of brilliant songs and I wanted to juxtapose one of the most influential years in rock music, 1973, when you had Roxy Music, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, you had the beginnings of Talking Heads, Television - in New York, the New York art scene. I wanted to juxtapose it with the moment we were writing in which started in September last year and just ask, has anything changed? And the influences of then and the present day are all mixed together and it's really a very accessible, very clever album. NINA: The first single from that was “Levitate” so let's take a quick listen. (The song plays) Sounds to me sort of vintage Toyah, it’s really punky and it’s really rocky and I think some of the inspiration was about lockdown lives, wasn't it, some of the lyrics of that?
TOYAH: “Levitate” was about - it deliberately ... the album opens with “how's your day?” Because it's the most important thing you can ask someone at a time like this, and the lyric is about just rising up. That's not just emotional, it's physical as well, about just rising up out of this situation and finding your true self again without the restrictions. And “Levitate” is literally about we are unified in this. Let's rise up together and find our new lives.
NINA: How do you feel now, Toyah, in your position as a really well known female musician? I'm thinking back to the days when you were on Top Of The Pops and we were at school singing “So what if I dye my hair? I've still got a brain up there” which is just about my favourite lyric of any song ever, which of course is “I Want To Be Free”, which is one of the singles from 1981, and it was the most astonishing line. We’d walk around school singing it. None of us dared dye our hair because my mum would be very cross about it, but it just encapsulated a spirit in that which I think you still have.
But what must it have been like to have been a female performer back in those days? I spoke recently to Skin from Skunk Anansie and she was talking about the 80’s, the 90’s, and it was really, really difficult, no matter how successful you were, to carve out your own space and say "yeah, I'm a woman, but I'm still rocking, I'm still a part of the punk movement, yes, there all these male bands, but I've got a place in this history too".
TOYAH: I agree and Skin, my goodness she inspired me. What a wonderful, wonderful human being. When I started in the rock business in 1977 a woman could not dye her hair and be safe. It was a very dangerous thing to do, but I was protected by the punk movement and the punk movement for me made it very possible to be a rebel, a new age woman and to break boundaries because that team of young kids made sure I was physically safe. It was a very unusual time, I think, to be a woman in music because you weren't dealing with female executives. There were virtually nil female executives in the UK - you had quite a few in the USA. So we had to be tough. We had to stand our ground. You have very beautiful women performers. Beautiful I mean as in feminine. You had Cher, you had Lulu, you had Sandy Shaw, but then you had Janis Joplin and Janis Joplin for me represented everything I wanted to be in music. I wanted longevity and I didn't want to self-destruct, but she was tough, opinionated and that gave me a lot of strength.
NINA: Do you have any sense of kind of bitterness? When you look back and go "well, you know, why did you give me such a hard time? I was just a really talented musician like so many. Why was it so difficult to put me in history?" TOYAH: That's a fantastic question and thank you for asking it. I'm not gonna bully men. I'm not gonna bully them because we're culturally changing and everything we're going through at the moment is good and the cultural changes we are making are good. But back then we were governed by an attitude, and it was a very sexist attitude. Very rarely did I come across misogyny, but because I was an androgynous performer people didn’t know what to do with me.
I deserve my place in history, and strangely enough it's starting to come alive since last December when my first album “Blue Meaning”, made in ‘78 (NB She means "Sheep Farming In Barnet") charted for the first time. That's last December. My second album went into the Top 30 two months ago, and I'm presently one of the biggest pre-order artists in the world so it's changing enormously. I'm a fighter. I am a survivor and no matter what a big corporate industry does to me up there, on the ground they can't touch this rebel. They can't touch this rebel. I'm a survivor and many of us women are. NINA: Do you think that it's better for women now, or is there still at sort of a pressure for the artist, however talented she may be, to look incredible?
TOYAH: It's a great point. Beauty will always attract a large amount of audience and viewers, especially on social media. Exposing yourself to a certain degree and we've experimented that with “Toyah and Robert “. The less I wear the more millions of viewers we have. What I'm saying is "I’m 63 and thank you, this is what a 63 can look like". Image for women I think will always be important and there are women out there who would love to afford to look a certain way and they can't afford to. And what I always tell myself is when I don't bother to dress up I disappoint a woman who has a dream of a buying a nice handbag and buying nice jewellery and they want to see what it looks like in person. And you've got all these levels. All these levels. Poverty stopping women from being able to get their hair done, poverty stopping women from being able to have the time to cook had the time to buy fresh vegetables and when you ask your question about women in music being glamorous, I think sometimes people need a role model which is glamorous but not unattainable
NINA: I like to ask all of my guests where you would like to be in five years time and I'm offering you anywhere on earth doing anything you want to do. I'm not saying I have the power to deliver, but it would be quite interesting to know. You could be doing anything. Could be headlining Glasto, winning an Oscar. I'm giving you anything you want, Toyah TOYAH: Well, I’m a megalomaniac, so thank you for asking that. I'd like to visit Bora Bora and be able to afford to visit Bora Bora. And I want to be signed up to at least ten Star Wars movies. I want to be playing arenas around the world and I want “Posh Pop” to to be completed and out there and I’m really doing the battle charge for women who are ... five years time I will be 68 NINA: You look amazing so you don't want much then in five years time (laughs)? TOYAH: The desire never stops. The ambition and the desire - it never stops! NINA: Thank goodness for us. Toyah Willcox, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s is absolutely brilliant and good luck with “Posh Pop”