Dreamscape – Toyah Willcox Fansite

Toyah Willcox – My Vintage, which originally aired on ‘Vintage TV’ in March 2012, is repeated next month.

Toyah chose 12 songs, by bands and singers as diverse as Roxy Music, Echo & The Bunnymen, Iggy Pop, Kate Bush, Tears For Fears and The Cure, and discussed why each song was significant to her.

My Vintage: Vintage TV: Sunday 11th March: 5pm
My Vintage: Vintage TV: Thu 15th March: 10.30pm
Toyah Willcox. Toyah was a rebellious child, but the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll reinvented her life and gave her grounding. Here she shares with us the songs that brought her to where she is today.

• View all of Dreamscape’s previous My Vintage news here.

• Culture Whisper: From the royal box, the time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I (Toyah Willcox, who played pyromaniac teenager Mad in the the original film 40 years ago) lords over proceedings like a dutiful monarch at the Royal Variety Show – and make no mistake, Jubilee is as perfectly random as the Royal Variety. It wilfully defies all theatrical convention, addressing the audience and breaking the wall to provide a sneering commentary on its own construction – Continue reading at Culture Whisper…

• Boyz Magazine: However it is the presence of Toyah Willcox, an original cast member of the 1977 film, who plays Elizabeth I, that really gives this show weight. Her command of the role is extraordinary and as the show draws to a close its fitting that one of her own songs closes the proceedings. Crazy stuff! – Continue reading at Boyz Magazine…

• Essential Surrey: This provocative and theatrical show reinvents Jarman’s Jubilee for the present day, whilst clearly still clinging onto the punk subculture it was based on. Characterised by anti-establishment views and general anarchy, it is every bit as loud and aggressive as you would expect. The play opens in the same manner as the film with Queen Elizabeth I, starring original cast member Toyah Willcox, time travelling forward into a bleak and destitute contemporary Britain – Continue reading at Essential Surrey…

• Stage Review: In the film Toyah Willcox played angry rebel, Mad. Now the 59-year-old punk princess has been elevated to Queen Elizabeth I and she spends most of the production in the theatre’s royal box, watching the action on stage, occasionally breaking into monologues. The Queen is given a vision of the future, and its dystopian desolation initially fills her with pain, before she finds herself sympathising with the group’s radical social commentary – Continue reading at Stage Review…

• A Younger Theatre: Jubilee is superb in its metatheacricality, realising the elements of stagecraft present within Jarman’s film. The script cleverly observes the forty years of cultural change since ’77 and is playful in its interaction with members of the audience. It is absurd, with a peculiar, ravenous kind of beauty and it will leave you craving a cigarette lit by a blaze fiercer than hell on earth – Continue reading at A Younger Theatre…

• The Upcoming: Chris Goode’s stage adaptation of Derek Jarman and James Whaley’s cult classic punk film, Jubilee (1978), can only be described as a wild ride. Semi-plotless, kinky and violent, Jubilee the play is a vintage punk romp amended to include a far more diverse cast, and to rail against today’s troubling political climate, both at home and abroad. Indeed, it seems only natural to apply that old punk rage to 2018, and the violent dystopia that we’re presented with is often all too believable – Continue reading at The Upcoming…

The one lesson I’ve learned from life: Toyah Willcox on how you can have the same waist at 60 as you did when you were 23!

Toyah Willcox, 59, shot to fame in the Seventies as a punk singer and actress / She revealed how she spent the past three months overhauling her lifestyle / She says a tailored diet helped her lose weight and improved her energy levels

This year I turn 60, which seems astonishing to me. Yet I’ve never been much of a conformist and I see no reason to become a little old lady. I’ve realised each decade has its own purpose and, in anticipation of my seventh, I’ve spent the past three months overhauling my lifestyle.

Today I have the same waist measurement I had at 23. My energy levels are through the roof, which is good because I’m still playing festivals and I’m known for the energy of my performance. This time last year I felt very different. I was physically and mentally sluggish. I was neither as bright nor as quick as I used to be and I was unhappy with my body shape. But I don’t think it’s inevitable everything should thicken and sag, and I wasn’t willing to watch it happen.

So my husband and I decided to take control of the way we were ageing. We went to the Wildmoor Spa in Stratford to see a Harley Street specialist in DNA. We had ours closely analysed for dietary intolerances and genetic traits that influence the way we process food. Results in, we were given tailored diets to follow. It’s been a major commitment of both money and willpower. I’ve cut out wheat, dairy and all processed foods, but my husband has different rules, so though we cook together, we have different meals. At first, I lost weight because I couldn’t find much to eat, especially on restaurant menus. And I missed cake.

• Continue reading at the Daily Mail. (Photo © Clark Enwell/BackGrid)

Watch Friday night’s mammoth three-hour 30th Anniversary edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test at BBC iPlayer. A fantastic retrospective programme packed with great music, interviews and memories – Catch Toyah’s appearance, alongside Chris Difford, at approximately 2hrs 22m in.

• Toyah Live 2018: Browse Toyah’s official gig diary of confirmed concerts and appearances at toyahwillcox.com…

• Hertfordshire Mercury: Saffron Walden’s Audley End House to be transported back to the 80’s with Here and Now festival featuring Jason Donovan, Midge Ure and more: Jason Donovan, Midge Ure, Five Star, Hot Chocolate, Altered Images, T’Pau and Toyah Willcox will all play their hits during this extravaganza of 80’s pop music  – Continue reading at Hertfordshire Mercury…

• Bishop’s Stortford Independent: Stars of the 80s come out for summer concert at Audley End: Some of the most beloved pop music icons from the 1980s will come together for an open-air concert at Audley End House & Gardens this summer. Jason Donovan, Midge Ure, Five Star, Hot Chocolate, Altered Images, T’Pau and Toyah are the magnificent seven acts that make up the bill for Here And Now – Back To The 80s on Friday, July 13 – Continue reading at Bishop’s Stortford Independent…

• What’s On Darlington: PIMM Productions Showcase Evening ft. Toyah Willcox: Darlington Film Club hosts an evening showcasing short films from local award-winning film company PIMM Productions. Among the cast members in their new film is the one and only Toyah Willcox. Toyah will be joining the Q&A to discuss the film, as well as questions on her own career in film, TV and music – Continue reading at What’s On Darlington…

There’s another chance to see one of the greatest pop images in modern music history – brought to life in Toyah’s iconic Brave New World 1982 promo video – very soon on BBC4′s re-airing of classic editions of Top Of The Pops.

Top Of The Pops: BBC4: Tuesday 6h March: 1.30am
17/06/1982. Simon Bates presents the weekly pop chart show, first broadcast on 17th June 1982. Includes appearances by Natasha, Roxy Music, Echo and the Bunnymen, Duran Duran, ABC, Bow Wow Wow, Queen, Toyah and Adam Ant.

On This Day 24.2.1982 the British Rock & Pop Awards (now The Brits) was broadcast on BBC One. Toyah received the award for Best Female Singer presented by Leo Sayer. These stunning shots (left) were taken earlier in the day when the ceremony was filmed. (Images © Official Toyah – See the anniversary British Rock & Pop Awards posts at Toyah’s Official Instagram)

• See Dreamscape’s British Rock & Pop Awards related posts here. Here’s a fantastic shot of Toyah and Joel performing I Want To Be Free at the awards show.

‘It’s going to be a huge reunion’: Bob Harris reveals live line-up for Old Grey Whistle Test

BBC Music is reviving The Old Grey Whistle Test for a one-off live special at 9pm tonight (February 23) on BBC Four. The revival marks 30 years since the legendary music TV show ended – it ran from 1971 to 1988 – and former host Bob Harris will be back at the helm.

Harris presented the show with that famous “whispering” delivery from 1972-78 and his spell included UK TV firsts including the performance from Bob Marley & The Wailers. Forty-six years since he first hosted, Harris will be back for the live three-hour special, which has generated huge excitement among music fans of a certain age.

“I know, it feels very exciting at this end too – the interest has been absolutely incredible,” the Radio 2 presenter told Music Week.

• Continue reading at Music Week. NB: Toyah will feature in a live interview having just come off stage from a performance of Jubilee at Lyric Hammersmith – Further info at toyahwillcox.com.

Over the May Bank Holiday weekend, we launch the first edition of Paracinema, a festival dedicated to films and genres outside of the mainstream. Expect a steady diet of horror, sci-fi and fantasy but also we’ll be exploring other genres outside the mainstream with special guests, previews and talks on a whole range of unusual genres and subgenres.

Confirmed Guests and Previews

Special Guest – Toyah Willcox. We are delighted to be welcoming actress and pop star Toyah Willcox to Paracinema and Derby Film Festival on Saturday 5th May to talk about her career appearing in classics like Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, The Tempest and the mod classic Quadrophenia as well as juggling a hugely successful pop career.

• Continue reading at Derby Quad. Visit the Derby Film Festival 2018 website here.

Amazing photos of Toyah as Queen Elizabeth I in Jubilee at the Lyric Hammersmith. View a gallery of shots, including larger versions of the four below, at the Lyric’s Facebook page. (Photos © Tristram Kenton)

Mark Shenton: How do audiences and critics react when a show is designed to provoke them?

At the start of the second act of Jubilee, the stage version of Derek Jarman’s 1978 film that has transferred from Manchester’s Royal Exchange to the Lyric Hammersmith, one of the performers surveys the audience and notes that there have obviously been some early departures.

I was very nearly one of them. I decided that I would spare myself – and the show – the need to write a review (because it is of course a total no-no to do so after only seeing half a production). But, after leaving the theatre in the interval to get a little bit of sugar comfort, I went back.

After the show, I tweeted what a bad time I’d had, and my colleague Lyn Gardner replied: “Oh narrowly missed out on being in my top ten shows last year. I loved it.”

When I searched out her original review of that run, I found she cautioned: “Don’t think of leaving at the interval: the first half may drag a little, but the payoff is delivered in the show’s final 50 minutes, in which fierce energy gives way to aching loss as a generation with no future searches for a phoenix in the ashes.”

• Continue reading at The Stage.

Trailblazers: Sky Arts: Tuesday 6th March: 5pm
Trailblazers: Sky Arts: Wednesday 7th March: 12pm
Trailblazers: Sky Arts: Saturday 10th March: 1pm
New Romantics. Toyah Willcox and Billy Bragg are among those examining the New Romantic movement, from The Human League and Adam Ant, to David Bowie and Ultravox. (Series 1, Episode 16)

The late Derek Jarman had a reputation as an iconic but iconoclastic filmmaker but, even by his standards, Jubilee was eccentric and frequently any meanings were too deeply buried for common or garden viewers to mine. It is now probably best remembered for a cast that included punk idols Toyah Willcox and Adam Ant, along with a dedicated team from the acting profession amongst whom was the late Ian Charleson.

40 years on, Chris Goode has taken the original film script, which Jarman wrote with James Whaley, and updated it for a fresh generation. Give the new writer-director credit, what should have been an unintelligible, unruly mess is always over the top, frequently rather fun and conveys some timely messages to its audience today.

Many of those present will not even have been born in the days when punk threatened to change British society forever. Like Queen Elizabeth, whose pontifications along with those of her alchemist and necromancer John Dee and ethereal Ariel frame the modern scenes, it is merely a short historical note that may well have passed them by.

In a happy connection with the original, punk Queen Toyah Willcox embodies the Virgin Queen having played Mad on celluloid so long ago. She also provides one of the evening’s highlights with a brief but lively rendition of “I Want to Be Free”.

• Continue reading at British Theatre Guide. Review by Philip Fisher.

A fiercely powerful staging of Derek Jarman’s punk classic

People have been pontificating on what punk is – if it’s sold out, if it’s dead – pretty much since it showed up. So I’m not going to join them. Except to say that if anyone’s keeping the ripped Union Jack flag flying, it’s got to be queer people of colour who are risking everything to live outside the rules of a heteronormative, post-Brexit society. Chris Goode’s play, transferring to Lyric Hammersmith after opening at Royal Exchange Manchester, gets this. He reimagines Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk cult movie ‘Jubilee’ just enough to make it speak to today, but leaves its wild nihilist momentum intact.

It’s set in a squat (although this being 2018, it’s probably a warehouse share) where the cast bicker, wheel a pram on fire around, violently demolish the patriarchy, rewrite history, and watch YouTube videos. Travis Alabanza (playing Amyl Nitrate, the group’s historian) brings us up to speed on this show’s world, and pretty much anticipates every possible criticism of it: ‘Welcome to ‘Jubilee’. An iconic film most of you have never even heard of, adapted by an Oxbridge twat for a dying medium, spoiled by millennials, ruined by diversity, and constantly threatening to go all interactive. You poor fuckers.’

• Continue reading at Time Out. Review by Alice Saville.

How Jubilee Became the Greatest Punk Film of All Time

Today, Derek Jarman’s punk classic turns 40 – to celebrate, we track its journey from notoriety to immortality

“Punks were in the audience screaming ‘THIS AIN’T PUNK!’ and ‘WHAT A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS!’ and ‘SHIT!’” That’s how Jayne County recalled the raucous atmosphere at the premiere of Jubilee, Derek Jarman’s dark sci-fi reckoning with a dystopian England, in an interview from 2011.

County, a veteran of the New York punk scene who cameos in the film, was no more charitable in his own assessment of Jarman’s vision, released in cinemas 40 years ago this month. “Wasted celluloid”, she called it – though the scene she starred in wasn’t half bad, naturally.

• Continue reading at Another Man.

Jubilee, Lyric, Hammersmith, London, review: In the Lyric Hammersmith’s fine tradition of reanimating controversial classics

Chris Goode’s stage adaptation of Derek Jarman’s 1977 punk classic ‘Jubilee’, recasts Toyah Willcox who played Mad in the film, as Queen Elizabeth I, who time-travels to today

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” says Amyl Nitrate, towards the end of the end of Chris Goode’s raucous, shrewd and free-wheelingly rude re-imagining of Derek Jarman’s cult movie.  “In 1977, someone shouting “NO FUTURE” sounded like the most extreme nihilistic punk.  Forty years on, it’s a fact.  It’s mainstream climate science.”  To mark the ruby jubilee of Jubilee (1978), Goode’s stage version — a co-production between his company, the Lyric, Hammersmith and Manchester’s Royal Exchange — does more than pay tribute to the inherent theatricality in Jarman’s apocalyptic vision or recreate the paradoxical ethos of a broken Britain sodden with royalist propaganda during that flag-waving year.

• Continue reading at The Independent. Review by Paul Taylor.

Chris Goode’s adaptation of Derek Jarman and James Whaley’s Jubilee was a ravenously sex-fueled and unvarnished representation of the state that the world is in.

It assures to have one question if royalty or religion are still relevant in an ever-changing society.

Toyah Willcox goes from rebel to regal as she makes a comeback having played Mad in the original movie and now bringing delightful grace to the stage as Elizabeth I. Unsurprisingly she owns every second of her role as an onlooker from the past. Jubilee’s blatant dialogue and minimal use of symbolism makes for a refreshing take on what are usually controversial topics. It is explicit beginning to end and makes no apologies for it.

• Continue reading at GScene. Review by Tin Nguyen.

Check out Broadway World’s five star review of Jubilee at the Lyric Hammersmith – “Sexy, riotous, celebratory and a bloody good night out“.

Jubilee is an event that fucks with every theatrical convention, but it also provokes its audience in the most important way. Derek Jarman’s iconic film has been adapted for the stage by Chris Goode, centring around a marauding girl gang on a killing spree and a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I – telling a story of what happens when creativity and nihilism collide.

The company hold nothing back – be it via nudity, crassness or direct address, they actively attempt to make you feel something. And I imagine you’ll feel a lot, even if it’s the sensation of being uncomfortable. Which is good; you should be.

After the interval you can tell who the non-progressive, potentially prejudicial people were in the audience. As Act Two begins many seats are now empty. People have left due to their own insecurities and biases around seeing naked flesh on stage, or as Travis Alabanza calls it, “one too many ballsacks”.

• Continue reading at Broadway World. Review by Alistair Wilkinson. (Photo © Tristram Kenton – Visit the Lyric Hammersmith’s Facebook page to see a great gallery of Tristram’s Jubilee production photos)

Toyah Willcox to visit the region ahead of starring in film about Darlington man’s life

Toyah Willcox is preparing to play the mother of a North-East football fan in a movie about his life.

The popular musician and actor will visit the region next month to attend a showcase event hosted by the team behind Give Them Wings, an upcoming feature film about Darlington man Paul Hodgson.

Ms Willcox is the latest cast member announced for the project, which tells the story of Mr Hodgson’s battle with childhood meningitis, which left him unable to move or speak. She will join a team including award-winning director Sean Cronin and Holby City actor Bill Fellows in bringing the PIMM Productions venture to the big screen.

• Continue reading at The Northern Echo.

This week’s best theatre shows: Our critics’ picks (February 20)

Jubilee – Lyric Hammersmith, London

Chris Goode directs and adapts a stage version of Derek Jarman and James Whaley’s 1978 film Jubilee, in a production first seen at Manchester’s Royal Exchange last November. The Stage called it “scrappy and self-aware”, but veteran punk star Toyah Willcox, who also appeared in the original film, makes it interesting to see again. It opens officially on February 20.

• Continue reading at The Stage.

• The Independent: Why The Sudden Rash Of Movies Onstage Now?: And it’s not just van Hove; theatre has been experiencing a boomlet of movie adaptations. Derek Jarman’s punk-inflected Jubilee (1978), adapted by Chris Goode, opens at the Lyric Theatre after earning rave reviews at the Royal Exchange in Manchester – Continue reading at The Independent…

• London Evening Standard: Things to do in London this weekend (and next week too): 3. Anarchy in the UK: Jubilee – Derek Jarman’s 1978 state-of-the-nation punk film has been adapted for the stage by Chris Goode – Continue reading at the London Evening Standard…

• London Evening Standard: London Arts: The best art, theatre, dance and concerts to see this week: Jubilee – Embrace the spirit of punk this week as the Lyric heads back to 1977 for a stage adaptation of Derek Jarman’s cult classic film. Expect a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I, DIY fashion, sex, swearing, and a very loud soundtrack – Continue reading at the London Evening Standard…

• London Theatreland: Jubilee, Lyric Hammersmith: “An explosive, no-holds-barred punk musical that’ll set your world on fire!” – Capturing the punk wave at its dizzying height, English film director Derek Jarman captured the spirit of the rebellious era of the late 70s. Now his seminal work is once again sticking two fingers up… – Continue reading at London Theatreland…