Dreamscape | The Toyah Willcox Fansite

The first “Album Of The Month” and it has to be ‘Prostitute’. Not only for being a great album but also for including the song that this new Toyah Newsletter takes its name from.

Released in 1988, I think this album shocked every Toyah fan at the time. It was the successor to ‘Desire’ and couldn’t have been more different but also that title. Tame by today’s standards maybe, but in 1988 it was still a word that Toyah couldn’t even say when she guested on TVAM.

‘Prostitute’ is definitely Toyah’s most experimental album to date, and her least commercial. Using all manner of samples and noises to create a weird, yet addictively interesting, soundscape. It’s minimalist and raw and has Toyah sounding quite like Kate Bush in parts, Laurie Anderson in others. There’s an abundance of spoken and whispered vocals and Toyah’s unmistakable laugh and in comparison to its two predecessors; ‘Desire’ and ‘Minx’ is almost a return to the brashness of Toyah’s early Safari albums. Go on, give ‘Prostitute’ another listen… View more here.

This will possibly be a regular feature on ‘Falling To Earth’. Collecting together key images from a specific Toyah “era”. Starting us off… Various Toyah photos from the ‘Sheep Farming in Barnet’ days.

Toyah’s official website will be offering visitors exclusive live tracks each month as Toyah’s Changeling Tour and summer festival/concert dates approach. At the beginning of each month an exclusive live track recorded from Toyah’s extensive 2011 tour dates will feature on the Gigs page.

The live tracks will be available to listen to for a limited time only with a new track replacing it each month. These live tracks are a taster for a special live album release planned for digital release in autumn/winter of 2012.

• Listen to the first, ‘Latex Messiah’, live at Manchester Academy, here.

‘The-Rocker/Zeitgeist’, “an idiosyncratic collection of music news and reviews”, recently gave the thumbs-up to both ‘We Are The Humans’ and ‘In The Court Of The Crimson Queen’;

The Humans – We Are The Humans
The Humans are an odd little cove. A project that was first put together to perform new songs at a series of concerts in Estonia, they comprise Chris Wong, Bill Rieflin and one Toyah Willcox.

After the shows were completed, they went into the studio to record the material, before heading back to Estonia to perform them again. Which is a curious, yet perversely intriguing way of doing things.

Most of the music comprises dense, electronic landscapes, with the clipped, robotic voice of Toyah acting as an additional instrument. It’s certainly interesting, and bears more than a passing resemblance to solo David Sylvain. Which is a good thing. ‘Twisted Soul’ is probably the closest thing to anything conventional, and acts as a good entry point. Me? I liked it.

Toyah – In The Court Of The Crimson Queen
Listening to The Humans album reminded me that I had quite forgotten how good the last Toyah album was, the wittily titled “In The Court Of The Crimson Queen”.

Toyah is one of those people who only really became interesting to me after the hits dried up, and this album is a bit of a secret joy. There’s half a dozen songs here that deserved to be huge with the likes of ‘Sensational’, the bluesy (!) ‘Latex Messiah’ and ‘Legacy’, utter delights. However, it would be a brave man who listened to ‘Come’ and ‘Bad Man’ more than once.

You really ought to buy this, just so Toyah doesn’t have to slum it on the Vampires Rock tour again.

Happy Halloween to all Dreamscape’s visitors. The great news this October 31st is that Toyah’s Latex Messiah (Viva La Rebel In You)  is currently number 30 on the iTunes Plus Top 100 Downloads Chart, and, better still, number six in the iTunes Plus Rock chart. It is also no. 92 in the general iTunes Rock chart. Keep downloading!!