Dreamscape – Toyah Willcox Fansite

Celebrating Toyah’s incredible career… Celebrating the unsurpassed imagery… Celebrating some of the finest music ever released… Celebrating 12 years of Toyah Fanzine!

We had an amazing holiday in New York…

Today saw the release of Toyah’s amazing 1983 single, Rebel Run on 10″ grey vinyl, which includes unreleased tracks, including an extended version of the lead song. It feels like a new era of Love Is The Law. I’m celebrating from a fan perspective with a new issue of Toyah Fanzine, which I’m currently working on, focusing on all things Love Is The Law. This bundle also includes part two of our Toyah Album Discography collection – flyers & postcards for every Toyah album release.

• More info on Issue 61, including previews and order link, here.

Dancing the Cha-cha-cha… Sharon and myself just want to send a massive ROCK IT!!! and all the best to Toyah and Neil for this Saturday’s Strictly Come Dancing. Tune in at 7pm, BBC One…

Love Is The Law – Toyah’s final studio album on Safari Records, originally released in 1983 – is reissued in deluxe formats this November, and we are celebrating with a new issue – #61 – of our fanzine. More info will be available tomorrow – which just happens to be my birthday!!

Cherry Red reach the final studio album from Toyah this Autumn, with the release/reissue of Love Is The Law. A wonderful album which features Toyah’s vocals at their most soaring and glorious thus far in her career at the time.

I’m happy to say I’ve managed to produce an issue of my fanzine for each and every Cherry Red release over the past four years, and currently working on Issue 61 (gulp!!) in celebration of Love Is The Law. More info soon…

Stir it up! Mix it up! Shake it up! Myself and Sharon – both longtime Toyah fans – took the leap to Edinburgh last week for a day of Warrior Rocking. We met up in Scotland’s capital to celebrate the reissue of the magnificent Warrior Rock album and also to mark Toyah’s birthday. It was a brilliant day, a lot of fun, walking, eating and talking Toyah! Toyah! and more Toyah! Watch this space for our next day out!

I’ve had requests for back issues of the fanzine. Unfortunately there aren’t many but what is available I’ve listed on the page you’ll find by clicking below…

The new issue(s) of Dreamscape’s Toyah Fanzine are available to pre-order. Celebrating the reissue of the glorious Warrior Rock: Toyah On Tour live album, as well as 60 issues of the fanzine. This bundle is also the start of a three-part celebration of Toyah’s album discography, via a flyers/postcards collection. Further info/pre-order by clicking below.

Introducing my giant Dreamscape Christmas card… To wish everyone a great run up to Christmas, I thought I’d feature one of Toyah’s inspirational, beautiful images from 1981, in huge Christmas card form as a way of starting things off.

In a 45+ year career of ground breaking, outstanding, pioneering visual creativity this is up there with the best of Toyah’s iconic images.

Christmas is a great season, but the run up is the really special time for many, so please enjoy the next two weeks. It always feels like there is something magical in the air while heading towards Christmas Eve and the 25th. So, here is to the next two weeks of wonderment, fun, surprises and joy… Merry Christmas Run Up!

Something I’d thought about doing for years, and had a spare weekend so I went ahead with “The Toyah In Glasgow Gig History Tour Of Toyah Tours”. A snappy title. See the full set at Instagram. Coincidentally, one of the venues I forgot to include: The Pavilion Theatre is mentioned in this radio clip from BBC Stereo Underground.

Dreamscape goes into its 24th year online in March and I’m currently working on revamping the website. Right now the idea is to completely change the look/format, which I find slightly scary/daunting, but I think it really is time for a radical change as I’ve been using this layout since 2012. During the 12 years before that I altered the format every couple of years.

This is, obviously, going to take a while as we have a huge archive that needs to be reformatted, or at least included in the new website in some form, as I’ve always considered the archives to be a really important aspect of any website. I’m also thinking of a way to incorporate the fanzine in some way.

So, the changes aren’t going to happen immediately but just a heads up that the changes will be happening…

This past weekend Toyah revisited her 1985 album, Minx, by exploring the second single released from it, Soul Passing Through Soul, in Toyah At Home. Here’s a bit of SPTS fan art I put together a few years ago… (While on the subject of Minx – Space Between The Sounds is still one of my favourite Toyah songs. Yup, it’s over-the-top but bloody brilliant!!)

This website flew (almost like a Bird in Flight!) into it’s 23rd year online last month. I started creating Dreamscape in the late 1990s, while I was also, slowly, teaching myself how to build a website with basic html. So I like to think of this website as existing in two millennia… even though it didn’t actually go live until March 2000, after a failed launch in late 1999!

I’ve thought about changing the website – It’s not one of those flashy “with bells on” sites but it does the job it’s supposed to do well I think, and I worry changing it to one of those websites would spoil it. Who knows…

I always said – as certain people like to remind me – I’d stop running a fansite (or a fanzine!) at 50, but I’m now the ripe young age of 54 with no plans, anytime soon, of stopping!!! (NB: I’m hoping to bring the News Archive up to date, at some point this year, by adding links to each of the past 18 months of news that hasn’t been “”archived” yet!)

The dedication and commitment of the super fan is something we never take for granted at Cherry Red. Their passion and energy for artists is the lifeblood of any musician’s career, and in our latest blog piece we celebrate that with a wonderful piece by writer and designer Chris Limb.

Chris has been a steadfast Toyah fan since the early 80s and wrote I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan; a fascinating example of loyalty and affection that serves as a window into the soul of any ardent music lover.

It is 1981. I am seeing Toyah play live. For the first time I am actually in the same room as her, albeit a very large room. There she is, over there. I can see her with my eyes.

It is 1991. I am putting together the latest issue of the Toyah Fan Club magazine Tellurian, a cut and paste concoction of photocopied articles as well as a handwritten letter to the fans from Toyah herself. I am typing up the lyrics for her new album Ophelia’s Shadow to include in it; once finished I’ll then take it to a print shop in Store Street WC1 to get a few hundred copies run off.

It is 2001. I am in a recording studio in Nuneaton where Toyah is recording guest vocals on a track by the band Chester with whom I currently play bass. The track will eventually be put out under the band name Family of Noise.

It is 2011. I am putting the finishing touches to the manuscript for my memoir I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan which grew out of a series of blog posts I’d written about my experiences some thirty years previously. I am about to self-publish this as both a paperback and an ebook.

It is 2021. I am writing this blog entry about Toyah and the impression she’s made on my life over the past 40 plus years.

• Continue reading at Cherry Red. Browse Dreamscape’s I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan news archive. There’s much more IWATTF content in our vast News Archive (scroll to around 2010 – 2012).

The Toyah Willcox Interview Archive has had a substantial update recently. Lots of new radio and TV interviews have been transcribed with accompanying visuals.

These include ITV Unscripted, Evelyn Glennie Podcast, Tammy Gooding, BBC Hereford & Worcester, RTE Arena, BBC Radio Two Steve Wright In The Afternoon and more. There’s also the latest Toyah interview from Classic Pop magazine.

• Click to visit the archive. Find links to all of the new, and previous, transcripts on the right hand sidebar of the blog/website.

New print issues of Dreamscape’s Toyah Fanzine are coming… In the meantime, our free digital lockdown issue – celebrating Toyah Solo – is still available online to read or download.

Dreamscape has 20+ years of Toyah news in our archives, but this isn’t only a news site – There are also tons of retro, and not so retro, Toyah career features – celebrating albums, eras, releases, significant Toyah “moments” and much more – to browse and read!

Didn’t expect our 21st year online to have been quite like this… Lockdown, masks and staying home! But there’s still been plenty of Toyah news (and newsy bits!) to post… I’ve been doing that for two decades now and the idea of not doing it feels slightly weird! I always said I’d stop running a fansite at 50, but I’m now just about to hit 53 with no plans, just yet, of stopping!!!

Re-uploaded to this website’s You Tube channel recently, Sky Trax – The 1985 Toyah Special; a great Minx-era interview; and BBC Breakfast Time, a much shorter but still interesting Desire-era interview. These uploads have both been edited to remove all music from them, which was the reason they were originally made unavailable by You Tube.

Lots of other quirky clips and footage have also been added to our channel: Toyah, Superhits, Monster Munch 80s adverts, and more! Click below to visit and/or subscribe!

Following our recent post about Toyah’s official You Tube channel… Here’s one about this website’s –  Dreamscape’s You Tube channel.

Our You Tube is pretty much what you’d expect from a fan based channel. We’ve compiled a selection of retro interviews, Toyah TV appearances and more from throughout Toyah’s career (which I believe is now in its 45th year if Glitter – filmed 1975, aired 1976 – is regarded as the very beginning!).

We are rollercoasting towards 1K of subscribers, and our most popular video is Toyah: This Is Your Life, which as of writing has been viewed 184,629 times and is currently increasing by around 2K views per day. Not that I’m a stats freak of course! Please click below to visit Dreamscape’s You Tube Toyah channel (which also includes some rare Madonna footage).