• Prosceneium: Calamity Jane: This set for Calamity Jane was originally built for the highly acclaimed professional tour starring Toyah Willcox.
• A new ‘Blackpool Pride 2012’ flyer has been released, with Toyah included. View it here.
• Time Out London: Time Out Says: Last year she celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of her most successful album ‘Anthem’ and tonight she’ll be celebrating 30 years since the release of her second best-selling LP, ‘The Changeling’. Wilcox will be performing prime cuts from the 1982 record, as well as other material.
• A random, but funny, reminiscence about the 12″ picture disc of ‘Thunder In The Mountains’ is included the latest blog by ‘Married To The Moz’. View here.
• Let’s Get Better Terms: It’s Jubilee Time Again: Jarman knows what he is doing visually, and enjoyed gardens (with or without plastic flowers), wastelands, and also had an eye for the beauty of people like Toyah, Jordan, Jack Birkett, Helen the dwarf and many others.
Quadrophenia, as with Jubilee, is a film that has grown in popularity in the decades since its’ release. Starring Phil Daniels, who gives an incredible performance as, central character, Jimmy, the film boasts one of the most famous and iconic movie “line up” promotional photos, instantly recognisable and used on various posters over the years. Toyah plays Monkey alongside Leslie Ash, Mark Wingett, Phil Davis, Ray Winstone and numerous others. It’s worth noting that Quadrophenia and Jubilee, films focusing on punk and Mods, are two of the biggest “youth” movies of the 1970’s. Toyah has the distinction of appearing in both.
Toyah played Bessie Watty in the 1978, made for television, remake of a 1945 Bette Davis movie, The Corn Is Green. Starring the legendary Katharine Hepburn and directed by George Cukor, Toyah was working with “Hollywood royalty”. The film continues to air sporadically on UK television.
Jubilee, Toyah’s first film. She played Mad, a pyromaniac. Directed by Derek Jarman, it premiered on 22nd February 1978 at Bloomsbury Square Odeon, aka Gate 2, London. The film was derided in its first few years but has become something of a cult movie over the last decade and is regularly written about in online blogs and articles. Jubilee also featured Adam Ant in his first role, as well as Richard O’Brien and Little Nell of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The, just revealed, artwork for The Derek Jarman Collection 5 disc DVD set. This includes Jubilee and The Tempest and will be released in Australia (but available to everyone thanks to the internet) on 2nd May 2012.
A collection of five astonishing films from a visionary British filmmaker:
Jubilee (1978) Queen Elizabeth I travels to late twentieth-century Britain to discover a tawdry and depressing landscape where life mostly seems aimless and is anyway held cheap. Three post-punk girls while away their vacuous existence as best they can, from time-to-time straying into murder to relieve the boredom.
The Tempest (1979) Jarman’s Tempest is the story of Miranda’s growth from girlhood to woman; Prospero has retreated to a world of ideas but it is cold and loveless, he condemns Caliban as a monster but all Jarman’s Caliban is guilty of is possessing carnal appetites, the same appetites which Miranda is starting to discover for herself.
• There’s an excellent selection of screen caps from Tomorrow Calling, the 1993 short film Toyah appeared in, at ‘William Gibson aleph’. Tomorrow Calling aired on Channel 4, premiering in December 1994 (part of the ‘Short & Curlies’ season), and was also presented at the British Film Festival in October 1996. View here. Take a look here too :)
• Lärwi, of The Toyah Willcox Interview Archive, has created an audio/slide video for Andi Fragg’s version of ‘Wow’. View here.
• Toyah is mentioned in the ‘Scotsman’ obituary of Andrew Currie who passed away on 28th March: In the 1990s one of his visitors was the singer Toyah Willcox who, as part of a television series, made a trip to Skye to see eagles and talk to Currie, the local expert on the subject.
• Toyah is namecked in this ‘Herts & Essex Observer’ news article on Hazel O’Connor.
• A couple of great Toyah photos (including one of Andi’s Toyah wallpapers, which seem to pop up all over the internet) in the “Make Up” gallery at ‘Pinterest’. View here.
• Rainbow Messengers: It’s A Mystery, It’s A Mystery… View here.
• The ‘Moon In The Gutter’ blog uploaded a collection of screen shots from Jubilee on Tuesday: Operation Screenshot (Films of the Seventies): Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). The “revival” of all things Jubilee continues… View here.
• Evening Times: Heaven is a place on Glasgow Green… Toyah is mentioned in this article today. View here. (NB. Toyah isn’t officially confirmed as playing this concert)
• Heard of Ghost Loft? Described as having “a heavy dash of the Cocteau Twins and a little bit of early Toyah”.
• Toyah’s ‘Warrior Rock: Toyah On Tour’ album was mentioned in Tuesday night’s Alex Lester Show on BBC Radio 2. (Thanks to Luke)
• Toyah received a namecheck in the, brilliantly titled, ‘Life Like Butter Sculptures’ blog yesterday: “This morning, the random music selector fed me Toyah Willcox’s “Mein Herr”. It was exactly what I needed. I’ll go find some Joan Jett next, I think.”
‘Second Sight’, classic film and tv on DVD, has great pages dedicated to the DVD releases of Jubilee and The Tempest. Both of these. now iconic, films were reissued on Region 2 DVD in the mid-2000s.
Both are also just about to be reissued again, as part of The Derek Jarman Collection: A 5DVD box set of Derek Jarman films released by Umbrella Entertainment, in Australia, on 2nd May 2012.
• View the Jubilee page here, and The Tempest here.
Steve Riley saw The Power Of Three in Brooklyn last night and, very kindly, agreed to share his thoughts, with ‘Falling To Earth’ and our readers, on the movie:
The Power Of Three is a feel good, funny, moving, motivational and enlightening movie. I am amazed at how women are treated as they age, It’s very different being a man. All of TPOT cast were very believable and Toyah was excellent of course. I would happily see the movie again. The rest of the audience certainly appreciated it as everyone applauded as the end titles rolled.
Definitely a film worth seeing. (A huge thank you to Steve: www.steverileyart.com)
An interesting article on punk in ‘The Independent’ yesterday. It includes a gallery of great photos, featuring rare shots of Adam Ant, Jordan, Billy idol, Little Nell, Siouxsie etc, plus Derek Jarman at the premiere of Jubilee.
Anarchy in the UK: The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 was also the year that punk hit
Photographer Simon Barker was there to capture it. Michael Bracewell opens his archive.
Punk lasted in the UK for little more than 14 months, between 1976 and the Jubilee Summer of 1977. Thirty-five years later, in another Jubilee year, how might we regard the intense, chaotic, moody, surreal, futuristic-yet-Victorian aesthetics of the movement? In answer to this question, photographs taken at the time by Simon Barker, also known as Six, go a long way to articulating the ways in which a phase of youth culture attained the impact of a manifesto – while never quite losing the cool allure and faintly slapstick temperament of its confrontational amateurism.
• Continue reading, at ‘The Independent’, here.
Quadrophenia is to show at the ‘San Francisco International Film Festival’ next month. The 55th prestigious festival runs from 19th April – 3rd May.
Tommy (1975) may be Pete Townshend’s most famous rock opera, but Quadrophenia (1979) is his most personal. In the hands of director Franc Roddam, the tale becomes a kitchen-sink drama of near-vérité realism and a timeless tale of teenage alienation and identity. “I don’t wanna be the same as everybody else. That’s why I’m a Mod,” says Jimmy (Phil Daniels), the parka-wearing, scooter-riding London teenager who spends his days at a dead-end ad agency job and his nights grooving to the likes of The Who.
Held each spring for 15 days, the ‘San Francisco International Film Festival’ is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in one of the country’s most beautiful cities.
Glitterbug, Derek Jarman’s final film, from 1994 includes brief Toyah footage from filming Jubilee in 1977. View a great article on it at Dangerous Minds.
…a prelude to Jubilee, a young flame-haired Toyah Willcox, The Sex Pistols, Jordan and a dress rehearsal for what will become The Last of England, as she pirouettes around a burning Union Jack, Adam Ant, hair-cutting, the Silver Jubilee.
Glitterbug Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, with Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, Tilda Swinton, Michael Clark, Adam Ant, Toyah Willcox, William Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge. Music by Brian Eno, specially commissioned for this film.
Another recent, and interesting, article on Jubilee, the film that becomes more celebrated by the month. This one by ‘Network Awesome’.
After the release of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee in 1978, Vivienne Westwood, outraged at what she saw as a misrepresentation of punk, took to her then preferred medium, the t-shirt, to express her displeasure. The “Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman,” with its wordy scrawl, is a rather confusing cultural artifact in that it now seems rather counterproductive. For starters, punk certainly had more important enemies in 1978 than a queer experimental filmmaker and visual artist, a fellow member of the counterculture whether she liked it or not…
It’s a Mad world: The trailer for Jubilee has just been uploaded to ‘You Tube’. View here and click below for larger screen caps. The movie, Toyah’s first, premiered in 1978 and just celebrated its 34th anniversary.
A 5DVD box set of Derek Jarman films is released, by Umbrella Entertainment (who just uploaded the trailer for Jubilee to ‘You Tube’), in Australia on 2nd May 2012. The set includes both films Toyah starred in, Jubilee and The Tempest.
The Derek Jarman Collection: DVD A collection of five astonishing films from a visionary British filmmaker: Actors: Tilda Swinton, Laurence Olivier, Sean Bean, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant.
The Tempest (1979): The tale of a potent magician, banished by his brother and the King to live on a desolate isle with his daughter. Last Of England (1988): A dark meditation on London under Thatcher. Jubilee (1978): Queen Elizabeth I visits late twentieth century Britain to discover a confronting civilisation. Sebastiane (1976): In Rome, 300 A.D, a man is exiled to a remote outpost populated exclusively by men. War Requiem (1989): A stirring visual representation of Benjamin Brittens famed work.
Your never too old and it’s never too late to live your dreams. All you need is the Power of Three.
Next week The Power Of Three, the film Toyah has a lead role in, plays at two US film festivals.
The Women’s International Film & Arts Festival: March 28-April 1, taking place in Miami and The Brooklyn Girl Film Festival: March 29-31 in New York.
The film plays on the opening day of WIFF and is a “Red Carpet Event”, and on Saturday 31st March at BGFF. View further details and the film festival’s respective shedules here (WIFF) and here (BGFF).
30 Women Photographers and the Women Photographers Who Inspired Them: A Blog Series in Honor of Women’s History Month, March 1 – 31
Caroline Coon is a multi-talented artist born and based in Britain. She is a painter, designer and photographer whose work has been exhibited at major London galleries, including the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate. Her photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery, and currently on display at the Strand Gallery in She-Bop-a-Lula, an exhibit celebrating female singers captured by women photographers.
In the 1970’s and 80’s, Coon wrote about, designed for, and photographed a number of Punk Rock bands, including The Slits and The Clash. Her New Wave Punk Rock Explosion is an inside, “as it happened” story of punk, with iconic images, and commentary by musicians and fans. (Photo: Jenny Runacre and Toyah Willcox 1977 © Caroline Coon/Camera Press)
Jubilee inspires at least one new article a week. The latest is by ‘Ikono’.
Numerous punk icons appear in the film including Jordan (a Malcolm McLaren protégé), Toyah Willcox, Nell Campbell, Adam Ant (born, Stuart Leslie Goddard), Demoriane and Wayne County. It features performances by Wayne County and Adam and the Ants. There are also cameo appearances by The Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The film was scored by Brian Eno.
