Dreamscape | The Toyah Willcox Fansite

Interview: Jordan Mooney : the iconic face of punk on then and now and Star Trek

Certainly personifying and symbolizing the face of “Punk” from a female point of view, “Jordan” caused a sophisticated anarchy that revolutionized equality in music for women at a time when it pretended to be a male profession. Beyond that she was, and still is a, heroine who dares to evoke the threat of imagination. Jordan defied sensibility and at the same time defined it.

Celebrated for her audacious fashion sense, her musical abilities, and her courageous and tantalizing artistic view, Jordan was privy to the most sacred Punk bands to ever emerge, including a close relationship with “The Sex Pistols”. She was also the very first manager of “Adam and the Ants”. She had a supreme role in Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s SEX boutique, and starred as the lead in one of the most impacting films of the time, Derek Jarman’s ” Jubilee”.

• Continue reading at Louder Than War. View details on Jordan in Conversation, with John Robb, taking place at Home Cinema, Manchester on Saturday 21st January, here.

Toyah Willcox’s colourful career has taken her from Punk Princess to Splash, Teletubbies and I’m a Celebrity. She never ceases to surprise…

There is something very endearing about Toyah Willcox. She is one in a long tradition of creative, sometimes downright cussed, free spirits who mellow into a kind of national treasure with the passing years. Say what you like about Toyah, you could never pigeon-hole her. The original wild-child punk princess is credited with starting the Goth movement, has voiced the Teletubbies, champions the National Trust and survived the Celebrity Jungle. And this multi-talented ball of energy has now been officially honoured by her home city with a star on Birmingham’s Walk of Stars.

Being Toyah, she challenges the word mellow. “I don’t think I’m mellowing,” she says, “though I do find things that freaked me out in the past don’t bother me anymore. And I’m working harder than ever.” No kidding! This is a one-woman phenomenon with a record company, six movies on the go and a touring band. A typical day starts at 6am, involves driving across the country, gigging, presenting and writing before final getting into bed at 4. Not that she’d change a thing.

• Continue reading at Birmingham Living.

As mentioned, Toyah guested on BBC Hereford & Worcester yesterday, chatting to Tammy Gooding on her radio show.

Toyah appears at approximately 1hr 16m into the programme for the first part of the chat, discussing her age, “bucket list” – which includes visiting various countries, making pottery, and cutting a diamond – and her future…

The second part of the interview begins around 1hr 35m in – With Toyah paying tribute to Greg Lake, and talking about the Walk of Stars event, her punk days, new films, the 80s Invasion Tour and more.

• Listen to the show/interview at BBC iPlayer.

“There is a mindset when it comes to competitive combat and I think I might have that.”

Toyah Willcox will always be associated with early 80s pop, punk and new romanticism – and that’s no bad thing. With her flaming sunset hair, rebellious lyrics and tribal synths, she is unforgettable. But what isn’t always remembered is that this versatile all-rounder has acted opposite greats like Sir Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, worked for directors like George Cukor and Derek Jarman, and had success in children’s TV as Barmy Aunt Boomerang and as a narrator of Teletubbies.

Nevertheless, the call of the 80s is hard to resist and so, next Spring, Toyah will join Paul Young, Martika and China Crisis for the 80s Invasion tour. It’s a tempting proposition. But I wonder if Toyah’s boundless energy is still in good supply.

“That enthusiasm is just a natural part of who I am,” she says. “I don’t believe in working on anything half-heartedly. If people are good enough to work with you, you have to give them 150 per cent in return. You can’t become an actress and have limitations or boundaries, that just feels contradictory to me. Diversity is a very rewarding thing because you see different aspects of human life and come into contact with things that you would never have otherwise discovered. As a writer, that’s vital for me because we all tend to live in a bit of a bubble. With Teletubbies I was doing a favour for a friend who never thought it would ever see the light of day. Of course she couldn’t have been more wrong as it became one of the BBC‘s most successful programmes.”

• Continue reading at Northern Soul.

Toyah guested on Wynne Evan’s show on BBC Radio Wales yesterday.

Toyah on Over-50’s Bucket Lists & Wynne has the Icing on the Cake: Adrenaline thrills and age-defying adventures – actress & singer Toyah Willcox on bucket-lists for the over 50s Plus How to make a Christmas cake.

• Listen to the show at BBC iPlayer (Available for the next month).

Toyah talks to ITV Central ahead of being presented with a star on Birmingham’s Walk of Stars.

Toyah Willcox gets emotional talking about being honoured with a Broad Street star… Toyah is being recognised for her work in music, film and television.

‘I hardly see him!’ Toyah Willcox reveals the secret to her thirty year marriage is separate houses… but insists she and her husband are still ‘very naughty in the bedroom’

She’s been happily married for three decades.

And Toyah Willcox has a pretty unorthodox way of keeping the spark alive, admitting on Thursday’s Loose Women that she and her husband have separate houses.

The 58-year-old, who wed Robert Fripp back in 1986, commented: ‘The secret is – please don’t quote me – I hardly see him!’

Speaking to the Loose Women, Toyah revealed that she and Robert have two houses, so although they spend much of their time together, there is somewhere to escape to.

• Continue reading at the Daily Mail.

Take on the purple trend in a midi dress like Toyah

Nineties rocker, Toyah Willcox, looked a far cry from her former punk self earlier today when she made an appearance on Loose Women wearing a demure midi dress!

Wearing a jersey wrap dress by Pure (click right to buy it now), Toyah accessorised her look with a statement coin necklace and a chunky arm cuff. With its wrap-around style, thigh-slit, side-ruching and jersey fabric, Toyah’s dress is perfect balance of classy and comfy! Make like Toyah and utilise the plunging neckline by stacking up with statement jewels.

• Continue reading at the Daily Mail. (Photo © ITV.com)

With the 80s Invasion tour coming up next year, Toyah will be performing along with other luminaries including Paul Young, Martika and China Crisis in a UK wide tour. At the moment Toyah is playing a solo tour all around the UK and she was gracious enough to spare us some time to talk about what type of holidays she prefers.

The singer’s earliest memories of breaks are spending time on the family boat moored on the river Avon and also at their caravan that was based close to the boat. This meant that from an early age Toyah was accustomed to packing – a task that she has had to carry out throughout her working life.

Cities are important places to Toyah, “I have written four albums in Seattle. I absolutely love that city – it’s a very green forest orientated city and its quite a harmonised hub of high rises but they kind of peter out into wooden shacks quite quickly and there is water everywhere.”

• Continue reading at Holiday Hypermarket.

WISE WORDS: Toyah Willcox Shares Her Idea Of Perfect Happiness

Toyah is joining Paul Young, Martika and China Crisis on tour in 2017.

For the latest in our WISE WORDS interview series – where stars from a whole range of fields share the important life lessons they’ve learned along the way – we’re posing some of the big questions to TOYAH WILLCOX.

Next year finds her joining the roll call for the 80s Invasion Tour. As she prepares once again to take to the road, she talks to HuffPostUK about some of the harder lessons she’s learned along the way, and what brings her greatest happiness…

What do you do to switch off from the world?
I love walking and I love being in big, wide-open spaces like hill tops or relatively easy to climb mountains. I just get everything I need from silence and being outdoors. It allows me to think and clear my mind. I like being very active and I can walk up to around eight miles a day every day.

How do you deal with negativity?
I don’t! I don’t deal with negativity at all! I think we’re naturally more tuned to hearing negativity than positivity and I find that aspect endlessly fascinating, that I can pick up two pages of glittering reviews and just one bad sentence is what you’ll remember. I think that says a lot about the human psyche, so the way I try and deal with it is I remind myself that most negativity has been expressed in passing and it isn’t held permanently. Someone that is negative is flippant and has just released a sentence and moved on to something completely different. I just don’t allow it to have a solid existence, I don’t allow it tangibility.

• Continue reading at The Huffington Post.

Toyah guested on ITV’s Lorraine this morning. The full interview has been uploaded to the programme’s Official You Tube channel. View it here.

Toyah Willcox is in the studio talking about teaming up with some of her favourite music stars for The 80’s Invasion tour, and why she thinks 80s music will never die!

There’s also a, very short, Toyah post/feature at the Lorraine section on the ITV website: Toyah Willcox is going back to the eighties!: Toyah Willcox joins Lorraine to tell her all about taking part in The 80’s Invasion Tour alongside some of our favourite eighties music stars.

And finally, a great photo of Toyah, Olly Murs and Lorraine was also posted earlier today at the ITV/Lorraine Instagram. (Photo © ITV)

Iconic singer and actress Toyah Willcox is interviewed by Lynnette Peck about why she is selling her 80s wardrobe and why she chose Lovely’s Vintage Emporium to sell it through.

Talented singer and actor Toyah admits her pop stardom was literally a case of “life imitating art”, coming soon after she was cast in a BBC play as a wannabe pop star who breaks into the Top of the Pops recording studios.

Speaking at the Rewind 80s Festival in Henley-on-Thames, Toyah recalled her first acting break aged 18 in the BBC play Glitter, playing alongside Phil Daniels, who was later to act alongside her again in the cult mod film Quadrophenia.

Toyah said: “I was spotted on the streets of Birmingham around 1973/74 because I had green and yellow hair! A director asked me to come and audition with Phil Daniels, and to play his girlfriend in a BBC2 drama and I got the part.

“The biggest irony was that I was playing a girl who wrote a song and broke into the Top of the Pops studios to sing the song in the studios; so talk about life imitating art!

“I was pretty instantly well known as an actress from the age of 18 and I was very successful as an actress right up until 1981 when I started having hit singles. I was the hottest name in the acting industry after I started at the National Theatre.”

• Continue reading at Music-News.com.

An Interview with Toyah at Rewind Festival South 2016.

Getting The Scoop on London’s Free Open Air Theatre Season

Director Phil Willmott talks to Matthew Amer about bringing free theatre to City Hall.

Growing up, theatre director Phil Willmott was enthralled and inspired by pocket money-priced trips to the theatre. Now he hopes to inspire Londoners with shows that are entirely free.

“I didn’t know anything about theatre or plays,” Willmott says of his early exposure to the excitement of live theatre at Bristol Old Vic. “I would sit in the dark and this extraordinary story would happen in front of me. It was just the most brilliant education in literature and humanity. The stories I saw taught me so much about the world and different cultures. I always want to capture that for other people, to give them theatre that is that exciting.”

That is exactly what the director has been doing since 2003 at The Scoop with London’s Free Open Air Theatre Season. Each year he stages a classic text and a children’s production, and the audience can watch without having to open their wallets.

“Because we’re free,” Willmott continues, “people from all walks of life will come along, take a chance and sit down. An hour and a half later they’ve watched our play and want to talk about it. The really exciting thing about The Scoop’s audience is most of them have never dreamed of going to the theatre.”

• Continue reading at Theatre.London.

Did you make it to the Rewind Festival last weekend? Muddy Stilettos was hanging out with the stars (*cough*), or at the very least, performing aerial rugby-tackles on any Eighties icons close enough to assault.

And look what we have here! Only the brilliant Toyah Willcox, with barely a bruise on her. Anyone who was old enough to take ‘O’ levels, chainsmoke multi-coloured ciggies or borrow their brother’s Chopper bike will remember Toyah – the dyed-to-a-cinder hair, the multi-coloured make up, and the impossibly catchy It’s a Mystery to I Want to Be Free.

She lives in Pershore (just south of Worcester, geography meisters) and these days aside from trilling and actiing for her living, the Eighties pocket rocket also loves to read, make her own jewellery (that masterpiece around her neck in the photo above, she created that) and, well, read on to find out more…

• Continue reading at Muddy Stilettos. Browse all of Dreamscape’s Rewind South 2016 news.

A rare interview with Jordan, punk’s enigmatic frontwoman

Working with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren, performing with the Sex Pistols and acting for Derek Jarman – Jordan Mooney reflects on a life of iconoclasm

With her legacy being celebrated in new tome Fashion + Music (out now, by Laurence King Publishing), punk legend Jordan discusses some of her most significant moments with the book’s author, Katie Baron.

Still one of punk’s most-fetishised poster women, Jordan Mooney’s pivotal role at the nexus of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s riotous (Sex and Seditionaries-era) world was vital to the looks of bands like the Sex Pistols and Adam and the Ants. She’s often immortalised in grainy black-and-white photography, as a severe vision of bleach-blonde-beehived, Cleopatra-eyed, latex-sheathed, fuck-you defiance, yet, there is far more to her influence than straightforward anarchic provocation. Rebellion was actually something of a by-product. Art (“I often described myself as a living work of art”), personal expression and a militant desire to champion the outlier were all at the real crux of her infectious perspective. As punk celebrates turning 40 this year, Jordan revisits her iconoclastic life.

At 14 you changed your name – why?

Jordan Mooney: I truly felt like I’d been labelled the wrong thing, like a kind of name dysmorphia.

You were suspended from school for your haircut, and famously given your own spot in a first-class carriage on the train to avoid your outfits provoking outrage in fellow commuters – do you think dressing the way you did was an act of bravery?

Jordan Mooney: People often refer to the name and the things that I wore as demonstrating bravery and shaking things up, but while I showed off to the best of my ability it wasn’t about bravery because I didn’t care what people thought. I’ve always been extremely comfortable in my own skin. It’s like being in an art movement – someone has to start it.

• Continue reading at Dazed.

Toyah talks returning to Wickham Festival 2016, playing with The SAS Band, performing a David Bowie song, the new musical Crime and Punishment, and much more in an interview at the festival… Toyah Willcox returned to Wickham Festival in 2016 to perform with SAS Band.

Toyah Willcox is never less than effusive about her involvement in projects.

On this particular day, her voice is typically bouncy at the end of the telephone – a retro way to interview nowadays, but then again it’s time to talk about the landline-tastic 1980s.

The 58-year-old is almost evangelical about Rewind, the 80s Festival, that will bathe Scone Castle and its grounds in a sea of Day-Glo clothing and lace accessories from July 22 to 24. She is performing at Rewind Scotland and the event in Henley-on-Thames. It’s not a first appearance at either for her – last year her presentation skills were also called on to MC the Scone event.

“That was a great opportunity to see everyone that performed , and I was impressed,” she says. “I don’t know why I was so surprised. All the acts come from the era when you had to be able to perform live before a record company would even look at you.”

The concept of Rewind works – as many acts as possible across two days and sets that can only include chart hits. So even if you liked the second track on the B-side of ABC’s Beauty Stab, this isn’t the place to hear it. Every track is a hit, keeping the energy as charged as the end of the night at a secondary school disco.

“Rewind is about fun,” adds Toyah. “No-one is trying to sell anything here; it’s not about plugging records of breaking new acts. It’s like a big ensemble, all feeding into the same musical experience.”

• Continue reading at The Herald. Browse all of Dreamscape’s Rewind Scotland 2016 news here.

Singer-songwriter Toyah Willcox has been a quirky tour de force in British culture since she found herself in the heart of London’s music scene as punk imploded in 1977.

Her eclectic musical tastes and penchant for penning life affirming songs have ensured she’s never been far from the public eye during her 40 year career. With eight top 40 singles under her belt, several lauded albums, a new acoustic show plus a musical in the pipeline, she’s a versatile songsmith whose background in acting has helped raise her performance chips.

We caught up with her in the PRS for Music tent at Glastonbury 2016 to learn more about her enduring love affair with music…

Singer and actress Toyah has had many Top 20 hits and appeared in films with stars such as Katharine Hepburn. She has also written several books. She starred at The National Theatre with John Gielgud, and she acted alongside Laurence Olivier in TV’s The Ebony Tower.

Toyah will be singing at The Rewind Festival, Scone Palace, Perth, on Sunday, July 24.

Why do the Rewind Festival?
The audience there is from three to 83 and I seem to get rediscovered by every new generation. It’s very rewarding. It becomes a party for all of us and every song is a hit.

What do audiences say to you?
Usually they say their mothers hate me because I’m the reason they dyed their hair as a teenager, or because I got them expelled from school.

Are you still a rebel?
I prefer to think that I’m just not a conformist. If that makes me a rebel, then I guess that’s what I am.

Is image still important when performing?
Yes, but I’m 58 now and I don’t want to look stuck in the past, so when I dress for stage I try to be age appropriate and reinterpret the songs for today.

• Continue reading at The Sunday Post/in10 Magazine.