Dreamscape | The Toyah Willcox Fansite

A new interview with Toyah, talking about her lifelong insomnia, in today’s Mirror, accompanied with some great photos.

‘For 40 years I’ve survived on three hours’ sleep a night’: Toyah Willcox on her battle with insomnia

Born with a twisted spine, a clubbed right foot and one leg shorter than the other, singer and actress Toyah Willcox has also suffered from chronic insomnia for 40 years.

Now the 54-year-old, who lives with her husband, musician Robert Fripp, 66, has finally found relief through having acupuncture.

I’ve suffered from ­chronic insomnia for 40 years. It started when I was a 14-year-old ­dyslexic schoolgirl revising for my exams in ­Birmingham. I experienced the typical ­teenage stress that the pressure of cramming for exams, and then sitting there for hours on end doing them brings.

During what felt like a solid month of exam papers, I just stopped sleeping. Once the pattern set in, it became a habit and I never really addressed it because back then no one really talked about insomnia. You’d just had a bad night’s sleep.

• Continue reading at the Mirror.

Here is the print version of Toyah’s interview with the ‘Daily Express’ from last Tuesday. It is, of course, the same interview that was published on their website but this edition also includes a great photo of Toyah from 1980.

Singer and actress Toyah Willcox says a course of acupuncture ended 40 years of insomnia.

After struggling with insomnia since she was 14, Toyah Willcox is an expert at surviving on little sleep. The singer, 54, who found fame as an orange-haired punk in the Eighties, says: “I had just started revising for my GCEs and the anxiety I felt made me stop sleeping.

• Continue reading at The Express. Read Dreamscape’s news post from last week on this here. (Thanks to Richard Smith for the scan)

An interview with Toyah, from last October by Glasgow’s Evening Times, which was previously only viewable to subscribers is now available to all.

Toyah’s performing her classic album, 30 years on

It’s her fans’ favourite record – but it’s taken 30 years for Toyah Willcox to face up to playing The Changeling album again.

The popular singer, actress and TV personality released the album in 1982, and it captured a dark, stressful time in her life. It’s only now that she feels she can perform it.
 
“The important thing about The Changeling and now is that I feel I can face it again,” she says ahead of her show at Classic Grand in Glasgow on Friday. “It was a pretty intense time making it, and being extremely famous is not a comfortable place to be, especially when you’re trying to write an album.

“I found the pressures of that one difficult, especially with the demands on time and the technology was very new as it was being made on digital.It brought back difficult memories revisiting it, as it was so intense at the time and I was just trying to remain true to myself. Being the most commercial female pop star at the time and wanting to write really dark material doesn’t go hand in hand.”

• Continue reading at the Evening Times.

A new interview with Toyah, published today, by The Express.

Singer and actress Toyah Willcox says a course of acupuncture ended 40 years of insomnia.

After struggling with insomnia since she was 14, Toyah Willcox is an expert at surviving on little sleep. The singer, 54, who found fame as an orange-haired punk in the Eighties, says: “I had just started revising for my GCEs and the anxiety I felt made me stop sleeping.

“I would go to bed around 11 or 12 at night and be awake two hours later. It didn’t help me with my exams as my brain would feel foggy the next day but there was nothing anyone could do for me. No one would give a child a sleeping pill and from that point on I had chronic sleep problems.”

She comes from a family of insomniacs. “My mother never slept,” says Toyah, who was born in Birmingham, the youngest of three. “I remember her doing housework until four in the morning and then she would take me to school a few hours later.

• Continue reading at The Express.

Toyah’s full interview, recorded last week at The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, from this evening’s Channel 4 News. “I accidentally saw the Sex Pistols at a gig in Birmingham and it changed my life forever.” So Toyah Willcox told me this week, nearly four decades after punk exploded onto the British music scene, writes Channel 4 News Reporter Katie Razzall.

At that stage, in the late 1970s, she was a teenager from Birmingham who’d been told she must behave demurely and in a “feminine” way. At the gig, there were “people out there who were misbehaving“. As she puts it: “Suddenly I was in a room of spitting, shouting, angry people. I thought, right, I belong. I’ve found my voice.”

Keep an eye on Channel 4 News. Toyah tweeted yesterday that she was being interviewed this morning for the programme: “C4 news filming me in dressing room at 9am. How punk changed the role of women! ”

Channel 4 News airs in the UK at 7pm Monday to Saturday and 6.30pm on Sundays.

An interview with Toyah, from October, by The Weekender.

It’s that time of year already! Pantomime returns to The Marlowe Theatre this winter with a new production of Sleeping Beauty. Alongside former Pop Idol Gareth Gates, pop stalwart Toyah Willcox stars as the Wicked Fairy. Toyah has had a long-running musical career; her first album was released back in 1979 and she still tours with her band today. Having performed in numerous theatre, television and film productions she is also a panto veteran. Toyah tells Emma Featherstone why she is looking forward to hitting the Canterbury stage.

You’ve worked in panto since 1993. What makes you return to it?

I’ve learnt to love pantomime as a form of theatre, which is more successful than any other. In the last 20 years it has been completely reinvented, mainly by one man, Kevin Wood  (one of Britain’s top pantomime producers). His daughter Emily produces Sleeping Beauty.

• Continue reading at The Weekender.

A comprehensive new interview with Toyah, from Penny Black Music.

With her fiery hair and soaring, near operatic vocals, Toyah Willcox was one of the most striking and iconic singers of the early 1980s.

Willcox, who was brought up in Birmingham, first came to prominence as an actress, appearing in Derek Jarman’s 1978’s punk epic ‘Jubilee ’and the Who-inspired ‘Quadrophenia’(1979), and also acting alongside Katherine Hepburn in the made-for-TV film ‘The Corn is Green’.

By 1980 her musical career, which she had run concurrently with her acting career, had also begun to take off. With her band which was also called Toyah, she released five studio albums, ‘Sheep Farming in Barnet’ (1979), ‘The Blue Meaning’(1980), ‘Anthem’(1981), ‘The Changeling’(1982) and ‘Love is the Law’(1983). She also had seven Top 40 single hits, including in 1981, her most successful year, three Top 10 hits alone with ‘Four from Toyah’, ‘I Want to Be Free’ and ‘Thunder in the Mountains’.

Since Toyah folded in 1983, Toyah Willcox, who has been married to ex- King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp since 1986, has gone on to release another ten studio albums under her own name.

• Continue reading at Penny Black Music.

Birmingham’s very own punk queen Toyah Willcox returns this month (Oct 31st) to perform a very special Halloween show at the Birmingham Ballroom.

LTW’s Ross Cotton took the chance to ask Toyah about her memories whilst recording her album ‘The Changeling’ and her future plans.

The iconic pop star, actress and TV personality is reigniting her triumphant forth album ‘The Changeling’, to celebrate its 30th anniversary and the mark of the gothic era. After a sell-out touring stint earlier this year, and a well deserved star awarded at the ‘Kings Heath Walk of Fame’, it comes as no surprise that our local girl is in high demand.

• Continue reading at Louder Than War.

Toyah Willcox is arguably the busiest she has ever been.

These days split very much between acting and singing, the ’80s legend who set the template for many modern musical maidens returns to Sheffield and Corporation on Saturday in a very different guise to her last visit – playing The Wicked Queen in panto at the Lyceum.

“Actress/singer,” she says when asked what goes on her passport these days. “Because you want to get into different countries you’re not going to put controversial person, troublemaker.”

She’s got a point. In her post-punk heyday Toyah was something of a mould-breaker. With costumes as outrageous as she was outspoken, pop hadn’t really come across someone like her before.

“I was being very successful at a time when it was a novelty for a woman to be successful. When you look at the 1980s the glass ceiling was being raised daily and I came into the music business as a strong woman who knew what I wanted with a strong identity. That sense of novelty continued for quite a while.

• Continue reading at The Star.

Another new interview with Toyah. This one from, Dorset based, Seeker News.

Although she’s never been one to hide her light, Toyah Willcox is more ready than ever for the public to see her.  She regularly plays to thousands in 1980s revival shows with the likes of Belinda Carlisle, Rick Astley and Banarama, but she also tours in her own right and is returning to some of the darkest material of her 35-year career in The Changeling Resurrection II tour which arrives in Bridport this month.

“The Changeling was a very difficult album for me, it was very difficult to write, I wasn’t very happy at the time – it was 1982 and I was so famous I couldn’t leave the building without being escorted and everyone wanted the Toyah they saw on Top of the Pops, nobody cared much about the Toyah that was the real me,” she says.

• Continue reading at Seeker News.

An interesting new Toyah interview from Domestic City.

Toyah Willcox, 30 years on from ‘The Changeling’ and the beginning of the goth movement

Birmingham’s very own punk queen Toyah Willcox returns this month to perform a very special Halloween show at the Birmingham Ballroom.

The iconic pop star, actress and TV personality is reigniting her triumphant forth album ‘The Changeling’, to celebrate its 30th anniversary and the mark of the gothic era. After a sell-out touring stint earlier this year, and a well deserved star awarded at the ‘Kings Heath Walk of Fame’, it comes as no surprise that our local girl is in high demand.

“[The Walk of Fame] was a really emotional day for me”, says Toyah. “I just wish my parents were around to have known because they just would be so proud…”

• Continue reading at Domestic City.

A recent interview with Toyah, from Birmingham Review.

BReview: “Congratulations on your star in the Kings Heath ‘Walk of Fame’.  How does it feel to be awarded this accolade?”

Toyah: “It’s wonderful.  It’s such an honour, and so good for people to remember me in this way. I lived in Birmingham for 18 years, until I left for London and got my career going. I was born and conceived here. I used to shop on the high street everyday with my mother.

It’s very kind of the business people of Kings Heath, to include me in the names of those associated with the suburb. Amazing people have played here, like Led Zeppelin and Jerry lee Lewis (at the Ritz Ballroom, now Cash Convertors, on York Rd).  I think I am the only other woman apart from Helen Shapiro; it’s an absolute honour.”

• Continue reading at Birmingham Review.

The Wayne’s Asylum Toyah Special, which aired last night on ‘Switch Radio’, is now available in full at Mix Cloud.

The 75-minute Toyahfest can be listened to online or downloaded. Toyah talks her career, the King’s Heath Walk Of Fame, future plans and much more.

Listen to the full interview, plus all 15 songs played, here! (Thanks again to Wayne)

Yet another rare retro Toyah interview. This one is from ‘Rock Star News’ in 1980 and it’s vaguely bizarre. Definitely “of its time” but still an interesting read. Toyah talks ‘The Blue Meaning’, death dreams, her teenage years and more. Click below to read. View all of our recent retro Toyah press articles & interviews here. (Thanks again to Andi)

A rare three-page interview with Toyah, plus a review of The Tempest upon receiving its first video release, from a 1982 issue of ‘Video Times’ magazine: Multi-talented singer and actress Toyah talks video, pop, films, cosmetics and big business with John Kercher. Click below to read. (Thanks to Andi for this great article)

An interesting, very rare, interview with Toyah from 1981. This was originally published by Finnish music magazine ‘Suosikki’.

FIERCE REDHEAD TOYAH SAYS: “I’M CRAZY ABOUT RABBITS!”

Now I have seen her, today’s hottest rock singer in the world, Toyah (Willcox). Compared to this tiny redheaded whirlwind rest of the female singers- and some men- look like salt statues. Toyah is 145 centimetres of pure sex appeal and energy!

After the concert Suosikki Magazine got an exclusive interview with Toyah, an honour not bestowed on many publications in the world. Markku Fagerlund asked the questions and Toyah answered. At the same time Toyah read the latest issue of Suosikki and liked it so much she sent the readers a special message: “Keep going strong!”

Toyah Willcox is a 23 year old multi-talented artist who has this year finally reached the top. Her latest album “Anthem” has been well received in most European countries (it’s number 2 in the UK at the moment) and her gigs have been massively successful.

As well as being a famous singer Toyah is an actress. We’ve been able to admire her sexy persona in “Quadrophenia”, “Jubilee”, “The Corn Is Green” and various TV series including “Radioetsivä” (Shoestring) which aired also in Finland.

• Read the full interview at Dreamscape’s Press Archive. (Thanks again to Lärwi for this rare interview and for taking the time to translate it for Dreamscape News’ visitors)

A new interview with Toyah, from This is Derbyshire.

Frustrated biker Toyah here to judge dream machines

The only thing stopping Toyah from hitting the road astride a motorbike is her husband.

“He (musician Robert Fripp) said he would leave me if I ever bought a bike,” she says. “When I was in my 30s I wanted a chopper Harley and he wouldn’t let me have one.

“Then he said that if I bought one he would get one – and he’s as blind as a bat. So there’s no way I would let that happen. It got down to as strong as he would leave me if I bought one. So it’s an unfulfilled ambition.”

But at least the singer and actress gets the chance to get close to some genuine dream machines when the Rock and Bike Fest comes to Elvaston Castle in July.

• Continue reading at This is Derbyshire.

Jersey.com have republished their 2008 winter holiday feature with Toyah and Robert.

Toyah Willcox and husband Robert Fripp took a short break in Jersey. It’s the first time she’s been back since a childhood visit. The island seems to have grown up with her.

I was seven years old when I took my very first plane on my very first trip abroad – to Jersey. Okay, I know that Jersey is perceived as being a part of Britain. But where in the Albion isles do you find turquoise seas and the French hopping just 14 miles across the water on day trips?

Forty-three years later and one hour and 10 minutes from Birmingham Airport and I am back in Jersey, a lot older and wiser.

• Continue reading at Jersey.com.

A short preview of the forthcoming ‘Wayne’s Asylum’ Toyah interview will air on tomorrow night’s show on Switch Radio. Info from Wayne:

This Friday I will be giving you an interview teaser EXCLUSIVE of the Toyah interview I did last week with the lady herself. She’ll be letting you know about the gigs she has coming up in here in Brum including the Hare and Hounds gig and a massive Halloween special @ Birmingham Ballroom . Do not miss this prequel to the Friday 13th/ Toyah special being aired in July..

A new Toyah interview, by ‘Vision4Dreams’. It runs for just under six minutes and Toyah chats about her career, education, building a career via the internet and more.