Dreamscape – Toyah Willcox Fansite

A response, at the ‘DGM Live’ Forum, to the “review” that has rapidly became vaguely infamous;

RF has long lambasted the quality of music criticism, in particular for its paucity of basic humanity and its ineptitude (and, of course, nastiness). A perfect example of this was a ’review’ of The Humans performance at the Haiti Earthquake Fundraiser earlier this week (by Pete Paphides of the Times, 26 February). Not a review at all really, in actuality simply a nasty sideswipe at Toyah and RF. This is not a surprise, I take the Times on Saturdays (mainly for the fine crosswords) and often read Paphides’s music reviews. They are uniformly tiresome, the type of review that is sadly typical of the British press in particular (thankfully the more reasonable and intelligent John Bungey contributes to the Times too). Such reviews appear to have little to do with music and more to do with self-aggrandisement and a rather sad attempt by columnists (especially those past the first flush of youth) to remain hip to the latest thing. It was this pathetic attempt to remain perpetually ’cool’ that led me to abandon British music magazines in the first place. Anyway I’m sure Toyah and RF don’t take this nonsense to heart. All the same… the casual reader is given a distorted, uninformed and partial impression of a band, mainly because they don’t follow the accepted musical orthodoxy. Which, to me at least, is still a pain in the ass. By fishbonealice