Dreamscape | The Toyah Willcox Fansite

…Prostitute and Ophelia’s Shadow. Two ridiculously underrated albums (particularly the latter. I mean ‘Ghost Light’ is just… incredible!)

Here I stand on a large chunk of rock
Floatin’ in the piss-pot part of the firmament…

That could almost be a description of certain areas of Facebook. Apparently this site, and myself, have recently been getting bad-mouthed (again?) by some misery or other.

Fuck chuck a buck you… ‘Ghosts In The Universe’, 1988.

Toyah puts it far more eloquently, poetically and succinctly than I ever could :)

Toyah casting her eye over two recent artworks: ‘The Changeling’ by Melissa Mailer-Yates and ‘Crimson Queen’ by Cliff Matthews. Both of these excellent creations are available to buy as prints. View more details of Cliff’s here and Melissa’s here. Read our recent Q&A with Melissa Mailer-Yates here. (Photos © Ian Dunn & Cliff Matthews)

Screen caps of Toyah from Saturday night’s The Timey-Wimey Of Doctor Who, which aired on ‘BBC America’. Click below to view larger versions. Read up on all of our recent Doctor Who documentary specials news here. (Thanks to Paul Lomas)

• Very rare print sheets of two retro Toyah badges, the logo and Intergalactic Fanclub membership, were recently up for auction at eBay. The sheets were originally produced by badge-making company de Graff and printed in the early 1980’s. View the logo sheet here, and the IRH here.

• VinceFont: Lee Fletcher’s “Faith” is no worthless thing: Both Toyah and Robert Fripp are mentioned in this review of Lee’s new album. He worked with Toyah a few years ago via This Fragile Moment.

• Quadrophenia: The legendary film is released on Region A/1 Blu-ray next week. Pay a return visit soon for a bumper Quadrophenia news update.

Two more photos of Toyah at Wynne’s Cakes & Coffee Shop VIP Night last week. Click here to view larger. All of the recent photos of Toyah at Wynne’s have been added to Dreamscape’s Gallery. View all of our recent Toyah @ Wynne’s Cakes news. (Thanks to Jenni & John)

A couple of pretend “adverts” for The Ebony Tower, using great stills from the ITV drama.

• Toyah plays Manchester Pride this coming Bank Holiday weekend. She headlines the Women’s Stage at Sackville Gardens on Sunday. View more info here.

• Heart Shaped!: Check out Toyah’s unique tomato at Twitter.

• Sugar Rush: Toyah & Robert Fripp: Read a great article about Robert at The Humans’ Fansite.

• Invisible Guy Recommends: Toyah: Danced: Even though I believe the live-version is better, I just have to recommend the studio-version of the song Danced by Toyah. Featured on her debut-album Sheep Farming In Barnet.

Toyah did, after all, guest in Saturday night’s third documentary special, The Time-Wimey Of Doctor Who, on ‘BBC America’. Here is a transcript of what she said.

Toyah on Rose Tyler in the epsiode ‘Father’s Day’: “Rose Tyler is human. She’s made like all humans, to nurture and save, and she sees her father and she has a chance to save him… So she saves him from the car hitting him, and all hell breaks loose. It cracks a moment in time, where these demons, these gargoyles, can come to life.”

On the Doctor and instant time travel, specifically from the episode ‘The Big Bang’: “He can go like that (clicks fingers) and he’s with one person, and he can be having a conversation with that, and he can go like that (clicks fingers) and he’s back in another time having a conversation with someone else. ‘Oh! I forgot to say something’ (clicks fingers), and he’s back somewhere else!”

On Doctor Who and its effect on viewers: “What the writers of Doctor Who manage is to broaden our perceptions, broaden our beliefs, broaden our horizons. They get it brilliantly correct every time.”

• Screen caps of Toyah from Timey-Wimey coming soon. (Thanks to Paul Lomas)

The Destinations Of Doctor Who: BBC America
Sat 25th August: 9.00pm/Sun 25th Aug: 0.00am
Leave the beach towel at home and take a trip to the end of the earth – literally. From the Starship UK to one very haunted hotel, you won’t find the destinations of “Doctor Who” in any guidebook.

More press for Toyah’s visit to Wynne’s Cakes & Coffee Shop. ‘The Sentinel’ included a great photo of Toyah at this week’s VIP Night, with the fantastic Wynne’s cake, in their Photos Of The Week yesterday. Visit Wynne’s Cakes & Coffee Shop Facebook for more info.

Rare, and amazing, photos of Toyah from 1980!! Photos from this session were used in a TV Times interview that year but these are all unpublished as far as I’m aware. (Thanks to Andi)

A 1991 report from ITV Calendar News, featuring rare footage of Toyah’s Cheap Thrills performance, has just been uploaded to You Tube. Toyah visited a number of British prisons, while simultaneously touring theatres with Amadeus, in 1991 in Cheap Thrills, a specially written play based on the life of Janis Joplin. Click below to view and here for larger caps.

Toyah’s appearance on BBC1’s Clean Slate, also from 1991, has been uploaded too.

The third ‘BBC America’ documentary special, The Timey-Wimey Of Doctor Who, airs tonight. No word on whether Toyah will be included, and there was no full-length preview trailer for this episode, but she is listed as a guest at the BBCA website: It’s The Timey-Wimey Of Doctor Who. Join celebrity Whovians – as they try to make sense of all the “wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.

I’ve made a start on a new update to Dreamscape’s Gallery: Adding the numerous fantastic rarities that have surfaced over the last year or so, with other ‘new’ Toyah photos, as well as correcting some date errors etc. It’ll probably take a while to complete, I’ll keep you posted!

Toyah Willcox has chosen Middlesbrough Theatre to launch the latest leg of her tour, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of The Changeling. The Changeling Resurrection II sees Toyah and her full band perform a selection of songs from the album alongside classic material as heard on the Warrior Rock live album.

The performance takes place on Wednesday 19th September at 7.30pm. Tickets are £18, concessions £16.

• Continue reading at Darlington For Culture.

Toyah visiting Wynne’s Cakes & Coffee Shop in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent yesterday. She tweeted: “Just visiting john wain’s new cafe Wynnes and sampling the cakes . Yummy“. Click below to view larger photos. More info here. (Photos © Wynne’s Cakes/Toyah Willcox)

Pints and bottles have been replaced with cakes and chocolates at a new Stoke-on-Trent business.

John and Carl Wynne have spent £400,000 transforming the former Three Tuns pub on Bucknall New Road, Hanley into a specialist cake and chocolate shop and cafe. Wynne’s Cakes and Winnie Wonka Chocolate yesterday, hosted a VIP night to celebrate its opening, with guests including singer and actress Toyah Willcox, right with John and Carl.

John, aged 41, from Hanley, said: “I ran the pub for 15 years, and it was successful for most of that time, but with the decline of the market, I decided to do something different, and my friend suggested I open a cake shop.”

“Four years ago I’d never baked a cake, but I’ve been on lots of courses and it’s going really well. We’ve been open five weeks, and we’ve already got bookings for three weddings.”

The complete, four-part, late 70s version of Quatermass, starring John Mills and Simon MacCorkindale, in which Toyah also had a small role as Sal, is available to view in full at ‘You Tube’. This was made by Euston Films, filmed in 1978 and aired on ITV in October and November 1979: Chapter One: Ringstone Round; Chapter Two: Lovely Lightning; Chapter Three: What Lies Beneath; Chapter Four: An Endangered Species. View a photo of Toyah taken during the filming here. The series has previously been released on VHS and DVD but is currently unavailable. This was also released as a television film in 1979, The Quatermass Conclusion, an edited down version of these four episodes. View further info at Wikipedia.

Three more new reviews of The Tempest on Blu-ray.

• Ioncinema: The Tempest | Blu-ray Review: Difficult as ever, Jarman’s take on Shakespeare’s final lone play is definitely a product of his own imagining. Laced with homoeroticisms, cabaret iconography, extravagant but dirty set design, and overall unsettling imagery… Like the original story, the film centers around the magician and ex-Duke of Milan, Prospero (Heathecote Williams), along with his beautiful daughter Miranda (Toyah Willcox) and their downright scary servant, Caliban (Jack Birkett), all of which now live alone in a decrepit mansion on an island.

• Blu-ray.com: The Tempest Blu-ray Review: Stormy weather ends in sunshine: Where Jarman’s The Tempest really differentiates itself is in its unsettling oddities, its ghostly atmosphere and decayed visual style… Karl Johnson makes for a hypnotic Ariel—weird and effete, dressed all in white—and Toyah Willcox is far from the usual, virginal Miranda. Here she’s sensual and erratic, a life-sized wind-up toy doll.

• Cultural Mente Incorrecto: “The Tempest” by Derek Jarman: A different and almost subversive Shakespeare classic: “The Tempest” by Derek Jarman is a different and almost subversive Shakespeare classic. Visually stunning, with that touch of indie with hints of neorealism but a literary question fabulesca, this is a historically important film in the film, required viewing for film fans Jarman, protesters and intellectuals.

• View links to numerous other reviews of The Tempest on Blu-ray here.

• Check out Toyah’s Official Twitter: Over the last couple of weeks she has tweeted about vistiting the National Portrait Gallery, Robert Fripp, tasty food from homegrown veg, the Olympics, recent gigs, traffic jams and more!

• Irenebrination: The (Blitz) Kids That Never Were (According to the Fashion Mainstream): A new mini-article on Melissa Caplan.

• Top Of The Pops: The Story Of 1976 is currently available to watch at BBC iPlayer.

• Samantha Fox mentions Toyah in a new article at The Quietus in which she chooses her 13 Favourite Albums: Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams: I remember when Annie Lennox first came out I just loved her voice and loved her image. She’s very androgynous and different to everyone else, other than someone like Toyah Willcox, who when I was younger I thought; ‘oh, she’s different.’

As mentioned a few times over the last week, Toyah guested on The Women Of Doctor Who on ‘BBC America’ at the weekend. Here is a full transcript of what she said during the 45-minute special.

Toyah on Rose Tyler: “She’s a wonderfully refreshing heroine, that sets the standard for heroines in other sci-fi series”; on Nu-Who: “Because I’ve watched Doctor Who for almost 50 years, I’m not used to this raw, human emotion that’s coming out in the modern version of the drama.”

Toyah on Martha Jones: “I love the moment when Martha Jones just turns to the Doctor and says ‘I’m not staying, I’m not gonna waste my time waiting for a man’, so good on her! Girl power!”; on the TARDIS/Idris: “Now you’d think the TARDIS, which is 700 years old, if it was to become flesh it would actually be a bloke, a man, in a boiler suit, covered in tar, covered in the muck of machinery, but no…”; on Donna Noble: “You get this scene, where they’re both kind of stuck. She’s great at Vaudeville, and that’s what this moment is. It’s classic comedy.”

Toyah on Sarah Jane Smith: “What is lovely about their bond, it’s not a sexual magnetism, it’s a genuine, eternal loving bond”; on Rose & Sarah Jane: “This moment where they realised they’re united in how special they are for having had those experiences, and they start laughing. Quite madly”; on River Song: “River Song is beautiful, glamourous… She is better at operating the TARDIS than the Doctor is, and for the first time you see him actually being quite put out at that… A lovely twist, is when River Song is about to be shot by Amy Pond, and suddenly she says ‘I’m doing this because I am your daughter’, and there’s this wonderful moment of recognition.”

Toyah on Lady Cassandra: “There’s this wonderful scene where all these dignitaries from around the universe are coming together, they’re converging to see the death of Planet Earth… She has been stretched so far that she is, literally, like a pinned piece of leather. Drying out… She arrives with all these medical staff who have to spray her and keep her moist”; on Joan Redfern: “You can see that for the first time the Doctor is falling in love as a human being, and he falls in love with her”; on female companions in general: “They have their vulnerabilities, and perhaps it’s because of those vulnerabilites that Doctor Who can experience human emotions a bit more.”