Dreamscape | The Toyah Willcox Fansite

Toyah and Robert – The website. All things Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp! Visit, by clicking below for Toyah & Robert merchandise and more.

Music, chat and more of your questions from Toyah’s home to yours including a special postcard home from Toyah on the Isle of Wight as she reunites with her band for their first gig since February 2020!

You can also listen to the show on the Official Toyah Willcox podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts. (Image © Toyah Willcox)

More Official Chart placings for The Blue Meaning.

Album chart #59⁣
Rock chart #1⁣
Independent chart #4 ⁣
Sales chart #12⁣
Physical chart #12⁣
Vinyl chart #14 ⁣
Scottish chart #16

Toyah tweeted and Instagrammed about the great news over the weekend, saying:

“Wonderful news that The Blue Meaning has charted in the UK @officialcharts yesterday & topped the Rock & Metal Chart. Thank you!! Toyah xx⁣”

Toyah unboxes the Four From Toyah – 40th Anniversary Mini-Album and Mesmerised | Rarities & Remixes 85-94, two very special releases from Toyah for Record Store Day 2021. In-stores ONLY as part of RSD Drop 1 on Saturday 12th June.

• Visit recordstoreday.co.uk to find a participating store near you.

Great news, the reissued The Blue Meaning has entered the Official Rock & Metal Album Chart at number 1. The album also entered the Official Charts Top 100 Albums chart at number 59.

50 Wild Women Of The 80s!: NOW 80s: Monday 7th June: 10pm
Brilliant songs, big voices, blazing hair & bags of attitude – the ladies of the 80s had the lot! From Toyah to Tina & Joan Jett to Janet Jackson.

“I was very reliable” Toyah tells SDE

Toyah Willcox, the new queen of ‘Sunday Lunch’ lockdown videos talks to SDE about the reissue of Toyah’s 1980s album The Blue Meaning. This is the second major release in Cherry Red’s reissue campaign, since the label acquired Safari Records in early 2020.

SDE: You’ve been keeping busy during lockdown – I’ve seen the videos – but you must have missed playing live, since you used to do it so much?

Toyah Willcox: Yes, that’s true, but I managed to build a pretty phenomenal… brand name in lockdown. So we’re going to continue with it. It’s been a phenomenon we never expected, and it’s still growing. In a couple of years we’ll have our own TV channel, doing our own TV broadcasts. What seems to have struck home is the very basic truth and simplicity of what we do. We’re not in hi-tech studios or anything like that, but we’ll actually be broadening the whole of that.

• Continue reading at Super Deluxe Edition. Browse Dreamscape’s SDE news archive.

The fantastic deluxe, and remastered, reissue of The Blue Meaning has this week been charting on iTunes, Amazon and, most significantly, on The Official Charts’ Album Midweeks – at an amazing No. 22!!

Stream The Blue Meaning on Spotify to see a new animation for each of the album tracks and hear 27 bonus tracks. Or order the stunning pink vinyl or 2CD+DVD.

• Browse Dreamscape’s Toyah on the Official Charts news archive here.

Buy the gorgeous pink vinyl edition of The Blue Meaning. It is sold out at Cherry Red but is still available, in all of it’s pink glory, at Amazon UK.

The Evelyn Glennie Podcast, on which Toyah recently guested, is now available at The Toyah Willcox Interview Archive as a text interview.

A great interview with Toyah, a great podcast, and now a great transcript.

• Read it here. Listen to The Evelyn Glennie Podcast here.

Celebrity Money For Nothing: Really: Tuesday 15th June: 1pm
Series 1, Episode 1. Sarah Moore and Jay Blades search the homes of celebrities to uncover unloved and unused gems for charity. Sarah and Jay look through the homes of 1980s pop stars Sinitta and Toyah Willcox in the hope of uncovering four pieces of junk to transform and sell on for a profit. Woodworking wizard Norman Wilkinson is tasked with taking on Toyah’s tired chairs, while robot-mad Mark Haig gives Sinitta’s broken fan a steampunk-inspired makeover. But will Sarah and Jay find new homes for their revamped items? (Photo © BBC)

Toyah’s Sack The Stylist?! Top 30: NOW 80s: Thursday 3rd June: 0.00am
Pop legend Toyah brings 30 memorable videos featuring a cavalcade of clothing calamities from superstars including Bowie, Madonna, Adam Ant and many more in this crazy countdown!

Press coverage for this week’s Sunday Lunch with Toyah and Robert (and Sidney Jake)!! (Image © Toyah Willcox)

• Rolling Stone: Watch Toyah and Robert Fripp Cover Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ – Continue reading…

• NME: Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox share cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ – Continue reading…

• Louder: Toyah and Robert Fripp cover Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and there are feathers everywhere – Continue reading…

• Metal Sucks: King Crimson’s Robert Fripp & Toyah Willcox Cover Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” – Continue reading…

• Metal Injection: King Crimson’s Robert Fripp & Toyah Willcox Cover Black Sabbath Classic “Paranoid” – Continue reading…

• Brooklyn Vegan: Watch Toyah & Robert Fripp cover Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” – Continue reading…

• DGM Live: Toyah & Robert’s Weekend!: Toyah At Home, Agony Aunts, Sunday Lunch with Sidney Jake – Continue reading…

• Sidney Jake: Right after Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch this week – Click the link for an “alternative” view of this week’s episode – Continue watching…

Quadrophenia Reunited – 40 Years On: Sky Arts: Friday 11th June: August: 2am
Lauren Laverne hosts a one-off special bringing the stars of Quadrophenia together. Featuring reminiscing, interviews, a table-read of the script and plenty of surprises. (Photo © Sky Arts)

Quadrophenia – Our Generation: Sky Arts: Friday 11th June: 1am
Celebrity fans and cast members come together to shed light on the making of Quadrophenia and explore the legacy that the cult film has left behind, 40 years after its release. (Photo © Sky Arts)

Season 2, episode 21 of Toyah At Home aired on Saturday. Watch/Rewatch by clicking below.

A full transcript of Toyah’s recent interview on BBC Radio Kent’s Dominic King Show can now be read online at The Toyah Willcox Interview Archive.

• Read it here. Listen to the interview at BBC Sounds.

Toyah – The Blue Meaning (Expanded Deluxe Edition): Album Review

Dark, intense and disturbingly graphic – an early masterpiece by Toyah revisited

Release Date: 28th May 2021
Label: Cherry Red Records
Formats: 2CD + 1DVD, Limited Edition Coloured Vinyl

Cherry Red Records have done it yet again! This week’s lucky recipient of their deluxe reissue treatment is Toyah and the band’s second album, 1980’s The Blue Meaning. In fact, Cherry Red are working their way through Toyah’s Safari Records catalogue – the band’s debut album, Sheep Farming In Barnet, has already received the deluxe repackaging and the rest of the bunch, Anthem (1981) The Changeling (1982) and Love Is The Law (1983) will be along soon – a veritable treasure trove from the happiest, most productive and most creative period of Toyah’s career. Oh – and for clarity – at this stage in the career of Toyah Willcox, Toyah was the collective name for the band in which she featured – Joel Bogen on guitar, Charlie Francis on bass, Steve Bray on drums, Peter Bush on keyboards and Toyah herself on vocals (or verbals and unusual sounds, as the album’s excellent sleeve notes put it.)

• Continue reading at At The Barrier.

The Rolling Stones, Kate Bush, The Cure: Great albums’ cover stories revealed

From hiding film in Toyah’s knickers to combining Mondrian and The Rolling Stones, designer Bill Smith tells the cover stories of great albums.

The Rolling Stones, The Jam, Kate Bush, The Cure, Led Zeppelin – they’re not only among the most important musical artists of our time, they’re also some of the most visually striking. Bill Smith has designed album covers for all of them.

Bill Smith and his studio have been designing album covers since 1976. Across five decades they’ve worked with more than 200 bands and artists. They were even there at the start of the Now That’s What I Call Music juggernaut, designing the very first cover of the world-beating compilation album series.

Now Bill’s work has been collected into a suitably glossy, album-sized, 12-inch book, which also features the stories behind some of his classic album covers. He gave us a glimpse into the creative process behind some of his most famous works…

• Continue reading at bigissue.com.

Toyah guests this evening on The Dominic King Show which airs from 6pm on BBC Radio Kent. Toyah is on after 8pm.

The Dominic King Show: Chris Addison + TOYAH
Evenings on BBC Radio Kent. Featuring great music and conversation.

• Listen online at BBC Sounds for the next four weeks.

Toyah – The Blue Meaning
Expanded Edition (Cherry Red)

With the context of the passing of time, this is all brilliantly boundary-pushing music, and The Blue Meaning is an album which could astound the unprepared. Pure gold

The Cherry Red Toyah reissue programme continues with the second album, 1980’s The Blue Meaning, following on from the excellent reissue of the Sheep Farming In Barnet debut. As with its predecessor, The Blue Meaning is a very different proposition to the impression casual listeners tend to have of the pop-punk singer with the wild hair taking It’s A Mystery and I Want To Be Free to the upper reaches of the singles charts. In truth, that image was always a false one when the albums were listened to in their entirety, but even more in the case of these earliest records. In fact, the next studio album following this would be Anthem, the first big hit album which contained those two singles, but you would never guess that from the music contained here, which is dark, edgy and often brilliantly experimental. The Sheep Farming In Barnet album had contained a great mix of post-punk attitude with a sort of ‘difficult prog’ edge to it, but on this follow-up things got even more serious and uncompromising, both in terms of lyrical matter and musical content, and this three-disc reissue rounds it up with some tremendous extra material from the time to produce a definitive edition if ever there was one.

• Continue reading at Velvet Thunder.