Dreamscape – Toyah Willcox Fansite

How I Spend It: Toyah Willcox on rocks, hag stones and meteorites

The musician reveals what lies behind her lifelong fascination with crystals

I collect crystals, and I’m not talking about crystals you keep in your pocket. These are museum-quality collectors’ pieces. My fascination is that these are timeless things. They have been there since the Big Bang. All around the house we have crystals, along the skirting boards, in cupboards, in the cutlery drawers. My computer sits on a piece of rose quartz that is at least 10kg in weight. It’s the size of a Bible you’d see in a church.

Meteorites are full of potential. They’re what’s put us here

I remember clearly the first stone that meant something to me. I was about seven years old. I was on a sandbank on the River Avon and picked up a pebble with a hole in it. My father said it was a “hag stone”, one with a naturally formed hole in it. I could not put it down. I was instantly in love with it, the smoothness of it, the history of it, what it’s been through, what it’s survived, that it’s outlived all of us and will outlive all of us. I’ve had this particular hag stone since I was seven – I’m now 63, and it’s been a point of conversation with virtually everyone I’ve known. A lot of musicians feel the same way about stones; we collect pebbles and send them to each other.

• Continue reading at ft.com. (Thanks to Kelly and Michael)

“Jubilee, Royal Exchange, Manchester — a magnificently theatrical punk apocalypse“.

Financial Times (Subscription required to read online)

The spirit of punk — and ‘Jubilee’ — lives on

In director Derek Jarman’s cult punk film Jubilee (1978), three characters stand on a London rooftop considering some high-rise housing. “Never lived beneath the 14th floor till I was old enough to run away,” says Sphinx, a young man who lives in a squat, played by Welsh actor Karl Johnson. “Everything was regulated in that tower block . . . didn’t know I was dead until I was 15 . . . my generation’s the blank generation.”

• Continue reading at the Financial Times.