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”
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.
“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.
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.
