Toyah Willcox: ‘I had tea with Princess Margaret – she wanted to see what a punk rocker looked like’
The singer, actress and presenter talks royal encounters, Judi Dench playing pranks, and an £80,000 bank forgery
Best and worst is a regular interview in which a celebrity reflects on the highs and lows of their life
Born in Birmingham in 1958, Toyah Willcox’s breakthrough role was in Quadrophenia in 1979. From there, she juggled acting with a pop career, selling millions of records. She has continued to sing and act throughout her career with roles in Casualty and Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and she also narrated the children’s TV series Teletubbies. She lives in Dorset with her husband, the King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, with whom she presents the popular YouTube show Sunday Lunch…
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Toyah Willcox: the day I found out there was a killer in my family
At 63, the punk icon learned that her grandfather was a murderer. She opens up on how it answered so many questions about her childhood
For all of us, the first lockdown last year was difficult. But for Toyah Willcox, it was unfathomably challenging….
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‘It shouldn’t be a big deal – but it is’: what a female Doctor Who really means to women Whovians
More than eight million people tuned in Sunday night’s episode of Doctor Who – the show’s largest launch in a decade – to see Jodie Whittaker make her debut as the first female Doctor in the show’s decades-long history. But did she pull it off?
Among those glued to their sofas were the comedians Bridget Christie and Susan Calman, authors Juno Dawson and Jenny Colgan, and the pop star Toyah Willcox – a Who fan who was once mooted for the title role herself. The Telegraph asked each of them what the arrival of a female Doctor means to them, and what they thought of Sunday’s episode.
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Toyah was a guest at yesterday’s V&A Summer Party. The annual party took place last night at the famous museum itself in South West London. Here’s a couple of press reports featuring photos of Toyah. The Telegraph reported: Singer Toyah Willcox opted for a summer floral midi dress, which she paired with a cobalt clutch.
Nihilism, nudity, no future: Derek Jarman’s bleak Britain comes pungently to the stage – Jubilee, Royal Exchange, Manchester, review
How do you take a defining film from the punk era and reconceive it for the stage, 40 years on, when the V-flicking message of punk was “no future”?
Derek Jarman’s 1978 vision of Britannia sinking below the waves during the flag-waving year of the Silver Jubilee revelled in images of dystopian collapse: post-industrial wastelands, dismal interiors that no yet-to-be-conceived TV makeover programme could spruce up, random acts of senseless violence. It was Beckett’s Endgame meets A Clockwork Orange, with melancholy traces of Shakespeare – and it was designed to look like the end of the world was nigh.
Yet here we now are, and many of the gobbing youths of yesteryear turned out fine, some of them doing very nicely indeed thanks to the Thatcher revolution (Malcolm McLaren, “godfather” of punk, at least had the grace and courage to acknowledge that, recalling a “failed, miserable country” before her arrival).
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Cannes 2017: How to Talk to Girls at Parties, review: Nicole Kidman channels Toyah Willcox in this lifeless sci-fi flick
Derived from a Neil Gaiman short story, this must have felt like an opportunity for provoc-auteur and queer cinema hero John Cameron Mitchell to let his hair down, by resurrecting the anarchic spirit of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and then staging a Shortbus-lite sex romp with added polymorphous perversity. If this film’s an acquired taste, so is kidney sorbet, or a sponge cake seething with live eels. You get to see Nicole Kidman, in a white electroshock wig, grapple with the part of an angry punk matriarch and yell “shut your gaping gob” at one of her minions. A substitute for Toyah Willcox she’ll never be for the life of her, but the silliness of the casting sums the film up, for good and bad.
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Review: a blissfully self-indulgent chance to reminisce for pop-pickers of a certain vintage
Who got a lifetime ban from a Manchester hotel for swinging from a chandelier and stealing a zebra? Ginger diva Toyah Willcox. Who bought an Austin A40 convertible so she could poke her beehive hair out of the roof? Jazz chanteuse Mari Wilson. What did this pair have in common? They were both on Pop Quiz: The Comeback (BBC Four), a revival of the retro gameshow which pitted two teams of Eighties pop stars against each other for no apparent reason other than festive fun.
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Out of the primordial soup we clambered, dragging our knuckles through the evolutionary steps. Now here we stand: upright, hairless (well, mostly), and with enough rudimentary intelligence to master simple tasks and ask ourselves the age old question, ‘what does it mean to be a man?’
While we go around and around in circles, scratching our heads like chimps as we try to find a purpose for masculinity and avoid extinction, British comedy Aaaaaaaah! manages to lampoon the entire farce in just 79 minutes of scything, armpit-scratching brilliance.
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An interesting new interview with Robert Fripp was published in The Telegraph today. The article includes a couple of references to Toyah.
Robert Fripp, interview: ‘I’m a very difficult person to work with’
Guitarist Robert Fripp influenced David Bowie and Peter Gabriel but it’s only the latest revival of his band King Crimson that has brought out his happy side
… He’s explaining the finer details of this protracted wrangle when he suddenly catches sight of his other half, emerging from the driveway of their home. Toyah waves over, he waves back and even digs out his camera to take a picture.
“There’s my lovely wife, driving off in my car,” he muses, almost to himself. “I must’ve done something right to have Toyah as my wife. She’s a lot sharper than me, she has a very fine critical intelligence.”
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A new interview with Toyah, published today, by The Telegraph.
Toyah Willcox, the singer and actress, has fond memories of Estonia and the remotest regions of Belize, but hates to travel with Ryanair
Your earliest memory of travelling?
As a young child, my family holidays were always in Rock, Cornwall, with my parents, older brother Kim and sister Nicola. We hired a bungalow on the grounds of a hotel, but there were only two bedrooms. Mum and Dad stayed in one while Kim and Nicola shared the other. They used to put me to sleep in the living room by pushing two armchairs together. We lived in Birmingham at the time, so it took what seemed like 10 hours to get there, pootling along the single-track roads and country lanes.
• Continue reading at The Telegraph – Travel.
Toyah is mentioned in The Telegraph‘s review of the, recently published, Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks.
Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks, ed. Stephen Farthing and Ed Webb-Ingall, review
Tim Robey is absorbed by the creative mind of film-maker and artist Derek Jarman, as revealed through his extraordinary sketchbooks
The nicest touch is that each chapter gets a separate commentary, too, by someone involved in a working relationship with Jarman at that time. Toyah Willcox, who starred in Jubilee, talks about the excitement of being an 18-year-old virgin from an all-girls school when she first arrived at Jarman’s Edwardian flat to find naked men cavorting around.
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Pop Star Toyah Willcox: How I stood up to BBC gropers in the Eighties
Toyah Willcox, the pop star, says she stood up to the men sexually assaulting girls at the BBC in the Eighties.
As the list of women who claim to have been subjected to unwelcome male attention at the BBC seems to lengthen daily, Toyah Willcox insists that she at least made it clear that she was having none of it.
“You either had to stand up to it or play into it,” the feisty 54-year-old pop star informs me at Annabel’s nightclub, where Nicholas Coleridge was launching his novel The Adventuress. “I’m feisty, I always have been, even then. I was deemed quite old at 20, among men, and that probably saved my bacon, in a way. You knew, in any case, that there were certain men that you shouldn’t be alone with.”
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