how did Toyah ever get BIG?

[`]

Mr and Mrs Fripp on, uh, Celebrity Mr and Mrs




Now, Toyah, when Robert is spending hour after hour skirting the edges of tonality by practicing his distinctive swooping fuzz tone solos, do you:


Put your hands over your ears?

Turn up Mrs. Dale's Diary on the wireless?

Nip down the nearest sheep farmer's market?

[fange]

Yes, she is married to Fripp.

She chose her time well. The late 70s / early 80s were an odd time for the UK pop business. Record labels had largely been confused by punk and flummoxed by new wave and as a result signed a load of good, bad and indifferent acts in the hope that some mud would stick. This was an era in which the biggest teen idol was the frankly odd Adam Ant, where Kevin Rowland and Julian Cope appeared on the covers of teen pop mags, and where even a band as leftfield as the Associates had chart hits. Somehow, despite her awful music, Toyah arrived in the slipsteam of this strange time.

Yep, MM has saved me typing this myself. They were heady, confusing times.

[Quaco]

Also ...




To be fair, she was a lot better- and cooler-looking than Adam Ant, even if she was sort of the equivalent. Looks count for a lot. She looked amazing plastered all over my friend's wall. I really thought I was missing something.

[Geezee]

(and if you don't want to talk about her, then mention somebody else who had a year or two of major-league success and then fucked off, to everybody's satisfaction)

The one that often comes to mind for me in this context is Dido. I mean what on earth brought her to the world stage? So bland and unremarkable, there are a million musicians like her.

[`]

She looked amazing plastered all over my friend's wall.

That was rather energetic of her.

[Jimbly]

(and if you don't want to talk about her, then mention somebody else who had a year or two of major-league success and then fucked off, to everybody's satisfaction)

The one that often comes to mind for me in this context is Dido. I mean what on earth brought her to the world stage? So bland and unremarkable, there are a million musicians like her.

Eminem using a sample of one of her songs in one of his biggest hits brought her the attention.

[Geezee]

(and if you don't want to talk about her, then mention somebody else who had a year or two of major-league success and then fucked off, to everybody's satisfaction)

The one that often comes to mind for me in this context is Dido. I mean what on earth brought her to the world stage? So bland and unremarkable, there are a million musicians like her.

Eminem using a sample of one of her songs in one of his biggest hits brought her the attention.

Well, before that her songs suddenly appeared in various hit movies, and that seems to be pure record company engineering - which of course is normal...but how they settled on her and her songs seems inexplicable to me, and I'm pretty sure this had little to do with her, or her talent.

[Robert]

She probably just ate a lot.

[never/ever]

Lene Lovich?

[The Slider]

To be fair, she was a lot better than Adam Ant

You didn't just say that did you?

Adam was fucking aces.
One of the great British pop stars
He looked amazing - had a very strong image - and his records stand up as classics, even now .

I like Toyah, but she was never any more than her look.
Her records are absolute drivel. Even the pre hits, which were a bit more angular:

[The Slider]

She's a sweetheart though

[Quaco]

To be fair, she was a lot better than Adam Ant

You didn't just say that did you?

Adam was fucking aces.
One of the great British pop stars
He looked amazing - had a very strong image - and his records stand up as classics, even now .

I like Toyah, but she was never any more than her look.
Her records are absolute drivel. Even the pre hits, which were a bit more angular:

You missed an all-important hyphen, John! Better-looking.

[sloopjohnc]

To be fair, she was a lot better than Adam Ant

You didn't just say that did you?

I was waiting for this one. . .

The Googa force is strong at BCB these days.

[Minnie the Minx]

I did actually go through some Toyah songs at the weekend to play on here, in a bid to illustrate how she wasn’t entirely terrible. Unfortunately everything I listened to did sound rather awful, even stuff like ‘Marionette’ and ‘Masai Boy’ that I thought was very deep at the time. I still love ‘It’s a Mystery’ and ‘ I Want to be Free’ and for the love of God, having this woman as a visible presence in my life at that time was very important to me or so it seemed. When I listen to her now, the lack of melody and the barefaced intentional weirdness grates a bit but actually reminds me of my own amateur song structures - writing about bollocks for the pleasure of it with no attention to the aesthetics.

Toyah did provide a memorable moment in my life - my best friend and I, both 11, dyed our hair with orange spray dye and donned t-shirts and our mother’s knee high boots and wobbled into Bradford like newborn gazelles to stand outside HMV. When I got home my mum looked at me as if I had come home with no arms. ‘don’t you think I look like Toyah?’ I said. She looked me up and down.
‘I think you look like a prostitute.’