HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!
I wish you all a fantastic year ahead, may all your wishes come true.
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE ONE OF YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND LOVE OF THE RE-RELEASES LAST YEAR.
I BELIEVE IN FATHER CHRISTMAS entered the vinyl charts at No.9 and was with some fabulous company in the top 10.
I am very grateful and there are some gorgeous releases being announced for 2025.
Fripp and I had a wonderful Christmas. The December shows were the best ever. Our brand has found its audience. It’s very clear that people who see us want to experience fun and great music. The applause on the last tour was AMAZING.
It went so well Robert said he may be retiring from touring but he would play again for the right event. Let’s see what comes our way.
For 2025 I am back to being TOYAH and playing TOYAH MUSIC.
Also I am back to making movies, just before Christmas I was offered the lead role in an intriguing and intelligent horror film and I am really excited. Fingers crossed for it to be greenlit.
I kind of worked over Christmas, I did have two days off then I got twitchy!
At my new residence there is a dedicated library room and I moved my entire book collection into The Old Mill over Christmas…….. and re-discovered myself. Who could guess that books collected over a lifetime could hold the key to who and what you are today.
Looking at the titles from the rulers of Science Fiction to the dark lords of Horror through to brilliant feminist authors and into the great artists in modern history I am connected to my younger self.
These books also bring back the memories of what the world was at the time. The desires to be creative and to understand the workings of the subconscious in a hope to connect with the outer world…………how times have changed! Those connections are now not only immediate but also close to ephemeral……I sincerely hope young radicals read William Boroughs today.
In the past I have read quite a lot. 
To hold my original copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar thrills me and caries the electricity of powerful emotional memories of the time. I read this amazing book while living in a bed sit in Hornsey Rise, London with the cold wind coming in through the broken window. Transfixed by the power of Plath’s words.
Even Ted Hughes’ collected poems evoke the tragic drama of their lives and struggles with a world where trains, cars and old-fashioned telephones were all they had to reach other in comparison to the tech of today.
My books remind me of my true self. Every book tells a story of desire to be something other.
There’s entire shelves of 60s and 70s science fiction, books where the covers are as inspiring as the confusion of ideas inside the pages. At least three shelves are for Stephen King and Clive Barker. Weaveworld is a beaten up copy I read when living at Reddish House in Salisbury. There was a point when Clive Barker was interested in doing a horror version of Peter Pan and he took a call from me when he was being chauffered from Pebble Mill to London, a kind open-minded person is how I remember that call.
Personal book collections are so revealing and I am happy for any film crew or journalist to look through my lifetime collection and to get to know me through it. The collection has made me fall in love with the slightly dark room that contains it, the mill stream runs underneath and there is a constant rumble which I now hardly notice.
Virginia Woolf wrote A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN at a time when women had very little autonomy in their lives, insisting if a woman was to write a novel then she needs her own space to write and think. Virginia had a haunting connection to water and as I look out at the flowing mill streams I think about her often, possibly because my generation were born to parents who where so greatly influenced by the Bloomsbury set, of which Virginia was a leader and a founder of the Hogath Press which published many artist’s work.
Artists who have greatly influenced me and given me a determination that life is intertwined with art. Art not necessarily being commercial but a way of life, of expressing life and connections. In 1993 I played the Bloomsbury artist DORA CARRINGTON at the Minerva Theatre, part of Chichester Theatre. Dora lived at Tidmarsh Mill House between 1917 to 1924.
She looked out on the mill pond at Tidmarsh observing the black swans. I fell in love with her life, her art techniques, her outrageous behaviour…..she was prone to climbing statues naked. It hasn’t escaped me that when I act, and it’s the same when I sing, I become possessed by my characters and here I am now, living in a Mill House and feeling so connected to her art and writing.
For my last TOYAH AT HOME there is a fabulous compilation film for NEON WOMB from SHEEP FARMING IN BARNET (edited by David Anning) from footage from the very early 1980s. In this film I am leaving my warehouse MAYHEM, walking down QUEENSTOWN ROAD in Battersea and onto a tube train.
I REALLY LOVE THE PERSON I SAW, the Toyah of 1980 has inspired the Toyah of 2025…..who would have thought?
HAVE A WONDERFUL BEGINNING TO 2025 AND SEE YOU OUT THERE.
BE LOUD, BE PROUD, BE HEARD
BIG LOVE TOYAH
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