Hello There!I hope you’re ready for a really fantastic autumn.
I am days away from starting the Adam Ant Tour and I am really looking forward to it, it’s a full circle experience as it is 48 years since making the film Jubilee.
My own shows at the Union Chapel in Islington as well as the Warwick art Centre are other events I am really looking forward to.
We have band rehearsals next week, we’re all really excited to be adding to the Toyah repertoire for these particular shows
It’s a wonderfully busy three months ahead. I’m talking at a teachers conference about dyslexia; I have meetings in Blackpool about a project I’m involved with that will be announced next September and I’m talking to a group of women, some farmers, which I’m really looking forward to. When I had the virtual briefing meeting I could hear calves and cows mooing in the background and I thought this is going to be great fun.
Also I am filming for Alan Titchmarsh; giving a one woman show in Wareham; And there’s some surprises for a certain audience in Birmingham in two weeks time.
I am really excited to tell you that on the 1st of November we have a fantastic announcement. It’s a project that I’ve been focusing on the past three months, it is beautiful, it is so representatitive of me and above all it’s inspiring.
The response last month to my blog giving my feedback to the songs that feature on the CD version of Chameleon really lifted my heart. To know that my feelings about the songs mean so much to you means a lot to me. Chameleon had wonderful chart placings, the album received a lot of respect and was welcomed with so much joy and love. I am hugely grateful.
Following on from last month’s web letter I promised you I would do my personal insights into ‘Side Two’ of the Chameleon CD, so here goes…
DANCE IN THE HURRICANE
For the past 20 years, I’ve tried to keep my writing true to myself but also true to my age.
We all go through these extraordinary periods of loss in our lives. Between 2009 and 2011 I not only lost my parents. I lost my greatest friend Veronica too. Then in 2018 and 2020 I lost two more incredible friends Bill Rieflin and his wife Frankie.
Dance In The Hurricane means so much to me because I feel that grief makes us greater people and a greater community.
It would be amazing to live our lives without grief, but it drives us beyond anything we have ever known up until that point
And grief for me is the void you learn to live with, you learn to dance in the hurricane.
DON’T FALL IN LOVE
My co writer Simon Darlow and I have been working as a team since he was 17 and I was 18.
I remember arriving at Simon Darlow’s home studio in Twickenham to start writing this song around 1983-84. We were both incredibly excited.
My approach was I wanted to write a song about someone who was irresistible telling the world not to fall in love with them.
A femme fatale. Both Simon and I really enjoyed the storytelling in creating this demo and then I went on to the studio to record it with Chris Neil, who produced the Minx album. Chris Niel, who also later worked with Céline Dion and Cher, absolutely loved this song and that meant everything to me.
SOUL PASSING THROUGH SOUL
This is a single released off Minx.
Chris Neil introduced me to the Co-Writer Michael Saint James.
Michael is an actor as well as a writer, we had a lot in common. We wrote this before I’d even met my husband to be Robert Fripp There are similarities in this song to Bowies Heroes. It mirrors the riff. If only I knew at that time that I would be marrying Robert Fripp within a couple of years!
This song has a beautiful rhythmic groove. It’s so reflective of 1984 when we recorded it. At this time I was signed to Portrait Records through CBS and working with the legendary Maurice Obistein who ran the label. It was a chance for me to appear to the world as a more mature artist. This was reflected in the whole of Minx. I started to train my voice with a legendary teacher, Helena Shenel, who coached Shirley Bassey. My Stylist for the Minx shoots worked with me with the blessing of the legendary designer Issey Miyake, who loaned me all the structural outfits for the artwork. We also worked with the incredible and magnificent photographer Terence Donovan.
ECHO BEACH
This was recorded during the making of Desire. Produced by Mike hedges and Haydn Bendall.
We recorded at AbbeyRoad Studios which was incredible, we were in the actual studio the Beatles used and in the corner were the four 2 track recorders that the Beatles recorded on for all of their legendary music.
The album was shaping up to how I wanted it to be but unfortunately my management took on an A&R man who was really the most hopeless human being I have ever had to put up with and he desperately wanted to have his input in this album and insisted I record the song Love’s Unkind which for me, one of the most disastrous decisions I had to live with in the whole of my career.
Haydn Bendall, who is Kate Bush’s engineer, as well as engineering Desire was so kind and so supportive that he went away and he recorded his own version of Echo Beach, brought it into the studio and asked me to record it because he was convinced it was a better choice than Love’s Unkind. I am so grateful to him for this.
He restored my dignity and my fans love this song. Admittedly there are some fans who prefer me not doing cover versions but perhaps if I say that this song saved the entire album, they might appreciate the pressure I was under.
SENSATIONAL
Simon Darlow and I went back into really focused, concentrated writing from 2007 onwards. The first song we wrote together in this period was Latex Messiah, and the second was Sensational. Simon and I have a knack of coming up with songs within two minutes. We are very in tune with each other.
Simon can play any style of guitar. He is a phenomenal pop writer. Sensational was originally composed because we wanted to submit it to the Paralympics as an anthem in support of the uniqueness and the brilliance of every human being on this planet, it didn’t get selected.
Luckily for us it did get selected to be the song of Weight Watchers in around 2013, which alone paid for us to record our next album. Our audience love Sensational and I still love performing it. For me, it is up there alongside It’s A Mystery in the importance of its chemistry.
ROSES IN CHAINS
2024 was a really busy year for myself and Robert, we were touring and we wanted a new song out. I initiate a lot of the ideas whether it’s writing songs or creating new social media ideas. I always set the ball rolling. At the beginning of May in 2024, I sent a demo called I Love You To Death over to Simon Darlow. These tend to be very basic ideas that I build on GarageBand. Simon is so in sync with me that he then takes these ideas into the studio and develops and arranges them. Literally within two days I was in his studio recording the version that became the single. It is a mature powerful ballad to the fluidity of the emotions of love.
SPACE DANCE
For me, this is the most perfect pop song in the world.
It puts a smile on everybody’s face, and the band love performing it. Written in lockdown for Posh Pop, it is a comment on the isolation caused by social media, A.I. and the modern world. A story of someone lost in space searching for someone to love face-to-face. It is also a comment on the fact that Tesla launched a car into outer space and the pure irresponsibility of doing something like that. Even though this song does have serious hidden meaning it is a joyous pop song.
INVISIBLE LOVE
This song came into the world when Joel Bogen sent me a backing track that consisted of an intro, verse and chorus and I really liked the tune. It had huge emotional depth.
On the day I approached writing a lyric to this song Sir Laurence Olivier’s passing was announced. I was immensely sad. I worked with Laurence Olivier on a TV movie called The Ebony Tower, and he became a bit of a father figure to me. We had a wonderful friendship. I was his companion when he ate his evening meal. I was his companion at lunch in between filming scenes. It was such an honour to get a chance to work with him.
He to me was very much a Chameleon. While shooting the movie he was missing his family intensely. His son would come over and visit him where we were filming in France. I believe Olivier’s wife, Joan Plowright, was away working on a play and he missed her so much.
My conversations with him led me into a world of legends, the insight he gave me still resonate powerfully today.
Invisible Love is about loss. It’s about loving someone platonically even though they’re no longer there because I truly believe Love is a tangible force that resonates throughout the existence of everything.
VELVET LINED SHELL
I loved writing with Tim Elsenburg – what a phenomenal talent. We came together to write an EP. It was a joy to work with him and his band.
At the time I believe I was about 50 years old and very much experiencing what a woman goes through at that age, moving into menopause, there’s a kind of last drive to be productive physically and even though I never had children, every woman goes through this and I think this is reflected in Velvet Lined Shell and Little Tears Of Love. There is a ferocious sexuality to do with survival that happens just before we become menopausal. This is a phenomenal song to perform it’s powerful. It’s strident, it’s fierce.
SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM
Around 1984, Simon Darlow and I, started to work on a song that later became Slave To The Rhythm. For decades now, we’ve been looking for that original demo, but it’s not been found. Simon Darlow came up with the title and the imagery to the song. At this time I was very much the singer that just portrayed his idea.
The rest is history. Grace Jones’s iconic version was and is a massive hit around the world. Very kindly Trevor Horn who produced Grace Jones’s version supported Simon and I doing my version in memory of the origin of the song. In turn this led to me working with Trevor Horn when he invited me to sing Relax on his latest album project in 2023.
LATEX MESSIAH
I am very proud that this is one of ROBERT’s favourite all-time songs. He loves it.
When Simon and I wrote Latex Messiah, it happened incredibly quickly. The guitar riff was right. The vocal storyline was right. It was perfect for my voice, the attitude of it, the imagery of it is so Toyah. It’s about ego it’s about sexuality. It’s also about fallibility.
LEVITATE
During lockdown, Simon Darlow and I were determined to remain creative. So we started to write and record Posh Pop. During this time, I was able to take up keyboard lessons and guitar lesson lessons because the world had stopped!
My dyslexia has a particular characteristic and that is I can learn something and have it in my memory and in my body while I’m writing but then that ability disappears within a matter of days. Because of this, I constantly have to repeat processes such as finger exercises, memory exercises, also exercises as simple as running the ABC, which I have never been able to hold in my memory for more than a couple of days.
One morning I woke with such mental clarity that I picked up the guitar and film myself playing and singing a song called Cellophane Heart.
I sent that to Simon and when I saw him in the studio later that day Cellophane Heart had started to morph into the beginnings of Levitate, based on a saint called Saint Joseph of Cupertino. Hundreds of Pilgrims would travel to see Saint Joseph preach and sing in the church in Italy in the early 1600s, there are at least 340 official reports of him levitating while praying.
Many of us will remember the levitation games we played at school where we lifted friends just using our fingertip. The idea of this song Levitate, is that we raised above the fear of Covid and experience the joy of that freedom. I love recording this song. Sometimes when you record a song, you just simply enjoy the musicality of it and this was one of those songs.
LITTLE TEARS OF LOVE
I love this song. I love that it’s brave. I love its bare faced approach. I love its fierce sexuality and it is a fantastic song to sing live.
It empowers me and I wrote it with Tim Elsenburg at a time when women were still not allowed to be sexually progressive, luckily I think that’s changed now.
DESIRE
When I was writing Desire, I wanted to write about the feeling of being on water.
It’s both a sensual feeling and an overwhelming awareness of the power of what’s holding you up. I was newly married and very much in love and very possessive of my husband Robert Fripp. I wanted Desire to be something that was unique to us in our new relationship together. Also this is a song about imagery. My lyrics have always had strong images and this is very representative of that.
REVIVE THE WORLD
When I first met Robert, I moved to Washington DC to live with him for three months at a school. During this time, not only did I end up teaching drama to the children of the school but I also started to work on Guitar with Robert’s students The League of Crafty Guitarists. There was a riff created by the Crafty Guitarists that I felt would make a fantastic song so I started to put a top line melody to it.
Revive The World is a song about our ecology, our responsibility, our love for nature. It’s about the sun rising and the power of the Sun’s light. When we recorded this at Abbey Road, the Crafty Guitarists sat in a semicircle while I sang. It was a fantastic experience.
BRILLIANT DAY
This song came about when ROBERT and I had a band called Sunday All Over The World. It was originally performed with SAOTW live and recorded with the SAOTW line-up for the SAOTW album, but it actually became part of Ophelia’s shadow, my solo album I made at the same period.
It is one of those songs that I wrote incredibly quickly. It’s about a day out I had while performing at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, playing Hernia in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Myself and my fellow actors drove off into the country for the day and ended up at Charingworth Manor where we had tea and then we went back to Birmingham to perform that evening. The freedom of just driving out into the country while you’re in the middle of a theatrical run was exhilarating. We were all in one car and we were laughing so much, there was so much joy, I wrote about that brilliant day.
WORST IN ME
I am incredibly proud of this song. The form and the meaning are powerful. It was written out of frustration of my life with my husband at the beginning of our marriage. The moment I became a wife I became invisible within the world I was used to.
We both had the same management.
We both had the same banks.
We both had the same lawyers.
And suddenly I went from being a really powerful female artist to being a submissive wife.
The song Worst In Me was written in my apartment in Chelsea, at a time when I really needed to express how frustrating this situation was. That literally, a very private act of marrying someone, felt like it was destroying everything I wanted in life. For the first two years of our marriage, I fought to keep other people’s influences out of our private relationship. I am so glad that I fought like a warrior because I’ve now been married to my husband for 40 years and woe betide anyone who trespasses on that!
IMPROBABLE THING
This is off The Humans’ third album Strange Tales. One of the most enjoyable recording processes I can remember. Chris Wong, myself, Don Gunn and Bill Rieflin were in Pearl Jam’s studio in Seattle. We were made so welcome. Death Cab For Cutie loaned us their PA. We had all of Pearl Jam’s incredible equipment to use.
The writing process was amazing. Bill already had his prognosis of terminal cancer by this time. He was learning to adjust after having had incredibly invasive surgery to remove part of his intestine.
This was a passion project. Bill was determined to “live to live” not to “live to die”. Every moment in that studio was magical. Bill fought with his fatigue and gave us so much.
This album is incredibly special to me, it is sonically beautiful. Bill and I often shared the microphone. He would be doing harmonies to my main vocal. Every song on this album means so much to me.
Bill, throughout too short a creative relationship, was a source of deep inspiration and this is where Improbable Thing came from.
TAKE ME HOME
This was the last song written for the album Posh Pop. Both Simon Darlow and myself spend a lot of time talking about the condition of mankind. And the condition of this planet. We both feel so connected to a greater power other than the flesh. Take Me Home is about the literal importance of knowing that your soul belongs somewhere geographically.
All my life, I have known where I live now, it is where my soul belongs. To imagine that some people have to leave their beloved homes breaks my heart. Take Me Home is literally about being able to return home.
In 2021 when we started performing this live, the understanding, the passion for this song from the audience would overwhelm me.
FASHION
If I knew in 1984 that one day I would be on stage in front of tens of thousands of people performing this with Robert playing guitar behind me, I would’ve been overjoyed.
This magnificent live performance of David Bowie’s Fashion which ROBERT played on originally is stunning. Very rarely does the world of Toyah meet the world of Robert as equals. On this occasion, it merges beautifully. This is a truly great version of Fashion.
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Thank you to EVERYONE for your support and love of Chameleon.
It has been a very special album. On the 1st Nov there is another special announcement. We are all very excited about it.
I will hopefully see you at the shows this month and remember….
BE PROUD, BE LOUD, BE HEARD
LOVE TOYAH
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