Hello there,
Thank you EVERYONE for the amazing support for Chameleon. It has been a very special and exciting time.
The world I inhabit is surrounded by my work 24/7, no surprises there, when I walk on stage I am used to people knowing my work or being familiar with who I am. In the last two months I’ve experienced people discovering me for the first, in radio stations especially and they come to me with wide eyes saying “we love you and what you do”, I have won new fans, reminded older fans of great memories and loved sharing my music with them all.
The rest of 2025 is going to be great too. Every month from now to Christmas is so exciting, the tour dates with Adam Ant followed by Big Country.
CHAMELEON feels very much like a completion on my history and 2026 already feels like a new chapter about to start. I’m really excited to be writing new material and getting new stuff ready for next year.
Chameleon is so respectful of my 45 years in music and that means so much to me.
What I love about this epic release is virtually every song on it has been a single or an exceptionally important song to me. Because of that, I thought I would give a brief explanation of what each song means to me on this remarkable double album.
I Want To Be Free
Over the years this song has been misunderstood.
It’s not a juvenile song and it’s certainly not a novelty song. This is a song about individual identity, the right of every single person to be who and what they feel without oppression or criticism from others, others who don’t understand what they are looking at or dealing with. Increasingly in the modern world we all have to fit into the same mould. Yet we are all born complete different but forced to be the same.
I Want To Be Free is literally a freedom call from the soul saying I will be what I am and what I feel. I am meant to be.
It’s A Mystery
I put my hand up and admit that when I was first asked to record this I had doubts about its vulnerability. It’s femininity.
One of the most rewarding things I have ever experienced is playing this to students in Sheffield around March 1981, we’d already done an hour and a half show were on our fifth encore and I said to the audience “this is my next single. I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”
We played it and the room went wild, and I have never looked back since. My fans love this song and over the decades I loved it more and more and respect wholeheartedly what my audience feels when they hear it. It thrills me that I am on people’s Bucket Lists as “I must hear Toyah Willcox sing It’s A Mystery live!”.
Thunder In The Mountains
An amazing backing track was sent to me from Adrian Lee and Nigel Glocker, two of my most favourite people, they were such allies to me in the 1981 era. I adored them, I adored their company. They were funny, witty and they saw me. On first listen I immediately loved this track and sat down and started to write the lyrics and top line melody. It was the day of Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s wedding. Did I know that I would come to know Princess Diana before the end of the decade? No.
This is a song about the collective need of everyone to voice their opinions against things they don’t agree with, at the time this was written they were riots in most major cities. There was generally discontent everywhere and I think my punk soul identified with that more than anything.
Brave New World
This song started its life in my hotel room in Bristol, having just played a gig in May 1981.
Initially it was about isolation, why couldn’t I just sit in the bar with everyone else without problems starting, what I mean is being really famous, if you sit in a public area it attracts so much attention, not everybody liked this happening, and fights would break out amongst the men. A year later I came back to the idea having heard a great guitar section written by Joel which helped me understand what BNW is really about. I started to understand what this song should be and it’s about the challenges of missing soulmates.
Good Morning Universe
This is about the sheer joy of being alive and acknowledging the fact that we are all miracles simply by being here. We are literally living on a rock in the middle of nowhere and yet I believe everything is connected in a very profound way. I was brought up to believe that only human beings had super intelligence and only human beings lived and existed in this universe. Now I just don’t believe that. I believe we’re part of everything and there’s far more out there and this gift of life is helping us experience the “here and now”, but there’s so much more.
Rebel Run
This is about a woman, whether a mother/daughter/girlfriend or simply a wise woman addressing a masculine rebel on another planet. Most of my writing back then was very much about other planets and “otherness”. I think part of this is to do with how I felt that I never fitted in anywhere And it’s about putting down your gun, letting go of your pride, so your life is saved.
Be Proud Be Loud (Be Heard)
Rather like I Want To Be Free this song is about strength of identity and being confident in knowing that you have a place in this world, even if your parents disagree with what you are or what you do, it’s a song that says feel no shame, love conquers all. Also use your inner light and shine.
We Are
It was really important to me while we were recording Anthem to say thank you to the fans.
I’d been touring for five years, building a huge fan following that where so loyal, they would follow me all over the country. Someone would even hire buses with other fans. Most shows we’d let them in through the exits because they couldn’t afford Tickets every night and I wanted to say thank you for sticking by me, for seeing me and giving me so much support. That is what We Are is about.
Jungles Of Jupiter
Quite simply this is about my love for science-fiction. It is about an ancient civilisation on another planet. I think today people are admitting that the moons around Jupiter could have some forms of life and I think people are admitting that Mars once had life on it, so Jungles of Jupiter is a wink and a nod to the fact that Jupiter could’ve been something other than a dead planet a long time ago.
Dawn Chorus
This is a celebration of the ritual of dressing up and going out…..finding a mate. The beauty of putting on make-up no matter what gender you are, what orientation you are, about going out and having the time of your life, feeling beautiful, feeling your best, feeling energised and excited about everything.
Angel & Me
This is a really dark song; and I know, you the fans love it so much. It’s exhausting to perform live because once it gets going there’s no room to take a breath. I wanted to write something that was incredibly visual. I think part of my dyslexia is that I think in images and I respond to images more than I do to printed words, even though I love phrases that are completely odd.
Bowie was fantastic at giving words new meanings but for me everything is visual. Angel & Me is a visual song about someone who has a supernatural friend. Also, I think it reflects how I always battled my mother‘s very negative view on life.
The Vow
This is a love song and a vow of solidarity to others, that Humans are made to bring love into the world creating sacred bonds. It’s a song about the love between friends, siblings, every type of love. Why do we still have wars, especially when they seem to be for economic reasons. Is it part of Human nature or something we are cajoled into?
I Explode
I Explode is one of my favourite songs. To sing it live is exhilarating, it possesses me. It is literally about that explosion of energy when you can’t contain your frustrations any longer, when emotions get the better of you and you need to explode, when the need to express yourself takes control. It’s about the contradictory nature of being a human!
Obsolete
I love this song; it is a nod and a wink to the punk movement and the bonds we all had as punks. I believe we were a very unique generation, with unique attitudes and I’m so immensely proud to be part of the movement.
Bird In Flight
Bird in Flight is quite a strange song stylistically but incredibly popular with my fans. I wanted to write something about expression when you felt “locked in”, part of my dyslexia when I was younger was about experienced being locked in within my head. Everything was vibrant in my imagination, but I couldn’t explain it to others or get it out into the world, yet there are these remarkable moments of clarity, and the song is about someone who experiences that moment of clarity and it frees them.
Neon Womb
This is one of my all-time favourites. I love performing it today as much as I did 45 years ago. In 2022 I opened Billy Idol’s tour, and we had a new arrangement of this song, it was so exhilarating and connected with the audience brilliantly.
It’s incredibly gender specific for the time, womb was not a word women were encouraged to use, in fact it was discouraged as vulgar! I’ve never really enjoyed being female. I’ve never understood why I have to be a gender, preferring to be free of any title other than my first name. Again, it reflects upon my very difficult relationship with my mother who was always trying to make me feminine, the song rebels against that.
IEYA
IEYA is an epic song and really satisfying to perform. It’s about a battle between flesh and spirit. It’s about the dual nature of good and evil in all of us. The Ego. It’s about past, present and future coming together in a confrontational way. It’s exhilarating.
Race Through Space
Joel Bogen came up with this wonderful riff and I just had to find my way into the riff as a singer and a storyteller. I wanted to write about deserts and travelling through sandstorms. Struggling for immortality, preserving one’s own life. As you might have guessed with the early punky stuff I was obsessed with life and death.
Danced
This is a song as celebration, deliberately written to play live, to celebrate the fans and to turn the room into a mosh pit of sweaty, happy people. All having a fantastic time.
The lyric represents so much to the fans, they sing in unison with me when we play it live. It’s about building relationships when you feel miles apart because of a lack of confidence.
Victims Of The Riddle
The studio version of this was recorded at the Marquee Studios at about 1am on a Saturday night. Outside the West End was rocking. It was an improvised vocal that lasted 20 minutes. Steve James and Keith Hale cut and pasted it into a song format and Keith added the keyboard line. It’s like a punk jazz improvisation. It’s very, very dark. I am anti-vivisection on animals, and I wanted a lyric that said what if we treated people like this, would we let it happen?
I hope you enjoyed reading this, next month I will cover Part 2 of Chameleon.
Thank you for being there for me and thank you for loving the music.
BE PROUD, BE LOUD, BE HEARD
LOVE TOYAH
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