Toyah: Live At Drury Lane. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision 8.5/10

In one of the great mysteries of life, the fans of one of Birmingham’s finest musical ambassadors, the scintillating and unique Toyah Willcox, have always been left wondering why one of the most memorable performances of her early career was never given the aural treatment it deserved. Why it seemed to appear on every other format except the one it mattered on, the vinyl love it required to truly capture an icon at the height of her powers and majestic best.

Toyah:Live At Drury Lane has become an almost mythic like tale, one of a queen riding into battle to take on the scourge of beige mediocrity, the uniform of men in suits and the screaming banshees of dull complexity. That tale of mythic, even legendary proportions has been mostly lost, the format used at the time that framed the evening as lost as the mists that have enveloped our lives as our bodies have been eroded by tide and the fears of those who wish us to be servient to the commonplace.

Toyah: Live At Drury Lane addresses that 40 year error, and it has been worth waiting for. An album of sheer intensity, of light shining brightly in the darkness, a woman, an entertainer, a free-spirited oracle to whom audiences gathered and gave thanks for, this is a spotlight on a song writer who captivated the world and who stood firm against the creeping insidious disease of the period that brought modern Britain into sharp focus in the decades that have followed; that of being afraid of being labelled anything other than ordinary.

For a person to break out of the suburb of Kings Heath, the leafy and pleasant shopping area to the south of Birmingham’s industrial heart, one filled with Saturday shoppers who mingled in shops such as Preedy’s and who’s claim to fame at the time was Gardening Today and the silky tones of ‘keen amateur’ Cyril Fletcher, is in itself nothing short of sublime, and the fact that it is Toyah who made that mark seems to be indicator of where the truth of the youth of Birmingham was determined to go…as one into battle with the queen of the genre but who also, as this live album aptly shows, had no issue with utilising the art of the Progressive to get her message across.

This is more than just a journey into time, a form of theatre, or indeed just a chance to reminisce in the company of one of the all-time greats, this album is an explosive combination of all three, but with the sincerity of damning the age of politics in which turned so many against family and friends as unemployment, struggle, the threat of untold measures against individuality all took the share of the headlines.

It is in the anger and respect of a young woman that this album finally receives its just rewards, that the night in which tracks such as Victim Of The Riddle, The Furious Futures, It’s A Mystery, Danced, Thunder In The Mountains, and the superb I Want To Be Free all responded in kind to the calls of the audiences with honour and the electric dominance of personality; for where else could Toyah have seen out 1981, but in the heart of theatre that she herself wonderfully espoused.

Ian D. Hall