Toyah (band)

Toyah
Origin	England
Genres	Punk rock, rock music, new wave, gothic rock
Years active	1977–1983
Labels	Safari
Associated acts	Blood Donor
Members	Toyah Willcox Joel Bogen Phil Spalding Adrian Lee Nigel Glockler
Past members	Steve Bray Pete Bush Charlie Francis Mark Henry

Toyah is the name of the band fronted by Toyah Willcox between 1977 and 1983. The only other consistent band member throughout this period was Joel Bogen, Willcox's principal co-writer and guitarist.

Back in the National Theatre, when she was 18, Toyah Willcox felt that was the right environment for her to work out how to put a band together: the theatre was full of musicians as well as actors. "Through a series of coincidences I just got involved in a punk band and that was purely from asking around y’know 'Has anybody got a band, does anyone need a singer?'" she remembered. First Toyah ended up in a punk band from Golders Green, which used to rehearse at Golders Green cemetery and even did a few gigs there.

"The leader of the band was a man called Glen Marks and his father ran Golders Green cemetery. I remember because Marc Bolan died during this period and we hid in one of the gatehouses to watch the funeral. And we went off and we did terrible gigs, I mean really bad gigs and I was a really bad singer and a performer at that point coz ... I was ... it meant so much to me that I was permanently nervous and I’d walk on stage and just become a jibbering wreck and hide behind a kind of ugly bravado, there was no craft there or anything. So I remember we played the Dagenham Ford Motorworks and we played youth clubs all over the place and I realised this was going nowhere fast."

It was Glen Marks, though, who in 1976 introduced Toyah to a protege who was at his school called Joel Bogen, whom she described later as "a very accomplished musician", by far the most accomplished musician that she'd met at that time. With Joel she struck up a writing partnership. In the beginning they's only meet up on Sundays and write and answer ads from the NME. Then they got a keyboard player called Pete Bush who had a music room in his house in Totteridge where three of them could rehearse. Slowly the band came together "from friends of friends of friends".

In June 1977 the band played their first gig without a name or a bass player. After several line-up changes, they spent a brief period under the name Ninth Illusion, without recording any music. In the beginning of 1978 they met again and the idea of Toyah the band was born. Joel auditioned several musicians and chose Pete Bush (keyboards), Dave Robin (drums), and Windy Miller (bass), quartet quickly taking their name from their unusual vocalist and figurehead. Toyah debuted in Barnet's, Duke Of Lancaster on 27 June, and gave three more concerts in London. On 13 July the band performed at Young Vic Festival. The band began to record early demos in Willcox's converted warehouse called Mayhem – which comprised offices, recording and rehearsal rooms for many young bands on the London scene of the time.

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Wikipedia