"I was born in King's Heath, Birmingham on May 18, 1958. My father was a wealthy antique dealer and my mother a retired ballerina.

 

The first thing I can remember is screaming my head off with fear when I was seperated from my mother on my first day at school. It turned out I had a good reason to be worried. The first year I was there a group of girls beat me up and tried to strangle me with my shoestring.

The reason they used to torture me was always the same - I used to look very funny when I cried. My face used to screw up and the other kids found it amusing..." (Toyah, Flexipop)

 

"I find it fascinating analysing myself. I can actually go right back to the womb. I used to lie in bed at night and get this terrible feeling that all my life was on a parallel, no time existed and rather than look into the future and see myself on my deathbed I got into the past.

I can remember before I was born opening my eyes in my mother's womb and then the memory jumps two years when I had my legs in a splint because they were deformed, and then it goes to four years old..." (Toyah, Melody Maker)

 

"..She was born in Birmingham.. third child of a middle-class architect (Toyah says upper class). But she did have a sixth toe on her right foot, a right leg two inches shorter than her left and eyelids that had to be operated on to make them blink. As a child, she was kept in irons up to the waist and went to hospital monthly. 'I was in a ward with children in wheelchairs, autistic children, deformed and insane, and I wasn't a cripple, I wasn't mental. The doctors had to twist my bones and it hurt. I used to scream and fight them.' She has been screaming and fighting ever since and to considerably more effect than the powerless, raging infant still vividly alive inside her, ever could.." (Cynthia Kee, Cosmopolitan)

"The way I formed in my mother's womb, meant that one side of me didn't get enough oxygen, so I didn't grow properly" (Toyah, unknown magazine)

"This interest in the supernatural stems, she says, from her experiences as a child. She claims she was born with fins and webbed feet - 'it's fairly common, I think,' and spent the first five years of her life being operated on for a compendium of afflictions..." (Tim Lott, Record Mirror)

"When I was a kid I had long black hair and looked very Chinese. When I see pictures of me as a baby, I think I look exceptionally pretty. But from the age of six months, I was a bit ugly. And after the age of three, I started becoming really ugly. I had such thick black hair I looked wild, like a wolf child..." (Toyah, No.1)

"She's a plain old bag basically, a fat little squirt who wanted to get on. I love her. I think she was delivered here by Martians." (Photographer friend, Cosmopolitan)

"When I got to the age of nine I started having poltergeist trouble. It all apparently came from me. Whenever I had an argument with my mother, something would happen to her. The same with my sister... we were sort of in league together.

If ever I was really depressed, things would start moving about in my room, doors would slam, things would rip off the wall. It kept on for a couple of years, then stopped altogether." (Toyah, Record Mirror)

"The only person I was quite close to was my older sister, Nicola. When I got in a state about something, things in my bedroom would move about of their own accord. She was the only person who knew what I was going on about, the only one who believed me..." (Toyah, Flexipop)

"Until I got to the age of twelve, I was quite timid, but I changed. Then I tried to behave as badly as possible, right up until I left school..." (Toyah, Flexipop)

"She must have been, she concedes, a terrible child. 'It wasn't very pleasant then,' she says. 'I was a bully at school.' Her posh, middle-class mummy sent her to a public school for refined young ladies in Birmingham, where the family lived. It was anathema to the wild young thoroughbred who kicked out at the system... She's eternally ungrateful for the sacrifices her parents made to try to give her a good education. She loathed it, didn't mix with the other girls who nicknamed her Toilet - because they considered it an amusing derivative of Toyah..." (Jo Weedon, Woman's Own)

"1969: She attends the Edgbaston Church of England School for Girls in Birmingham. Toyah admits that she wasn't at all popular and was bullied because she was 'dumpy' and had a stammer. She soon cured this by fighting back and creating her own brand of individualism..." (unknown Annual)

"I really hated that school. They teach you a load of crap. They don't tell you what you want to know. When I left school, it was only then my dyslexia started to disappear..." (Toyah, Record Mirror)

"Children are the only pure souls in this world. Education corrupts them. That's why I could never have a child. You have to have education to survive in this system but it stops young brains developing freely" (Toyah, Cosmopolitan)

"My mum tried so hard to turn me into a posh lady but I wasn't remotely interested. I wanted to live out the consequences of my own decisions - not someone else's - so I didn't feel a part of the environment that I was growing up in. My ambition was inspired by a desire to escape from the mundane" (Toyah, Sunday Express magazine)

 

Poem written by Toyah, aged 12, in 1970 - 'The Journey'

For connection with Kate Bush, see Dome Horizon

 

"As a pupil at an all-girl's public school in Birmingham, she put curses on some of her classroom rivals. 'I would put them on girls who had been really nasty to me. They'd do very badly in end-of-term exams.'

As well as curses, Toyah also experimented with ouija boards and levitation, though she says she has now stopped practising black magic.

A chilling experience shook her family when she was just 14. Toyah takes up the story: 'My sister was working in a hospital cancer ward, which she found very disturbing. One particular day, an old lady died and she was very distressed. That night my sister was in her room and the old lady appeared, by way of thanking her for help. My sister began to rise out of her bed - levitate - and, in the next room, so did my father. he nearly had a heart attack! Meanwhile, posters in my room had started flying in all directions. Similar things happened to me all the time. We always thought the house was haunted. And it wasn't until my sister married a psychiatrist that we realised that we did it. I get a lot of letters from adolescents who say things like that happen to them. At the time, I thought I was going mad.'" (Titbits)

"Nicola has psychic experiences herself. She used to work in a cancer ward, and patients used to come and visit her after they'd died. I'd see them throw her bed clothes off..." (Toyah, Flexipop)

"Toyah hardly ever bothered to work when I taught her English from 14 to 16. When she did bother it was badly written and weird in content. She always wrote about death or madness.

She was very isolated at school - even the toughest girls were afraid of her. She was very aggressive and loved to fight. She was a rather plump and dumpy girl, who wore strange clothes. I think now that she had all the marks of a gifted child but we didn't recognise them. She was such a forceful girl, no wonder the other children were rather terrified of her" (Shirley Williams, The Sun)

"I was eleven when I started wearing make-up. I saw a picture of Lou Reed with blond hair and great black eyes, so I started copying him. Then Marc Bolan came in - I used to have a glitter teardrop on my cheek.

I was fifteen when I started dyeing my hair. I went dark blue - and I've been every colour since. The movie of 'The Rocky Horror Show' and David Bowie drove me to dye my hair.

A year afterwards the Sex Pistols played Bogarts in Birmingham and I went down to see them. Suddenly I was among people that looked like me. That was great, because up till then I'd been in complete solitude..." (Toyah, No.1)

"1976: She is offered a place at Birmingham Old Rep Drama School, which she accepts and within only a couple of months finds herself being offered a co-starring role in 'Glitter,' with Noel Edmonds, a play in the BBC's Second City Firsts' series.

1977: The play 'Glitter' is broadcast and on the strength of her performance in it the National Theatre offers her a place with the Company. A chance not to be turned down she plays Emma in 'Vienna Woods' and stays with the National for nearly nine months, during which time she receives a slagging from one of the theatre's famous knights about being loud-mouthed. Realises that he is right and tones down some of her brashness. When her time with the National is completed she decides not to go back to the repertory company. Instead, she lands the part of Mad in Derek Jarman's film 'Jubilee.' This inspires her to start her own band and at Christmas she forms the group 'Toyah.'"

****************************************************************************************************************