Last updated at 13:02, Saturday, 01 August 2009

PUNK icon Toyah was edgy, vibrant and outspoken in the Eighties and, you’ll be pleased to know, she is still as feisty as ever.

The multi-talented singer, actor, television presenter and author, now 51, was a pleasure to talk to and she can’t wait to come up and perform in Whitehaven as part of the star-studded Here and Now concert.

“Whitehaven will be new territory for me, I have performed in Ambleside and Carlisle before,” said Toyah.

“Here and Now is incredibly successful around the world. It is hit after hit of pure nostalgia.

“And the audiences are getting younger and younger because Eighties music is so popular, the audience is always smiling from beginning to end.”

So what makes it appealing to a younger audience? “I think that teenagers have discovered Eighties music for themselves. People have knocked the Eighties and that’s done nothing but make them want to know more about it. It was written for teenagers, by teenagers. It was a decade of image and the songs were very strong, as was the fashion - for men and women.

“I do think that the songs were made for stadiums and because of that the open-air arenas work very well with this music - it’s very anthemic and very personal.”

Toyah’s Eighties career was phenomenally successful, resulting in hit records including It’s A Mystery and I Want To Be Free. In fact, she has had a total of 15 Top 40 singles and four gold and platinum albums.

“It was a fabulous time,” she says. “When you are young and have that kind of fame, it is everything that you want. It is extraordinary because you could not go anywhere without being mobbed. There weren’t many women doing what we did then. We were on a crest of a wave, we were making women strong and opinionated.”

Toyah was brought up in a middle class family and was public school-educated. “I was told to get married and have children and that was the most terrifying message,” she said. “What someone like me did for women was to say go your own route and seek out your ambition.”

Everyone remembers Toyah as the petite powerhouse with a distinctive voice, flame-coloured hair and striking make-up. “For me, a way of being remembered was to have very distinctive hair colour and I used that to effect. I lived it, it was totally me, I did it 24 hours a day, it was a statement of individuality.”

Toyah, who is married to international guitarist Robert Fripp, has always come across as open and honest and she rarely shies away from talking about a subject. I asked Toyah whether her having a facelift was down to the pressure of keeping young in a world of celebrity.

“Pressure is very personal. People constantly tell you that you are the wrong height, you have the wrong hair colour, but I don’t hear it. You do something for yourself, you are the holder of the purse strings. I don’t believe in this outside pressure.

“Everyone I know is so strong-minded that you cannot tell them how to look. Having said that, I think that it is utterly wrong that the fashion industry only uses a certain size of woman.”

Toyah talked openly about plastic surgery in her book Diary of a Facelift. “People are dishonest. People who are astonishingly rich have plastic surgery as a statement, to hold themselves apart from the rest of the world and then refuse to admit that they have had it. “I think that this is stupid because all it allows is bad plastic surgery to be carried out. I thought, well let’s talk about it, I was one of the first people to be honest about it. I do believe in honesty. I do a lot of speeches and I could not stand up there in front of women and lie. Women are lied to so much, they need to know we are equal. “I cannot see people turned into an underdog and I hate people to be undermined - men and women.”

Featuring in cult classic film Quadrophenia, Toyah has been in more than 10 feature films and appeared in more than 30 stage plays. She also stars in ITV drama Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which she plays Billie Piper’s mother, and she is about to tour this year with hit stage show Vampires Rock. In a nutshell, she has never stopped working and doesn’t intend to. “I like working,” she said. “The bottom line for me is that I have something to do the next day. I cannot bear having nothing to do. If there is not enough acting going on, I make sure I am writing music. “I see myself as a cottage industry, I am an acquired taste which gives me a comfortable kind of fame. I like being creative. In the nineties, I was almost exclusively presenting TV. I’m much happier when I’m writing music, creating something unique. “When I am acting, that is very satisfying. I keep thinking I have to earn a living. I love acting and it suits who I am today.”Toyah’s latest music project is The Humans which she describes as “slightly avant-garde”. “It’s like film noir of music - dark and secretive. It’s a pure spiritual project, it is not a Toyah project.” She has teamed up with Bill Rieflin of REM and they recently played in Estonia at the request of the president and first lady. “Bill and I went out there and wrote on the spot. When we went out we hadn’t sold a ticket, but then within four hours they were all sold.”

Despite everything Toyah has achieved over the years, there is still much more to be done. “I have no intention of retiring, I am in a job where I cannot wait for the next project. I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve. What I achieved for music in the eighties I achieved then. Now, as a woman in her fifties, I see so many doors of opportunity that are not being exploited. I want to act 24/7 around the world, there are countries I want to go and perform in, I am still very driven, I like having new adventures and all my successes have come from having that attitude,” she added.

Toyah’s energy is infectious. She’s still quirky, she is a champion of people and is thoroughly charming. One thing is for certain: we can expect to see plenty more of her.

MIDGE URE

 AN ARTIST who has received Ivor Novello, Grammy, BASCAP awards – not to mention having a flotilla of gold and platinum records to his name – really needs very little introduction.

Musical success is seldom measured in time spans of more than a few years, if not Andy Warhol’s oft quoted 15 minutes of fame – so the fact that by the time Midge’s single If I Was went to No1 in 1985 he had already crammed several musical lifetimes into a 10-year professional career speaks volumes. By that time Slik, The Rich Kids, Thin Lizzy, Visage, Ultravox and of course the most famous one-off group in musical history, Band Aid, had all had the guiding hand of his musical navigation.

Then you have to take account of Midge’s musical directorship of a series of rock concerts for The Prince’s Trust, Wicked Women for Breakthrough and in honour of Nelson Mandela; a Lord Provost award for services to Scottish music; record production for Phil Lynott, Steve Harley and countless others; his video direction of memorable hits by the Fun Boy Three, Bananarama and others; or a whole swathe of landmark singles by Ultravox; TV, theatre and film music credits ranging from Max Headroom to stage and big screen.

His musical roots were playing and learning the records of the Small Faces and other rockers who did things very much their own way. Midge appeared to the wider public in a moment of heady teen success with Slik whose sway-along Bell single Forever And Ever took over at No1 in the UK from Abba’s Mamma Mia on Valentine’s Day 1976. Soon outgrowing Slik’s pop dimensions, Midge was snapped up by ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock the following year for his new outfit, the Rich Kids, who charted amid an avalanche of press with a self-titled EMI single early in 1978. By April 1979, with his name being added to many musicians’ contact books, Ure had been asked by Billy Currie, Chris Cross and Warren Cann to become the new frontman in Ultravox.

The band was a major influence on the new romantic and electro-pop movements of the early ‘80s and many an open-minded studio and bedroom experimentalist since. Their successful trademark was combining Midge’s powerful guitar riffs with sweeping synthesizer motifs, enigmatic imagery and state-of-the-art visuals. Throughout the first half of the ‘80s, they brilliantly combined the responsibilities of top 10 chartmakers and innovative style-makers.

As interest in the 1980s rises again to a new peak in 2004, courtesy of Duran Duran’s massive success, Ultravox’s chart catalogue rewards merits new scrutiny. Tracks like Reap the Wild Wind, Dancing With Tears in My Eyes, Love’s Great Adventure and 1981’s timeless Vienna were all massive hits the world over as they charted with awesome regularity, not only on single, but with seven consecutive top ten albums in just six years.

Even by then, the Midge Ure story had some individual chapters, of course. He wrote and produced Visage in 1980, then hit the top 10 in the summer of 1982 with his first release under his own name, an atmospheric take on the Tom Rush song made famous half a dozen years earlier by the Walker Brothers, No Regrets.

Then came November 25, 1984, an historic day for Midge and all of pop music as 36 artists by the collective name Band Aid gathered at SARM Studios in West London under Ure’s production. They recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas? a song he had just written with Bob Geldof as the industry’s heartfelt and eloquent contribution to Ethiopian famine relief. 600,000 copies sold in its first week in the UK alone, and that was only the beginning: 800,000 more were bought in the second week, more than three million world-wide, and the unstoppable emotion engendered by the project led to Live Aid, the summer 1985 global concert which, all exaggeration aside, spoke for a generation.

Within months, a staggering £8million had been raised for the starving in Africa, and Geldof said that without Ure’s initial enthusiasm for the idea, not to mention his rapidly penned sketch for the single, neither Band-Aid nor Live Aid could have happened. Midge is still to this day a Band Aid Trustee.

Just two months after Live Aid, Midge was back at No.1 in Britain, this time under his own name, with If I Was, and by the autumn he had a No2 solo album to accompany it, entitled The Gift. In 1993, that chart-topper was to lend itself to the retrospective album If I Was. After an initial solo outing to the Oxford Debating Society where his response to “What song would you write for Take That” was met with the characteristically witty retort of “An instrumental!” broke the ice, he supported the album’s release with a 22-date ‘Out Alone’ tour of Britain, armed only with a couple of guitars and a keyboard.

In 1996 the new Breathe album was followed by further extensive touring, including dates in the US as special guest to the Chieftains. The Swatch campaign brought spectacular renewed international activity for the record in 1998. The album and eponymous single were subsequently in the top 20 throughout Europe for much of that year, and No1 in Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where Midge toured voraciously. Breathe sold over half a million copies in Europe alone. Eberhard Schoener invited him to perform at the re-opening of the Potzdamer Platz in Berlin, in front of an estimated audience of 500,000.Soon after, Midge was busy producing and writing with and for various artists, both established and unsigned, at his studio in Bath, and writing music for films. Other duties included the ‘Music for Montserrat’ benefit at the Royal Albert Hall alongside Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John and Eric Clapton, and a performance for the launch of the Hard Rock Hotel in Bali.

Theyear 1999 brought a major Japanese tour and shows for Womad in Singapore (where he broke the house attendance record) and Las Palmas, where the band played to a packed town square in a performance broadcast by Spanish TV later that year. Yet another new strand to his career emerged when Midge presented shows for BBC Radio on the careers of Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Thin Lizzy, also participating in a 15th anniversary radio show to celebrate the Band Aid success. He has also recorded a contribution to BBC Radio 2’s ‘Electrifying – The History of the Electric Guitar.’Whilst completing work on his next studio album Move Me, Midge also narrated a tribute to Alex Harvey for BBC Radio, appeared on BBC1’s A Question of Pop with Craig David, and made various festival appearances, including a performance with Sir George Martin for Wings & Strings, as well as completing another extensive European tour of his own to support the album release.Following Midge’s appearance on the flagship ITV programme This is your Life in early 2001, EMI released ‘THE VERY BEST OF MIDGE URE & ULTRAVOX’ which prompted him to go back out on the road in “rock band mode” ‘Rewind - The Greatest Hits Tour’ a major 15-date UK jaunt supported the release and performed his hits from across the full spectrum of his career. The show was filmed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and released on DVD through Eagle Rock. Once again, Midge was instrumental in the video production, always preferring to keep things under his direct control. Another important milestone was the opening of the www.midgeure.com online shop; a vehicle which allows him to release his own product, completely under his own control. The first exclusive shop release was Glorious Noise – Breathe Live, followed by Intimate Moments; a collection of previously unreleased material. As he says: “I needed a home for the songs that didn’t fit a particular album. They’re my Little Orphans!”

In 2002, he once again combined a series of acoustic shows with a glorious summer spent performing a series of shows in historic building across the UK in band format with The Pretenders. Another exclusive release also hit the virtual shelves. Intimate Moments is a candid record of his acoustic show, captured on a double CD.

Always one to ring the changes, Midge next decided to revisit his “electronic” roots in the “Sampled, Looped and Trigger Happy” tour. 35 shows left no corner of the UK untouched by this amalgam of old and new, the old being given a contemporary twist sitting comfortably alongside the new. Songs that hadn’t seen the light of day for many a year like Astradyne, Reap the Wild Wind and Wastelands enthralled the audiences. Once again, the shows were filmed for a future DVD release. There were also two further on-line shop releases. One Night in Scotland from the Flying Brzezicki Brothers tour 1988, and in a new departure, a multimedia release (VCD) from the US Answers to Nothing Tour – Once Upon a Time in America.

So, what next? Well, as usual there’s so much in the pipeline it’s difficult to keep track! One thing that is certain is that Midge’s autobiography If I Was will be published in the autumn. He’s also working on a major TV programme celebrating the 20th anniversary of Band Aid. Then there are contributions to various other TV and radio shows, such as Channel 4’s “100 Greatest Videos”, and the Phil Coulter show. Oh, and a trip to Poland!

Uncovered is Midge’s latest live incarnation. Combining his own classic hits with a selection of songs that have been a major influence on him along with a smattering of personal reflections, all done in an acoustic format, it should certainly provide an entertaining evening! But then that’s nothing new for Mr Ure!

BELINDA CARLISLE

 OVER the last two decades, Belinda Carlisle made the journey from Hollywood-based teen punk with the Go-Gos to the ultimate global big hair pop icon with a series of sophisticated, but instantly memorable pop-rock singles.

Belinda’s career can be pinned down to determination and bags of self-belief: “Over the years I’ve learnt that everything is possible and my career is a testament to that way of thinking. I’ve never let doubt or any negative thoughts interfere with my dreams,” she says.

“I’ve been making records for 22 years and the longevity says something. I’m very proud of my career.”

It was with Heaven Is A Place On Earth that Belinda achieved international success. With a video directed by Diane Keaton and co-starring husband Morgan Mason, it was a No1 on both sides of the Atlantic and helped to establish her as a solo artist in her own right after the demise of the Go-Gos in 1985. “Heaven is not just a song; it’s one of those moments in one’s career that don’t come around too often. It had the right sound at the right time. It’s one of those unexplainable things,” she says.

Heaven was a collaboration with writers Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley who’ve written many of Belinda’s biggest hits including Circle In The Sand, (We Want) The Same Thing and Do You Feel Like I Feel?

RICK ASTLEY

 IN 1987, a young man from Warrington made his debut with a global No1 that became a pop standard of its day.

And later Rick Astley thrilled his fans and wooed their mums when he unveiled a surefooted cover of the classic ballad When I Fall In Love.

“I really enjoyed doing that,” he says now. “I knew Nat ‘King’ Cole was one of the best vocalists that ever lived. When we did that, it was meant to be a ‘last track on the album’ kind of thing, sort of like ‘I know he’s done Never Gonna Give You Up and Together Forever and it’s all up tempo, but have a listen to this.”

“It did make me think that one day, I wouldn’t mind having another bash at that sort of song.” Which is what he did, recording the material in Los Angeles with producer Peter Collins.

It’s unjustly forgotten sometimes that after his first American success, Astley recorded the incredible scorecard of two US No1s from two releases there, when Together Forever also hit the top. Rick went on having top ten UK singles through into 1991, when the reflective ballad Cry For Help sent another signal of his knowing touch.

Astley established his song-writing credentials on the 1993 album Body & Soul. Then he decided his wife and young daughter were more important to him than the chart rat-race, and he unofficially retired from recording and performing.

But at the turn of the millennium, Rick was back in the studio and a year or two back he found himself being asked to come back to the home of his chart triumphs to make an album for what is now SonyBMG.

He settled on such timeless songs as Close To You, These Foolish Things, Somewhere and, to make the link with 1987, two closely associated with Nat King Cole, Portrait Of My Love and Nature Boy.

So now we know where Rick Astley’s been, let’s concentrate on where he’s got to. “I’ve come full circle. I’m so removed from 1987, I can look back on it myself and say: ‘Wasn’t that a bit of fun?’ I’m getting another crack of the whip in a very different way. It feels great to be doing stuff I’m enjoying.”

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

 HAVING signed a record deal in 1986, the band Curiosity Killed The Cat (named after a password in an adventure game) instantly became one of the hottest bands of the late Eighties.

Curiosity’s many hit singles include Down to Earth, which sold 1.5 million worldwide, Misfit, Ordinary Day and Name and Number (which later went on to be a hit single for De La Soul).

Curiosity’s debut album, Keep Your Distance, went straight into the UK album charts at No1, selling more than 1.5 million copies, while their second album Get Ahead also made the top ten.

In addition, Curiosity Killed The Cat were well respected in the music industry and won a BRITS nomination for the Best New Act of 1987 as well as winning the Music Therapy Best New Act award.

JOHNNY HATES JAZZ

 EIGHTIES band Johnny Hates Jazz has been added to the line-up for the Here and Now Whitehaven gig at Copeland Stadium on Saturday August 15.

Johnny Hates Jazz had big hits with Shattered Dreams and Turn Back The Clock.

First published at 15:44, Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk