TAKE one sunny, smiling girl next door, the embodiment of niceness, normality and spunky charm. 

Now take one (former) punk icon, the girl who sang "so what if I dye my hair, I’ve still got a brain up there" and whose best known stage role was as a tough wrestling champion. Not quite the perfect match, you’d have thought . . . 

Then, she was a pouting, lisping, angry rebel; now, she’s a 40-something with a healthy stage career mixing panto with serious dramatic parts, as well as continuing to record - mostly, she admits, for her own satisfaction, having ceased to trouble the charts some time ago - and a long marriage to prog-rocker Robert Fripp. 

It may not be the transition from scruffy cowgirl to dutiful wife that Calamity goes through, but Willcox is keen to point out her version of the popular musical is not just a camp old singsong based straight on the movie. "Our show is about the real Calamity Jane who was a tough, strong woman," she argues, in those distinctive soft tones which have narrated everything from The Good Sex Guide to children’s cartoon Brum. 

Based on a true story, the character of the sharp-shooting, independent woman who held her own amid the male-dominated Old West was watered down in earlier versions, the singer reckons. 

"I like the film. I remember watching it on Saturday morning TV and for an actress it’s a blessing of a part - there’s so much range in it. 

"It is a warm-hearted affair, full of 1950s goodness," she says, but adds that "all that 1950s goodness has been left were it belongs, in the last millennium. 

"People are split by it. The feminists feel the ending is a huge disappointment in that she gets married in a white dress - in mine, the last time you see me with a dress I’m ripping it up and she gets married in buckskin, so there’s no compromise. It was made 50 years ago and women have moved on. 

"What we have is a production that is played for the truth of how hard it would have been to live in Middle America in 1860. We have given it an edge that an audience in 2003 can handle. It is very much the same show, but rather than being lined in duck-down it now has steel-tipped edgings. 

"There are a lot of issues in this story that jar, such as why should a woman have to wear a dress to be acccepted and why should love be uncompromisingly heterosexual in its external interpretation. Also it is based at a time in history when America was colonised by the white man and nothing in the play addresses the injustice of such an invasion." 

It’s an interesting take, but nevertheless the show keeps the story and songs from the original, so fans of the movie won’t find it too unrecognisable. She is not, though, attempting the clear, pure tones of Day’s singing voice, though there is a mid-west accent. 

"We’re very much a play with music not a sequinned West End show," she emphasises. "It’s very much an ensemble show with characters. I’m doing the songs in character so there are fallibilities and frailties in it, I’m not using my own voice. The things we have changed are subtle but take a long time to achieve." 

Of the cast, she says: "On average I am 22 years older than the lot of them, but mentally I am the youngest. I scare them, they never had Punk or New Wave or New Romantics. Their generation are the straightest since the Sixties, bless them, but I’m teaching them bad ways." 

Willcox had to spend months learning to use the bullwhip - with full whip-crackaway action - for the role, studying under stunt director Alex Lorenzo who coaches Pierce Brosnan for the James Bond films. 

"It was hard and quite dangerous because they can cut the skin," she grins, having finally mastered it. 

That’s probably not a skill that will turn up when next she goes on tour, though, her gigs these days being quieter affairs than the grand costumed and choreographed ones of her heyday. A new album is due out next month, which she calls "just basic rock, really. I’m in a different place, just putting out records for my fanbase now," she admits, though a surprising number of Toyah-ites have stayed loyal. 

"But a lot of music around now is just fantastic - I have bought more CDs in the last two years than the last 20, I had divorced myself from it for a while. Now people are revisiting an era I’m used to, with the influence of Seventies chord structures and so on. I get such a high when I listen to Coldplay or Radiohead or Mogwai." 

Despite that, she nearly agreed to take part in a rather less credible project, a new reality TV show giving Eighties popstars the chance to ‘win back’ fame, with the least popular being voted off each week and the most climbing out of nostalgia tour hell, presumably, and back to the A-list. 

Willcox was interested, but couldn’t fit it in with her Calamity Jane schedule. "I pointed out to the producers that contrary to popular press belief, an awful lot of us ‘old timers’ have regular employment. I have to say it is a brilliant idea - it will prove how talented people really are, or not. I have been asked to do series two." 

Still, there are limits. The Calamity tour took a break over Christmas so Willcox could appear in panto, playing Aladdin in Basingstoke. The original script called for her to parody her biggest hit with the lyrics: "I want to turn old Beijingstoke inside out, to have position, wealth and clout, to be looked up to without any doubt, to have my name on a roundabout." 

She laughed the idea out of the show, unsurprisingly. That really would have been a calamity. 
 
 

Edinburgh Evening News - 23rd January 2003