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She's Toyah
Daily Record
1985
She's sleek, sophisticated
and oh-so-adult. The clothes are high fashion, the hair
expensively groomed, the make-up discreet. But
beneath the elegant image is Toyah - the hell-raising,
outrageous, racous
punkette, who turned her motto Be Proud, Be Loud
into a top-of-the-pops
number. Loud
and proud she certainly was. Toyah became a rock legend at full blast. Now
a 26 year old millionaire, she is settled in domestic
bliss with
guitarist Tom Taylor, but her agent last week denied she
was expecting.
Has Toyah been tamed?
VICTORIAN
"I'm still a rebel
deep down-I find all rules a bit strange" insists
the girl who was an 11 year old Hell's Angel, a classroom
rebel, a teenage satanist, and a pop whirlwind who
stormed into the Top Twenty as much on her riotous image
as on musicalmerit.
But she admits:
"I'm in my womanhood now, puberty is over, and I've
grown a bit more sensible."
The new Toyah is a
model of abstinence. She is now a vegetarian, totally
teetotal - "I had my first hangover at nine,"she
confesses - works out in the gym at her Victorian house,
and bones up on the Classics in her rapidly growing
library.
The one addiction
she still fights is chocolate: "My craving got much
worse after I gave up booze last year."
"I'm grateful
to my parents, who believed in letting me learn by my own
mistakes. They allowed me to drink and smoke, and my dad's
rules were - don't hurt others, don't steal,
don't get pregnant,
and don't end up in prison."
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IMPROVE Toyah, the school failure, has
made a success of serious acting, with some of the most
illustrious names in the profession.
Starting at 17 with
a starring role in Jubilee, she went on to play opposite
Katherine Hepburn in a TV version of The Corn Is Green,
played Miranda in the film version of The Tempest and
appeared with Lord Olivier in The Ebony Tower.
Her ambitions
are, for Toyah, modest: "I'd like to be the most
famous person in the world, do more films, improve my
voice, and become a really brilliant actress."
But the old Toyah
is still there, under the veneer of restraint Soon to be
released in her latest album, Minx. "It's called
Minx because that sums me up."
PERSON
Her favourite track on
the album is a raunchy number entitled I'll Serve You
Well. "It's about bondage and it's wonderful!"
she exclaims.
"It caters to
sheer chauvinism, but what I'm really saying is that
woman always controls man by exploiting her mystical
feminine prowess."
However the real
influence is the man in her life. "Tom is wonderful
- I really treasure my relationship with him. Mind you we,
argue, claw each other, smack cakes in each other's faces,
and tie each other up, but we have some great laughs.
"I really
despise promiscuity. It's only by staying faithful to one
person that you cope with love."
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