Table Of ContentI WAS A TEENAGE TOYAH FAN
by Chris Limb
© 2011 Chris Limb. All rights reserved.
To Toyah - for inspiring much more than this.
Introduction
We are the stories we tell ourselves.
This is a story set in the past. Strictly speaking these people no longer exist
even though there are individuals in the present day who have inherited their
memories. But the actual people from back then? They’re familiar old tales, tales
we revisit from time to time to flip through the pages with nostalgia.
Other people are also stories we tell about them, but they are only ever told
in the third person. Whilst we might think we know what is going on in
someone’s head, chances are we have absolutely no idea. Only they know, only
their own personal story is canon.
Whilst the story I tell here about myself is true, it is viewed through the
distorting lens of time and whilst I’ve done my best to check the facts it’s
possible that things didn’t happen exactly as I describe them here. Perhaps
chains of events have been slightly reordered to improve narrative coherence.
Perhaps separate days have been concatenated. But things happened close
enough to what is described herein for this to be a reasonably accurate account
and I don’t think anyone else who was there will find anything wrong with it - if
anything I hope they find it all hauntingly familiar.
This is primarily a story about two individuals who no longer exist. The
versions of Toyah and myself from thirty years ago probably bear little
resemblance to the people walking around now with their names – and in
particular the version of Toyah described here is one that only ever existed in my
head. While my interpretation of what she did at the events described might
coincide with the things that the real Toyah did, only she knows the truth.
This is life. Everyone else described herein is also real, their description my
interpretation of their behaviour at the time although I should say that in some
cases the names have be changed to protect the author from the guilty, even
though any culpability as described here is of course only in the mind of the
beholder.
This is a story of a teenager and as the story opens he has only lived a third
as long as I have now. I would like to think that this is an on-going process and
that in the future when I have lived three times as long as I have now I will look
back to now with a smile and the recollection that that there were changes lying
in wait for me just as exciting as the ones described in this book.
But only time will tell. In the meantime please enjoy this interpretation of
times past.
1: Standing all alone
I was always a bit of a late developer.
Whilst all the other boys at school were sneaking porn mags into class
under their jumpers, I didn’t understand the appeal of the airbrushed mannequins
contained therein. I disliked the way they prised their nether regions open with
gynaecological expertise whilst wearing expressions that made them look
simultaneously half-asleep and nauseous. Furthermore, the short cut to views of
genitalia offered by these magazines seemed to miss the point completely. For
me it was about fancying the girl to start with. It was about getting to know
them, hanging out with them, talking to them. Maybe getting a snog. Then who
knows?
Also, for some unknown reason I simply found a very different kind of
woman attractive. Whilst it seemed as though the majority of my peers adored
Olivia Newton John, Farrah Fawcett and the like - not to mention the soft-focus
women in the aforementioned magazines - I could never see the attraction. They
all seemed so bloody wholesome and boring. Even the ones in the magazines –
once they got dressed again I was sure they’d be indistinguishable from anyone
else.
One of the schoolboy purveyors of this creased glossy smut had originally
started out as a friend. However he seemed very disappointed that our shared
enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings didn’t mean that I shared his fascination for all
things pornographic. Despite his amassing a vast collection (on which he
cunningly used to swap the covers for those of more innocent magazines to
avoid parental detection) I never wanted to borrow any of them no matter how
many times he offered. Eventually he decided it would be easier to simply stop
being my friend.
Due to my lack of enthusiasm for these traditional teenage boys’ fantasies, I
was often branded a “bender” or a “pervert”, although despite what these bigots
might have been implying here, I actually thought women were brilliant.
However, the only ones that sent my stomach on a rollercoaster ride and made
my viscera turn somersaults were the scary looking ones I’d seen on TV and in
the Kings Road or West End when I’d made my solo trips into town to visit
Forbidden Planet in Denmark Street or the Museums in South Kensington.
Punk girls.
I don’t know what it was, but there was something about the combination of
torn fishnets, leather jackets, extreme makeup, unsuitable boots and brightly
coloured scruffy hairdos with shaved sides that seemed to press all my buttons
simultaneously.
This raises the question, why? It’s not as if I was remembering something
from deep in my childhood. Punk was a relatively new phenomenon and back
then you could hardly escape the media coverage. The tabloids were full of it,
implying that it foretold the beginning of the end of civilization as we knew it. I
didn’t mind. I’d have been more than happy to live in a post-apocalyptic
dystopia if all the women looked like that. But to this day I have no idea why my
brain decided I would be attracted to fierce, frightening-looking women.
It was at the bitter end of the nineteen-seventies. I’d admired these scary
punk girls from afar for a little while now, but as a small SF geek shopping for
Blake’s 7 / Star Wars crossover fanzines I had absolutely no idea about how to
go about getting any kind of girlfriend, let alone a punky one. There was no way
any of those beautiful beings would be remotely interested in a short spotty nerd
in a white arran-knit jumper and purple corduroy trousers clutching a copy of
Doctor Who Weekly.
I’d have to radically change my image if I was to stand a chance against the
competition, which at the time seemed to largely consist of blokes eight and a
half feet tall (if you included the extra two foot of Mohican) with arms like tree
trunks, complex tattoos covering 98% of their skin surface and half a pound of
scrap iron embedded in their face. I didn’t think this kind of thing would go
down too well at school.
I didn’t yet have a pop star idol either. Like many boys my age Kate Bush’s
Babooshka video had made me feel all hot and bothered but despite the fact that
I liked some of her songs Kate just didn’t do it for me. Not odd looking enough,
not punky enough, although the atmosphere she carried around with her was
more interesting than most of the female pop stars on TV. Interesting women
singers were few and far between although in retrospect it’s obvious that I was
simply looking in the wrong places and had missed Siouxsie and the Banshees
on Top of the Pops although do remember catching X-Ray Spex at least once.
It was a very different time and there was far less entertainment around. No
one I knew had a video yet, there were only three channels and so if you wanted
to watch TV you just had to make do with what was on. As a result you often
ended up watching any old thing. So it was that on 2 December 1979 I found
myself watching Shoestring, the BBC show starring Trevor Eve as a private
detective who worked for a local radio station and who was therefore somewhat
irritatingly known as a “Private Ear”. It was one of those shows that was always
on a Sunday evening with all the associated depression involved; there remained
nothing else between now and being back at school bar sleep. Often you hadn’t
done your homework, but it was too late. Even the man with the moustache
investigating crime couldn’t take your mind off the inevitable horror of the week
ahead.
The previous day I’d watched The Doctor grapple with the Mandrels, today
Eddie Shoestring was looking for a missing beauty queen only to be blocked at
every turn by a cast of characters including a sinister Christopher Biggins, pre-
Eastenders Peter Dean and a young Lynda Bellingham who was still a long way
from the cornerstone of the Oxo family who’d mysteriously moved to Gallifrey
to put The Doctor on trial…
Personally I thought the punk girl Toola in the story was far more attractive
and interesting than the woman who’d disappeared, beauty queen or no. Toola
was striking and angry, somehow familiar looking. There was a certain
melancholic air about her as well that contrasted with her enthusiasm and fire,
resulting in a character I found captivating.
If I ever have a girlfriend, I thought, I’d like her to be like that.
I enjoyed her music as well (she was the singer in a band which was all part
of the plot), but I had absolutely no idea that the band, and therefore Toola, was
real.
Shoestring solved the case, although at a cost. It turned out that the beauty
queen was dead and her boyfriend Mole (played by the late Gary Holton of Auf
Wiedersehen Pet fame) was murdered in the attempt to expose her killers - quite
a high body count for such a cosy little show. Toola dedicated the haunting song
she sung over the end credits to the dead Mole and as such I was concentrating
on her and the music so much that I didn’t have the wit to check the cast list
(quite daft in retrospect when watching it again now). With no videos and no
Internet that was it. I had no idea who she was. She’d gone.
