VELVET THUNDER

If you only want one Toyah live album, to be as close to definitive as you’re likely to get, Warrior Rock is the one. In the Toyah catalogue it’s the Made In Japan, the Space Ritual or the Seconds Out – simultaneously the go-to listen for newcomers and also revered by fans alike. The choice of material is a very good mix of the crowd-pleasers and the deeper cuts, and the performances are without exception first-rate.

With 1982’s The Changeling just out, and consolidating on the success that the preceding Anthem had brought, Toyah was riding something of a crest of a career wave at the time of the two July 1982 Hammersmith shows captured here. A string of hit singles had taken her from the experimental, edgy, art-punk beginnings to selling out large theatres with a mass audience, in just under three years, Which isn’t bad progress in anyone’s book, and especially for someone like Toyah, whose albums had never caved in to easy, commercial appeal on the back of the Top Ten hits; even the breakthrough Anthem had featured some very edgy material indeed alongside It’s A Mystery and I Want To Be Free, while The Changeling was a very bumpy ride for the Top Of The Pops-watching casual listeners, with some wilfully challenging music repaying repeated listening (the similarity of the words Changeling and Challenging may be a coincidence, but it’s an apt one). Add to that the fact that the Toyah band was the strongest line-up yet, with long-standing guitarist and writing partner Joel Bogen joined by Keith Hale on keyboards, Phil Spalding on bass and the vastly experienced Simon Phillips on drums – the latter a really strong addition in particular. The album is available as either a three-disc box containing a host of bonus tracks, or alternatively if just the original album is your preference, there’s a beautifully designed transparent green double vinyl edition. I will be looking at the CD edition for the purposes of this review.

On this 3CD set, the original double album is spread across the first two discs, with the first three vinyl sides on Disc One and the fourth on Disc Two. The remainder is made up of soundcheck audio, tour rehearsals and a host of alternate versions of songs recorded elsewhere on the tour (with three which missed the cut for the original release). There had been excellent live material from Toyah before this – 1980’s Toyah Toyah Toyah (the title later confusingly reused for a compilation) was a raw, high-energy summation of the first two albums, and was a thrilling listen. The video soundtrack Live At The Rainbow and the since-released Live At Drury Lane both captured the year that Anthem broke the band wide open, and are also excellent live documents. However, if you only want one Toyah live album, to be as close to definitive as you’re likely to get, Warrior Rock is the one. In the Toyah catalogue it’s the Made In Japan, the Space Ritual or the Seconds Out – simultaneously the go-to listen for newcomers and also revered by fans alike. The choice of material is a very good mix of the crowd-pleasers and the deeper cuts, and the performances are without exception first-rate. For the love of the mainstream, hit single side of Toyah, there is the opening Good Morning Universe, the recent Brave New World, the air-punching Thunder In The Mountains and, of course, the ‘big two’ from Anthem, It’s A Mystery and an extended I Want To Be Free. Beyond that, however, deeper delights await. Dawn Chorus becomes an unexpected triumph in the live setting, while We Are tees up the pre-encore set closer I Want To Be Free on a riotous note. The Packt, from the recently released The Changeling, seems a brave and risky choice to attempt live, but it emerges with flying colours, outstripping the studio version for drama and menace. Castaways and Angel And Me from the same album also come over well. For the hardcore, of course the big hitters from the first two albums are present and correct here: a brilliantly played Danced, showcasing just how underrated a guitarist Joel Bogen was and still remains, and of course the final encore of Ieya, the massive outpouring of stream-of-consciousness Necronomicon-referencing invocation, thrown out to the audience over eight or nine rollercoaster minutes. It never gets old, and assumed a place in the Toyah set somewhat akin to Won’t Get Fooled Again for The Who, and it’s just as good as ever here. Perhaps the only tracks I could have done without are Warrior Rock itself and War Boys, but as they are both rhythmic, tribalistic pieces cut from very similar cloth, that could say more about my preferences than the tracks themselves – neither has ever seemed totally convincing to me, but the crowd love them and they both give Phillips a chance to shine on the drumkit.

That original album alone is probably all the casual listener needs, but the rest of the material is a goldmine for the serious fan. First up is the very welcome live out-take of Street Creature, which was originally cut. Two soundcheck recordings are hit and miss – the nine minute Hammersmith Jam is actually several one or two minute shorter pieces of instrumental improvisation roughly joined together along with the usual cries of ‘One Two’, and I would be surprised to hear of anyone wanting to hear it twice; Good Morning Universe is different however, again done as an instrumental (it would appear Toyah herself may not have been keen on the soundcheck procedure), but fascinating for that very reason as it allows you to hear the deceptive amount of tight and skilful playing going on in an apparently simple tune. The five tour rehearsal recordings are generally less than essential, but it is interesting to hear Life In The Trees which was dropped from the set for the tour itself.

The remainder of this disc, and the whole of the third, is made up of performances of every song performed on the tour, recorded at different dates around the UK. The great thing about this is that we get recordings of songs which were either dropped by the time of the Hammersmith shows in July which made up the album, or else simply not included in the final tracklist. Thus, we get bona fide tour live versions of Neon Womb and a superb Bird In Flight, thus representing the early days of Toyah’s career more strongly. Interestingly, Warrior Rock itself, which was included on the album, had been dropped after the first few dates, so for its inclusion on the album it was recorded at the soundcheck before one of the shows, and dropped in with attendant crowd noise – with the bonus tracks we get an actual live take, from an earlier Hammersmith date in June. It seems very questionable as to why this would have been done for the album, beyond the wish to have the title track included, but even so, putting it back into the set for the show would have made more sense. It is hard to escape the view that Bird In Flight would have been a stronger inclusion. As regards the alternative live recordings in general, they lack the dynamic fidelity of the professionally recorded and mixed album, being cassette recordings from the soundboard – but despite that there are some which one could identify as possibly even superior to the album performances.

There is just one more of the original Safari albums still to come at this point (the highly underrated Love Is The Law, the tour on which I myself saw my first Toyah show), but while the whole reissue series has been excellent so far, Warrior Rock is a contender for the strongest. It’s not far from being a genuine ‘greatest hits live’, as the track listing would make a very reasonable compilation given the original 2LP limit, and there is no track which is definitively inferior to its studio original. The packaging of the set is excellent, as have been all of these reissues, with new notes added by Toyah herself along with an essay together with plenty of live photos from the tour, including panoramic shots on the digipak foldout, and behind the discs themselves. Perhaps the only misstep is the presence of two pages with the text printed in purple and red against a black background, and hence impossible to read without a 747 landing light and a telescope! Other than that, it’s hard to see how this could have been improved.