‘Little Jewish man’ who helped punk queen Toyah to create her Anthem
Jewish Telegraph, September 2022
BY MIKE COHEN
PUNK band Toyah hit the big time in 1981 with gold-selling album Anthem.
And 41 years later, the album, which reached number two in the charts, has been given the Cherry Red Records treatment with a three-CD plus DVD re-release.
While most people see Toyah as singer Toyah Willcox with a backing band, it actually is the name of the band — with Jewish guitarist Joel Bogen at the forefront.
Bogen worked with Willcox from the late-1970s to 1983 — and co-wrote many of her songs.
Anthem includes the hit singles I Want to be Free and It’s a Mystery.
The latter song was inspired by an encounter Willcox had with a religious Jewish man at Finchley Central tube station.
Before the recording of Anthem, a depressed Willcox thought her music career was over as her band had broken up — and it was just her and Bogen left.
She recalled in an interview: “A man came up to me and he said ‘Good morning!’ And it was a little Jewish man with the hat on and everything and I said ‘Hi’ and I thought ‘Oh, here we go’ because I looked so punky I did get propositioned an awful lot at tube stations.
“He said ‘Don’t do it, everything’s going to be fine tomorrow’. And I thought ‘Oh God that’s really weird, that’s such a weird thing to say’ and when the tube came I thought ‘No, I’m going to be nice to this man’ coz I wasn’t very nice, I just went (blows a raspberry and waves hand) and I thought I should thank him for saying that and I turned around and there was no-one on the platform.
“I went to work, recorded It’s A Mystery and he was right, the next day my life completely changed. It was decided that was going to be the single, the record company were going to invest in it and It’s A Mystery was my first hit song.”
The new release adds demos and live tracks, including the song Ieya, recorded at the BBC’s Paris Theatre, London, in April, 1981.
The song — which is also included on the DVD — has an interesting background.
Released as a single in June, 1980, Toyah explained: “A lot of my band were Jewish, and we all found it particularly offensive that the National Front would recruit at concerts — they’d go around the audience intimidating the youngest, the smallest, the scrawniest boys into joining the NF.
“By the end of this concert in Bath, the NF were chanting ‘Sieg heil’ at the back. Charlie Francis, our bass-player, found this intolerable, and Joel kept taking his guitar off to go and beat them up, which we all had to stop him from doing.
“Instead we just shouted back ‘Nazi scum’ and got the audience to chant ‘Nazi scum’. For the fourth encore, all we could think of doing was something that had started as a jam in the sound-check that day, which was Ieya.
“It was a sequence of chords that grew, so every verse had more chords added to it, and it had a fantastically simple chorus, a chant, ‘IEYA. IEYA, I am solar, IEYA I’m the beast.”
In another interview, Willcox spoke about the group’s first time in Germany and how it caused problems for her and Joel, but not over religion, but food.
“I was vegetarian and whenever we ordered vegetables it would arrive with bacon in and Joel was Jewish and it was like . . . it was a struggle,” she said.
“We weren’t sophisticated. It was a struggle and trying to get people to understand that we didn’t want to eat any meat was a completely foreign experience. I don’t think that’s the right way to explain it, but I mean ‘why do you not want to eat meat? We don’t understand’.”
Toyah’s album before Anthem was The Blue Meaning which had tracks influenced by the Holocaust.
“The Blue Meaning I find a really strange album when you listen to it as a whole album,” she said in one interview.
“It’s really, really angry. The imagery is exploring things that I only learned when I came to London, for example on Vision I talk about genocide and it was because I only learned about the Holocaust when I came to London.
“I was at the National Theatre, an actress called Kate Nelligan gave me a book, something like Beyond The Darkness, which is about the Holocaust and that’s the first time I ever knew about it.
“I felt betrayed by my education for not telling me. And I wondered why the world never talked about this.
“And, of course, at the beginning of punk, certain bands were wearing swastikas, which we never did because Joel was Jewish and I understood you just didn’t do that.
“But I was still learning what had happened to that community less than 30, 40 years ago. So I used a lot of that imagery and explored how I felt about my own mortality.”
She added in another interview: “Visions is very much about discovering the truth of the Holocaust and just wondering how any one human being could ever feel they had the power to govern so many people to do what they did to another race.
“It’s a song of extreme anger. It’s also a pop song. It goes into really great pop feels. And my feeling was that to put such heavy lyrics and heavy imagery into the pop sections of this song really made the impact of the message harder.
“So it’s a song about learning about things that have happened to mankind that are so disgusting and so wrong that how could the world allow it to happen? It’s just for me a real punk song.
“It really does say if we are going to be revolutionaries and change the world that will never happen again.
“And, of course, it is everywhere. It’s going on more now than ever. So it is a song that underlines history. It says this has happened. That’s happened. Is it right for an individual to think that way? Is it right for an individual to tell you to think that way? It is about a dystopian future and the potential for a dystopian future.
“With the punk movement we felt, and I definitely felt as a punk rocker, that I could tread a territory I do not want to go near today. There was no political correctness within punk, other than you did not wear swastikas.
“That political correctness grew. We policed each other over that by education. And all of that stopped pretty quickly.”
Willcox also starred in the Film4 movie The Disputation in 1986.
The film was based on Barcelona Disputation in 1263 where Jews and Christians debated whether Jesus was the Messiah or not.
Anthem, which is released next Friday, has been remastered by Nick Watson from the original master tapes and approved by Bogen.
It includes a 24-page booklet with an introduction by Willcox.
The DVD includes an interview with Willcox where she talks about the creation of the album, alongside TV appearances and videos for I Want To Be Free and Thunder In The Mountains, both directed by Jewish Mancunians Kevin Godley and Lol Creme.
