Childhood and Early Life
Toyah Willcox was born in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Her father Beric Willcox ran a successful joinery business and owned three factories. Her mother Barbara Joy, née Rollinson, was a professional dancer whom he fell in love with after seeing her on stage in Weston-super-Mare with Flanagan and Allen, and married in 1949. Barbara Willcox had to give up her career after giving birth to Nicola (b. 1950) and Kim (b. 1953), Willcox's older sister and brother, respectively. Asked why her parents might have called her so, Willcox said in a 1981 interview: "I don't know, they won't tell me, but it's definitely my birth name. There is a town in Texas, called Toyah, and Toyah in Red Indian means 'water'. My parents deny that's where they got it from".
Willcox was born with a twisted spine, clawed feet, a clubbed right foot, one leg two inches shorter than the other and no hip sockets. Because of this she endured years of painful operations and physiotherapy. Her physical condition was a cause of difficult times at school. "When I was bullied at school, it was coz of my character. I was a weak child, I was incredibly small. I had a speech impediment, I was the perfect bait for bullying. My dad took me out the back and taught how to punch the hell out of someone and from then on I was never bullied again", Willcox recalled.
Years later she described her relationship with her mother as complicated, saying she "hasn't hugged her mother since she was 12 and can't see it ever happening". However, later she gave much credit to her parents. "I've never gone hungry. I never suffered lack of money in any way. Not because of my parents, anyway. They wanted the best for me, like all parents do for their children. They wanted me to have a very good education, to be a polite child, to be taught good manners and have a future", she recalled in 1980. In fact, until the age of seven Willcox remembered having been very close to her mother, if only for the reason of being very ill and having to be taught how to walk and talk. Then Barbara had another child, a daughter called Fleur, who died. "When she came home from hospital there was a bit of a distance between us. It was never talked about again", Willcox remembered. At the launch of her autobiography in 2000, the singer said: "We had a very violent relationship together. I was the violent person. And I didn't want her to kind of suffer by the book and I hope I represented her very well. Coz she really was a wonderful woman with a child from 'hell'." In another interview of the time, Willcox said: "My mother taught me how to walk, she was one that was trained to give me the physiotherapy to straighten my own spine so twice a day we would go through this routine. So she was disciplinarian in my life from a very – well right from when I can remember. So it was natural she was the first person I should rebel against. And I regret that our relationship was very often violent. And I feel very strongly towards my mum that she sacrificed everything to give me the freedom I have today."
Willcox attended a private girls' school where she was noted for absence from the class room and setting off alarm clocks during a speech by a visiting MP, one Margaret Thatcher. Suffering from dyslexia, which, by her own admission, turned her into an "angry, rebellious" teenager, she achieved just one O-level pass in music. The ambition to sing and act started at about nine. "I was an incredible dreamer when I was at school. I just felt trapped. I wanted to escape, really", she remembered. This had to do also with her upbringing which she described as "very strict". As a teenager, obsessed with aliens and the concept of alienation, Willcox felt she could not fit in with anything. "I loathed suburbia, I loathed the idea of getting married and having kids. I just thought: 'Where the hell do I belong?'" she recalled. In 1974 Willcox started to exercise her rebel instincts in experimenting with hair. "I just looked like something off another planet. And I was very very lonely. No one would come near me. Buses wouldn't pick me up, boys wouldn't come near me", she remembered.
From early childhood, Willcox was aware she did not fit into gender stereotypes. In an all-girls school she was always a tomboy, very aggressive and physical, always in rough and tumble fights. In 2003 Willcox remembered: "The rebellion came easy since most of my life up until I was a teenager I had to play a gender role. I didn't like to be a female and I didn't like to be a boy either, I just wanted to be a person and I was acutely aware of this very early on in life, about the age of four. I loathed dolls, I loathed dresses, everything that had to do with femininity I couldn't bear. And it was forced on me with such passion that I thought: 'If I don't fight it I'm gonna be stuck with it for the rest of my life'".
As a teenager she became uncertain about her sexuality even more. "I went out with guys first when I was about 13 to 15 and then I just stopped. I never actually went out with a woman or anything. I generally thought I was a lesbian purely coz I wasn't interested in men but at the same time I wasn't interested in women. And that's why I concentrated so hard on my career from such an early age", she recalled. As the band Willcox started to gain ground, the singer felt put off by the groupie scene. "All I ever see of women, usually, is groupies. They disgust me. How they can jump into bed with someone they've just met is beyond me. I just don't understand. There's no brain there as far as I'm concerned. I can put up with them. As soon as they get to me they change. They want to talk to you rather than pull your body. But as soon as I see them pulling, I just leave the room. I don't want to be associated with that at all. The band used to go out pulling every night and I just used to go back to the hotel. I wouldn't go anywhere with them", she told Paul Morley in a 1980 interview.
In the mid-1970s, as the punk movement started to gain ground, Willcox saw something she might belong to, even if she understood little about punk politics. "When punk started, I think it was very much about Socialism, the Labour Party, the right of the workers, the right to be heard. I saw it on a slightly different level – no matter who you are, if you had an idea, then you could be part of the punk movement. I was slightly more simplistic in how I viewed it. It was a kind of emotional rebellion rather than a cultural rebellion." A friend suggested that she should see the Sex Pistols. "It wasn't that I saw Sex Pistols and thought: 'Oh, that changed my life'. I saw them and my reaction was: 'I can do better, I go to London to do it'. From then on I knew I didn't have to behave in a social norm. Because I wasn't alone." By the time she formed her first band, though, Willcox was already an aspiring young actress.
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