I'm gonna turn this world inside out, gonna turn suburbia upside down

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

12/07/81 : Anthem - Toyah

This is our first ever mention of Toyah the band, with Toyah the singer having had two mentions - both of which have her alongside her husband, Robert Fripp. One is for doing an amusing cover of "Summer Of '69" along with Chesney Hawke (while dressed as dinosaurs) and the other for when I saw them live at Glasto (and they were considerably better than expected). It's not clear she even knew the man at this point in time (they married in '86), but she was definitely already amusingly barmy - I'm quite looking forward to listening to this.

Yeah, it is pretty barmy but it's also better than I was expecting. The backing tracks are pretty well done (if not exactly going to change the world) and show more variety than I was expecting. But I can see why the vocal eccentricity scared me off back in the day because she's just giving a bit too much uberBjorkness for my liking - although, given that Toyah is eight years older, I guess the adjective should be uberToyahness. Kate Bush (two months younger than Toyah) is the other obvious touchpoint, but there's a lot less musical eccentricity here. Overall though I think this has held up pretty well over the years - I quite enjoyed it all and it was particularly nice to catch up with "I Want To Be Free" and "It's A Mystery".

We're at #8 in the charts this week on the eighth week of a very decent 46 week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its second week, kept off the top by Stars of 45, which is an absolute travesty - she was robbed! The top five this week were Cliff, Randy Crawford, Kim Wilde, Stars on 45 and Motorhead, with the highest new entry being Wah! (#33 - before they were mighty!).

Wikipedia tells us its their (they make it clear Toyah is the band, not the singer) third album and "original vinyl issues of the album came complete with a colour insert featuring photographs of the band wrapped in bandages, with various exposed body parts sprayed gold" - such a shame I missed that! And that's about your lot - looking at their entry to pad things out, they were only active for six years ('77-'83) but they managed to have 22 band members during that time! Critically, the only word is a "favourable" review from Melody Maker and commercially, it did best here but did get to #30 in Finland and #20 in Norway (those crazy Scandinavians!).

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version of this for two quid and if you want to go mad, then you're out of luck because the most you can spend is £30 - I suspect more people view this with fondness rather than any level of essentiality (yes, that is a word - I Googled it). But I thought it was a decent-enough fun slice of eccentricity from the early 80s.

19/07/81 - A most peculiar album

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