Toyah Willcox’s career has always defied easy classification, and Chameleon – The Very Best of Toyah leans into that restlessness, offering a panoramic view of her 45-year arc as punk agitator, pop icon, and enduring creative force. Released via Cherry Red Records, this career-spanning anthology is the first to fully embrace the breadth of her recording history, and it does so with a curatorial precision that mirrors Willcox’s own chameleonic artistry.
The collection’s structure tells a story. CD1 captures the original Toyah band years (1979–1983), where the collision of Joel Bogen’s spiky guitar and Willcox’s commanding, otherworldly vocals forged a sound that felt both feral and theatrical. Singles like “It’s A Mystery” and “I Want to Be Free” may have cemented her as a chart presence, but it’s deeper cuts like “Jungles of Jupiter” and “We Are” that underline her singular lyrical vision, tapping into cosmic anxieties and spiritual yearning against the urgency of post-punk rhythms. The material retains its charge, a reminder of how Toyah helped broaden the vocabulary of British new wave beyond mere attitude.
CD2 shifts to her solo years, tracing the evolution from the widescreen pop-rock of “Don’t Fall in Love” through to the elegant theatricality of “Brave New World” and the reflective power of later songs like “Dance in the Hurricane.” The inclusion of “Roses in Chains,” debuted at Glastonbury 2024, bridges past and present, showing an artist still pushing forward. Perhaps most compelling is the unearthed “Worst in Me,” a collaboration from her late-’80s band Sunday All Over The World with Robert Fripp. It’s a revelation: intimate yet fierce, it speaks to the experimental impulses that always underpinned her pop sensibility.
The rarities disc is where Chameleon becomes indispensable. From alternate early takes of “It’s A Mystery” to forgotten collaborations with Kiss of Reality and Chris Guard, these tracks provide a skeletal map of the roads less traveled. They emphasize Toyah’s restless curiosity, her refusal to calcify into nostalgia.
The box set’s Blu-ray component is equally vital, offering newly restored videos and archival BBC appearances that showcase Toyah’s mastery of image as an extension of sound. Willcox’s visual language—equal parts glam surrealism, punk defiance, and pop futurism—remains strikingly contemporary. Contributions in the booklet from Shirley Manson and Saffron underscore her generational impact: an artist who cleared a space for women in rock to be confrontational, cerebral, and unabashedly themselves.
As an anthology, Chameleon is less about canon-building than about mapping Toyah’s shape-shifting continuum. Its triumph lies in revealing not just the hits but the connective tissue—the experiments, the risks, the unapologetic flamboyance—that makes her body of work feel alive across decades. For longtime fans, it is a treasure chest; for newcomers, a crash course in one of British pop’s most unruly and resilient voices.
