Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Neon Womb
2. Indecision
3. Waiting
4. Computer
5. Victims Of The Riddle
6. Elusive Stranger
7. Our Movie
8. Danced
9. Last Goodbye
10. Victims Of The Riddle (Vivisection)
11. Race Through Space
12. Bird In Flight
13. Tribal Look

Disc 2:

1. Ieya
2. Spaced Walking
3. Ghosts
4. Mummies
5. Blue Meanings
6. Tiger Tiger
7. Visions
8. Insects
9. Love Me
10. She
11. Sphinx
12. Street Addict

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14738 in Music
• Released on: 2002-04-29
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Customer Reviews

A monument to individualism!
These two albums are both excellent ( if your into that sort of thing). Toyah at her best before she became main stream. These songs have true meaning. Unlike a lot of Toyah's later Albums these two albums do not have too much of the fantasy element that Toyah became renouned for. The songs address subjects like abortion and prostitution and the new (at the time) wave of the computer generation. Also within this selection is the awsome IEYA. A must have for any Toyah fan. These albums are raw and capture a time long gone. It makes me want to dye my hair orange and pogo around my living room to be brutally frank! Why has it taken so long for these to be released? One final word of warning: these albums are incredibly addictive so be warned............

This really -IS- the best of Toyah
Thank you, thank you to whoever had the mad idea of re-releasing these albums on CD. Putting both on one CD makes them simply unmissable. Just to be clear - this CD contains the full albums SHEEP FARMING IN BARNET and THE BLUE MEANING.

You know how it is, don't you? - somehow your original vinyl copies of albums you never wanted to lose vanish into thin air and you spend the rest of your life nursing an increasingly threadbare cassette tape that you made so you could play them in the car. And every so often, you riffle through the racks in the more obscure corners of your local record shop and you find a 'best of' CD - but it never IS a best of. All it ever is is a selection of the tracks which were commercial and banal (and safe) enough to make it into the charts, whereas most of Toyah's real stuff was much too dark and strange to be played on the radio or on TOTP.

Buy this for "IEYA", "MUMMIES", "THE LAST GOODBYE", "NEON WOMB", "DANCED" (which is a very slow starter, but stick with it), and THE BLUE MEANING to name just a few.

While you're at it, you should probably buy THE CHANGELING just for "THE PACKT" and ANTHEM just for "THE MARIONETTE", although these albums are slightly less good overall than Blue Meaning and Sheep Farming.

-GG

Long overdue but well worth the wait
Having spent 12 years or so looking out for a CD re-issue of these two albums (which I have on vinyl but have nothing to play them on) it's great to see that they've finally been resurrected. They represent Toyah's earliest recordings, before she became commercially successful, and the general style is sci-fi flavoured prog rock with a hint of punk beat. Both albums are dark, bleak, experimental, creative and startlingly original.

If you're a fan of songs like 'It's A Mystery' and 'I Want to be Free' then you may find these albums a little bit weird - they are quite different from her later albums. But if you like music which is slightly weird then this is about as good as it gets. Toyah's training as an actress enables her to do things with her voice which other singers would never even have thought of, and the music combines melodic synth lines with a gritty, thumping bass which is quite unlike anything else you're likely to have heard. Both albums have stood the test of time really well. This re-issue is also very good value for money, with two worthwhile bonus tracks on each album.

Sheep Farming in Barnet is such a mature and complex album that it's incredible to think Toyah was only 21 when she created it. The vocals are incredibly expressive, and while the analogue synths place it in a distinct late-70s/early-80s niche it still manages to sound fresh and contemporary. Styles range from thunderously energetic, such as Our Movie and Race Through Space, through the more ethereal Elusive Stranger, to the downright weird, such as the brilliant and disturbing Victims of the Riddle (Vivisection) which represents animal suffering in musical form with a hallucinogenic whirl of electronic beats, disembodied synth fragments and bizarre vocal squeals.

The Blue Meaning is worth having just for the magnificent Ieya, which showcases Toyah's unusual repertoire of high-pitched squeaks, but the rest of the album is also excellent, and perhaps a tiny bit heavier than Sheep Farming. The token 'weird' track is Spaced Walking, with its very spaced out 'helium' vocal, while Ghosts has an addictive pounding energy and Love Me is haunting, heartfelt and beautifully strange.

I still don't know why these two brilliant albums have been unavailable for so long, but I hope they will now find a new generation of fans and belatedly get the appreciation they deserve.