About Me
A brief outline for the uninitiated:
We formed Toy Love in Auckland NZ as 1978 drew to a close. 3 parts Enemy and 2 parts Basket Cases - with both these earlier bands originally hailing from the South Island. Playing our first gig in January '79, we commenced to blaze a trail through the NZ music scene, sweeping along at lightning speed. Our disparate personalities and influences combined to produce a strange and potent brew. We were absolutely united in our passion for the music - not that we took it all too seriously, everything was laced with healthy lashings of black humour.
Terry Hogan (then working at WEA) soon took a keen interest in the band, and with his help and guidance we released our first single Rebel/Squeeze on Elecktra Records a few months later. After courting by various majors, in November we signed to new Oz indie label Deluxe, headed up by Michael Browning of AC DC fame. In March 1980 we headed for Sydney and its punishing gig circuit - ostensibly to harden us up for our projected trajectory towards London and beyond.
We gigged relentlessly for 5 months, and recorded our only self-titled album somewhere in the middle of it all. It's no great secret, and indeed has become part of the myth, how disappointed and unhappy we were with this record. We returned to NZ to promote it, and towards the end of the tour formed a unanimous decision to quietly disband upon fulfilling current musical obligations. The whole process including 500-odd gigs had taken 19 short months.
Over the ensuing years people tried to get us to re-issue the LP. Without original masters and the opportunity to remix it the idea was always mooted. Then in 2005 with backing from Flying Nun Records we re-released the album (its guts miraculously restored), and our singles on CD plus a bonus disc with other demos and some previously unreleased material. Collectively entitled CUTS, it was 3 or 4 years in the planning. The original master tapes were possibly destroyed in a warehouse fire in Sydney, but fortunately Jeremy Freeman who worked at WEA back then (they licensed and distributed the release in NZ) had dubbed a DAT tape off the master. Other original master tapes used in the release had to be restored, baked and transferred to digital before remastering, tweaking and mixing.
It's great to have the opportunity to present the music again, for fans old and new, and hey, we can listen to our rekkid again without wincing! We still get pestered to reform, but we've always been adamant we'd never do so. Our little slice of musical history shone pure, bright and fast - exhilarating fun coupled with musical traumas and dramas, and no doubt influencing and shaping us along the way. Unlikely that us Toy Lovers will forget those heady days anytime soon - they have a habit of sneaking up on you and biting you on the bum!
Read band members' recollections in the blogs above, click below for more stuff (archives, press, reviews, lyrics, member profiles etc) on the Toy Love website:
MOJO Magazine review: Issue 154: September 2006
TOY LOVE - CUTS (Flying Nun)
Finally on CD, the complete works of Toy Love: the roots of modern New Zealand
Toy Love were one of the most important bands on the New Zealand underground continuum. A democratically organised quintet, extant through 1979 and 1980, they are usually noted outside NZ for frontman Chris Knox, whose work has done much to define his country's sonic identity.
Toy Love's sound begins in hard-edged tracks like the exquisite Pull Down The Shades, manifesting frantic punk guitar motion à la early Saints. It ends in the repeat coda of Pictures Of Naked Ladies, prefiguring screwball compositional ideas Knox would later explore with The Tall Dwarfs. Along the way it passes many brilliant punk-pop and wave-friendly milestones. It's cool as hell this material (their LP, singles, compilation cuts and demos) is finally available on CD. Cuts is an important piece of the international puzzle and it sounds great.
Byron Coley - (4 stars)
Excerpt from recent interview with Chris Sunday Star Times 2005
TOY LOVE was a great live band. Apparently. Some times more than others. We were an odd mix, far from a traditional five piece. Jane and Paul played as a drumless rhythm section, Mike kinda followed my vocals and Alec punched out his wonderful guitar riffs with no obvious acknowledgement of everything that was boiling around him. This idiosyncratic approach made for breathtakingly stratospheric moments of ecstatic searing beauty and - just as often - an anarchic maelstrom of broken rhythms and stuttering, incoherent, hilarious cacophony. Both extremes were huge fun. It was the gigs that were competent and well-drilled that were dull.
Excerpt from Hogue (Terry Hogan, the good guy from WEA) from CUTS liner notes
Toy Love's music always seemed to be in a constant state of being formed and reformed, songs would warp and twist with every playing. So, for all its undeniable power it could seem unstable, almost fragile, threatening to burst out of its own skin, shards and globs all over the place - every gig was like another attempt to make this strange creature hold together and live. At times it would only take off at a few unpredictable points, at others it would lift off immediately and roar through the air - an astonishingly compelling, unlikely flying thing full of dark folds and flashes of light. The best stuff was transcendent, and the near failures were so often funny or had the buzzy pathos of a crash site, you couldn't look away.
