NewsToyah & The Humans / Noise in Your Head / five-disc box set
4CD+DVD anthology features studio albums & bonus material
Noise in Your Head is a new five-disc box set that brings together Toyah Willcox‘s three albums as ‘The Humans’ and presents them to a wider audience with a raft of bonus material.
Formed in 2007, The Humans were were Toyah, her musical director Chris Wong and multi-instrumentalist, the late Bill Rieflin (drummer for King Crimson and latter-day REM and many others). After a live performance in Estonia in 2007 (for the birthday celebrations of Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia), the debut album, We Are The Humans, was recorded in Seattle in 2008 and released the following year. The CD version of this album in the box set now includes four bonus tracks: a cover of ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’ featuring Robert Fripp, and three of Toyah’s original home demos, demonstrating her original concept for the ensemble.
Toyah explains her thinking behind the band: “I was very keen to work on an idea where mid-range frequencies didn’t cancel out the natural space of the voice. Always having been in love with the bass I wanted to create a trio of just my voice and two basses, allowing power, prose and top line melody to dominate the audio spectrum. The Humans were to be music stripped bare.”
A second album Sugar Rush followed in 2011, and the sound was expanded slightly thanks to ‘guest Human’ Robert Fripp, who performs on every track. A different version of ‘Small Town Psychopath’ is appended to the CD version in Noise in Your Head.
2014’s Strange Tales completes the trio of albums and now features a previously unreleased seven-minute version of the King Crimson classic ’21st Century Schzoid Man’.
As well as those three albums the bonus material included in Noise in Your Head includes Live at Scala London 2010, the first full release of the entire concert (16 tracks) which features Robert Fripp throughout and memorably concludes with an encore of ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin” and ‘Purple Haze’.
Finally, a DVD Live at Trading Boundaries featuring a previously unreleased 90 minute concert, and four promo videos.
All the discs in this set come in facsimile wallets and this comes with a 40-page booklet with some notes by Toyah and an essay on the period covered by Craig Astley (Toyah’s official archivist and compiler of this box).
Toyah dedicates this set to Bill Rieflin, who died only last month. Strange Tales bonus track ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ is one of his last completed recordings and was recently mixed for inclusion in Noise in Your Head.
In addition to the CD box, coloured vinyl editions of each studio album will also be available. Noise in Your Head is released on 3 July 2020.
DISC 1 (CD)
WE ARE THE HUMANS
- We Are The Humans
- Is It Wrong
- Twisted Soul
- Telekinesis
- Quicksilver
- Labyrinth
- Icarus
- Noise In Your Head
- This Belongs To You
- Demigod
Bonus tracks:
- These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ [feat. Robert Fripp]
- We Are The Humans [Toyah’s Home Demo]
- Twisted Soul [Toyah’s Home Demo]
- Icarus [Toyah’s Home Demo]
DISC 2 (CD)
SUGAR RUSH
- Titanium Girl
- Love In A Different Way
- Sea Of Size
- Pebble
- Small Town Psychopath
- Sweet Agitation
- Playing In the Dark
- Snow at 10:23
- Sugar Rush
- This Reasoning
- Fragment Pool
- Put A Woman On The Moon
Bonus track:
- Small Town Psychopath [version]
DISC 3 (CD)
STRANGE TALES
- Slow Descent
- She’s Fast
- Get In Your Car
- Amnesia
- Bedhead
- Improbable Thing
- Sleep Tight
Bonus track:
- 21st Century Schizoid Man
DISC 4 (CD)
LIVE AT SCALA LONDON
- Demigod
- Is It Wrong
- Twisted Soul
- Fragment Pool
- Sugar Rush
- Quicksilver
- Labyrinth
- Icarus
- Noise In Your Head
- Telekinesis
- Sweet Agitation
- Put A Woman On The Moon
- We Are The Humans
- This Belongs To You
- These Boots Are Made For Walking
- Purple Haze
Disc 5 (DVD)
LIVE AT TRADING BOUNDARIES
Filmed live at Trading Boundaries, near Fletching, East Sussex, 11.04.2015
- Sugar Rush
- Titanium Girl
- Get In Your Car
- Labyrinth
- Amnesia
- Small Town Psychopath
- Telekinesis
- Fragment Pool
- Sea Of Size
- These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
- Bedhead
- Is It Wrong
- Quicksilver
- Sleep Tight
- She’s Fast
- Pebble
- Slow Descent
- Improbable Thing
- Twisted Soul
- Put A Woman On The Moon
- Demigod
BONUS FEATURE:
PROMO VIDEOS
- We Are The Humans
- Quicksilver
- These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
- Sea Of Size
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The signed Toyah CD boxset is £28 on Amazon today.
My signed copy from Amazon has finally been cancelled by them as unavailable. Given £5 credit as compensation.
Same here.
Good luck to the Amazon marketplace seller who presumably bought the signed box set for £32.99 from Amazon and is now selling it for £75 on the Amazon site. Perhaps that’s the one that was dispatched but couldn’t be delivered to me :)
This is strange, just received an email form Amazon saying:
Toyah & The Humans “Noise In Your Head (Amazon Exclusive Signed Edition)”
Estimated arrival date: August 03 2020
Fingers crossed that it’s just been a delay.
I ordered the signed version on the 5th May through Amazon and have now been sent a message saying that they are still trying to obtain the item and that they are making every effort to ship the order as soon as possible, I have also been given the option to cancel. Anyone else have this flag up.
Same here, ordered 5th May as you did, and still no box. The annoying thing is that if I bail out now and order the regular unsigned box, I’ll actually pay more!
I got a “Toyah Solo“ signed Box Set, but not in time for this one. Oh well, at least it’s ordered, unsigned.
Why is this set unavailable to ship to the US? What is the logic? So far, it appears to be unavailable anywhere else: not on the DGM site, or through Burning Shed, or even on Toyah’s site. WTF? They will be doing fans, followers, and all the musicians involved some serious disservice by only making the box available through the European market. Please keep us updated as to all developments, Paul, especially if you end up selling the set directly; those of us in the USA want to know!
I was so pleased to have the excellent evening The Humans put on for a very small audience at Bishops Cleeve church Gloucestershire. They put on a short local tour to take in the qualities of the beautiful churches in Gloucester. To sit 4 feet away from the four of them Toyah and Robert playing his soundscape filling the walls of the church was stunning and Toyah singing her heart out was an evening I will never forget .
Toyah’s put up their version of 21st Century Schizoid Man as a tribute to Bill Rieflin , search YouTube. So tempted by this set.
Paul, any chance of you stocking the non autographed version of this set? Im sure some people in other territories would be interested…like me!
We are the Humans? No. How can that be.
The Humans were an amazing group from the Santa Cruz, CA area with releases on Miles Copeland’s I.R.S. label.
Invisible Man – Lightning – Obituary. Classics all. Vocalist Sterling Storm’s lyrics on Get You Tonight are unforgettable: “Attention all you K-Mart shoppers, fill your carts. Because your time is almost up. You think that all the things you pay for are your own, but you don’t hear the guns.”
And from Get You Tonight, how appropriate for these strange times:
You close your gate and you bolt your door
. You flip your switch. You got maximum security. But your phone is dead, you’re line won’t work. They cut the lines. Technical Difficulties.
Yes, that was the Humans.
Amazon UK Exclusive and they wont deliver to Australia. Very Dissapointing. :-(
I’d love to see Edsel Records to put out a Human League The Virgin Years box set with all kinds of stuffs (alt versions, single version, b-sides, extended, etc) included. In times of covid-19 in let’s dream for a while.
Paul – can you please provide details on the DVD… is it NTSC or PAL?… is it All-Region?
The Toyah Solo box was NTSC region-free, so this will be the same.
Thank you! Good to know…
Hopefully this will pop up on another site that will ship to the USA at some point.
Three of Toyah’s best recordings. Experimental, atmospheric, unsettling, and shows off the power and beauty in her voice. The Scala gig was their first outing in London, only attended by about 100 people, me including. No one knew what to expect, what with the Robert Fripp starting with a sound scape for 15 minutes, so very glad to see this being fully released. Small Town Psychopath is the stand out track.
I was at that gig too,it was amazing.Toyah dedicated “Quicksilver” to me.
Wow..Toyah really spoiling us with all the reissues so far this year ..Fingers crossed for The Blue Meaning, Anthem, The Changling, Rebel Run, Warrior Rock and Toyah,Toyah,Toyah all getting the coloured vinyl treatment soon.
Unavailable for delivery to the USA. It is what it is in these times. Either way, hope to be able to source this here as this is a must-own.
I’m in! Saw the Humans twice, once with Fripp and once without, though he was in the audience. Both gigs local, Bishops Cleeve church and Gloucester Guildhall. Great shows.
Thanks for sharing Paul. As a follow up to Solo this is brilliant – wondering if she intends doing something similar with her earlier material?
She’s confirmed that the legal issues that caused her Safari Years stuff to be haphazardly reissued and then deleted over the years have been cleared, so the box set of that is extremely likely sooner rather than later. And, in the interview on the ‘Solo’ box, Robert Fripp confirms that a Sunday All Over The World box is being compiled.