Toyah Wilcox, pictured below, reveals to Steve Pratt how she found her hormonal side in spite of living the kind of life that doesn’t lend itself to motherhood and being a housewife

HORMONAL Housewives is the title of the show, but Toyah Willcox isn’t one of them. Only on stage every night in the show of that name. She doesn’t have children or teenagers, and has lived a life out of the ordinary, mainly in a man’s world.

She’s gone from Derek Jarman’s punk movie Jubilee to playing Billie Piper’s mother in Diary Of A Call Girl on TV, she’s flown high as Peter Pan on stage and continued to rock with her band in concert.

It’s difficult to pin down Willcox, but we know where she’ll be in coming months – on tour in Hormonal Housewives with Julie Coombe and Sarah Jane Buckley. A series of one-nighters brings the show to Newcastle, York, Billingham and Darlington.

Willcox didn’t know the show – which toured last year with Margi Clarke – until the script was sent to her. She laughed and was intrigued by this all-female three-hander. She enjoyed the attitude of the script and the fact that it wasn’t making a political statement. In short, she liked it because it was fun.

“It’s comedy from beginning to end. It’s all humour that’s aimed at women. Miranda Hart meets Smack the Pony. It’s total comedy,” she emphasises.

Men are welcome, she says, although I’d fear for their lives or at least their trousers. Willcox says the show is fine for men who like women, but not perhaps for those who find women “overpowering and difficult to deal with”.

The piece is written by Julie Coombs (with John McIsaac) who has done previous tours, so knows both the material and the audience for it very well indeed. Willcox’s only input is in a party scene where the actresses contributed their own experiences.

Some topics discussed are out of her realm. She’s doesn’t, for instance, have children and it follows that she has no experience of raising teenagers.

So rather than looking at subject with fresh eyes, she’s viewing it with totally new eyes. At least 99 per cent of the audience, she believes, will have intimate knowledge of the subjects raised.

“So it’s been very interesting and intriguing. My life is about a rock band, acting, writing songs and travelling. So, it’s an alien piece, but that doesn’t mean I cannot be part of it. It’s all things that women find interesting,” she says.

BEING a singer and musician much of her working life has been in a man’s world.

She’s never had to look after a baby. She doesn’t even have to mind her language because she’s with men the whole time. No wonder she says Hormonal Housewives is a completely new experience for her.

She tells (in the press notes for Hormonal Housewives) how one of her earliest hormonal moments was at the age of eight when her “even more horomonal” mother took her to see The Sound Of Music seven times in the hope it would make her more lady-like. It didn’t work.

By the time she was approaching 30 “all hell was breaking out inside my body,” she reports. “I had performed all over the world, been in the trickiest situations imaginable, but nothing prepared me for the hormonal changes you experience in your thirties. Why don’t they teach you this at school?

“The highs. The lows. The PMS. The food cravings.

The cold feet. The weight gain. The bloating.

HELL. My way of dealing with it was to work, work and work. In fact I worked so hard I forgot to have children, but I did find a husband.”

Although her thirties were hormonal hell, her forties were fantastic. “I sang my way through this decade, starring in Calamity Jane in the West End, performing at Wembley and touring stadiums in the Hear And Now shows.”

Hormonal Housewives is enjoyable, she says, because it’s light-hearted as women share their stories. “There are scenes at the school gate and jogging and a lot of talk about weight and labour and divorce and men,” says Willcox.

“I have not lived my life from a feminist bubble, probably because feminism made my life possible when I was a child in the 1960s. I very likely lived through a generational shift.”

The touring aspect of Hormonal Housewives doesn’t worry her because she’s used to long periods away from home. “I’m in America a lot and Europe a lot with the music. It’s only unusual in that the longest I’ll be away is two weeks.”

There’s music in the show, sandwiching the scenes together, but it’s not a musical, she says.

“Even though there’s a script it’s very much performed as stand-up and we encourage the audience to be part of it.”

Willcox does a variety of things but doesn’t pick and choose. “I do what I do, I don’t do what I do by preference. I’m an artist who writes, who sings, who acts.

I don’t cross things out with a preference." Tour dates:

  • Newcastle Mill Volvo Tyne Theatre, April 14. Box Office 0844-4939999 and millvolvotynetheatre.co.uk
  • Billingham Forum, April 15. 01642-552663 and forumtheatrebillingham.co.uk
  • York Grand Opera House, April 18. 0844-8713024 and atgtickets.com/york
  • Darlington Civic, May 8. 01325-486555 and darlingtonarts.co.uk