Nick Toczek's Blog

Here’s the third single from our album, Shooting The Messenger. It uses a lyric which I wrote specially for the album. The credits are as follows: me on voca...

On Friday 13 March, shortly after the UK invasion by Covid-19 became a reality, I began writing one poem per day. I’m seventy in September and have both asth...

FREE SINGLE DOWNLOAD! FORMAT: Download only single TITLE: When We Men Talk ARTISTS: Nick Toczek & Signia Alpha LABEL: Mutiny 2000 Records RELEASE DATE: 6 Mar...

It’s my first collection of poetry for adults in 22 years. I’m really pleased with how it looks. Caboodle Books have gone for an excellent cover (by Joseph W...

DEBUT ALBUM FROM NICK TOCZEK & SIGNIA ALPHA Released seconds after midnight on 1 January 2020, Shooting The Messenger is the first album of the new decade. I...

Here's the cover of the download-only single 'Sea Shanty' by me and Thies Marsen... my lyrics and vocals, his music and arrangement. It's released today as o...

‘The Voices In His Head’ is the debut download-only single from Nick Toczek & Signia Alpha. The song is based on a close friend of mine whose ordeals are det...

It's now a couple of months since Thies Marsen and I released our debut album, The Bavariations Album, and the reviews are beginning to appear. Here's one of...

One of my hobbies is researching family history. The death of my father in August 2012 prompted me to start finding out about his German Jewish past and mine...

In September 1983, I did a manic drug-and-alcohol fueled ten-day Dutch tour with Leeds punk-rockers To Be Continued. After I’d done my opening poetry set, th...

Thies Marsen and I are pleased to announce the official release of our first joint album...

In September 1968, days before my eighteenth birthday, I moved out of my parental home in Yorkshire and into digs in Birmingham. Thus began my three-year sti...

I had my first slim pamphlet of poems published in 1972 by Aqulia. A couple of dozen more followed over the next two decades, all from small presses. In 1995...

The late 1960s saw me leave our family home in Shipley, Yorkshire to take up a three-year stint as an Industrial Metallurgy student at Birmingham University....

Here’s my third piece about the US tour I did with punk bands The Instigators and The Detonators in 1986. If you missed the other two, Noo Joysie’n’Noo Yawk ...

In August 1973, I was appearing at The Traverse Theatre as a performance poet on The Edinburgh Festival Fringe. There and at whatever other venues would give...

This must’ve been a year or so after the Millennium. I’m standing in our kitchen doing the washing-up when Matt, our eleven-year-old son, comes back in throu...

In a previous story (Noo Joysie n Noo Yawk), I wrote about the start of my 1986 US tour with two punk bands – fellow Yorkshiremen, The Instigators, and Calif...

Gaynor and I met on Christmas Day 1979. We were married on 8 September 1984 and became parents with the birth of our daughter, Becci, on 23 December 1986. Th...

In the six years between 1982 and 1986 I ran weekly punk and indie gigs in Keighley, Bradford and Leeds. Often the bands I’d booked and their entourage would...