Nick Toczek's Blog

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...

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...

It was June 2014 and I was at my granddaughter’s eighth birthday party. The youngest of the invited children was a five-year-old called Taylor. She was the g...

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, my proto-punk band, Ulterior Motives, played several gigs in The Vaults Bar which was in what had been the cellar of T...

I love it when people say something fairly simple and then follow it with an extraordinary explanation. Here are three examples of that. I was born in Bradfo...

2019 marks my fiftieth year as a performer. I first went on stage – terrified – to read a few of my poems in the main hall of the students union at Birmingha...

Whether it’s been due to a pregnancy or being gay, quitting education or having acquired a tattoo, abandoning a religion or needing help with an overdraft, w...

Travelodge provides cheap overnight accommodation. There’s one of their hotels at Toddington services on the M1, about thirty miles north of London. Sometime...

In June 1981 I received a letter addressed to The Occupier of 5 Beech Terrace. Written on behalf of the Head Postmaster, it read: ‘ Dear Sir, It has been rep...

We’re in a taxi in Gateshead, four of us, Gaynor and me and our two closest friends, Caroline and Paul. We’re up here from Bradford for a weekend. We’ve come...

There’s some kudos, a certain degree of cool to being a music journalist. Obviously, it’s got more than a little to do with the fact that you get to hang out...