Nick Toczek's Blog

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...

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...

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,...

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

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

Here’s an update, especially for all those of you who came to the punk and other music events I ran in Keighley, Bradford and Leeds in...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

When my partner, Gaynor, was a teenager, she worked part-time at a chemist’s shop in Bradford. On one occasion, which she still remembers...

When our daughter, Rebecca, was a two-year-old I was in town with her. Suddenly she pointed across the road and said: "Look, daddy....