Nick Toczek
Nick Toczek is a British writer and performer working variously as a poet, journalist, magician, vocalist, lyricist and radio broadcaster. He was raised in Bradford and then took a degree in Industrial Metallurgy at Birmingham University where he began reading and publishing his poetry. Staying on in Moseley, Birmingham, until 1977, he founded his poetry magazine The Little Word Machine, had several books and pamphlets published by small presses, co-founded Moseley Community Arts Festival, and toured with his music and poetry troupe, The Stereo Graffiti Show. Moving back to Bradford in 1977, he co-founded the seminal music fanzine The Wool City Rocker and formed the band Ulterior Motives, in which he was lyricist and lead vocalist. Continuing to tour as a poet and to publish his writings, he also recorded songs with a variety of bands. During the early 1980s, he ran a series of weekly punk and indie gigs. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, he ran weekly alternative cabaret clubs, usually co-organising these with fellow performer Wild Willi Beckett. Since the mid-'90s, his collections of children's poetry have seen him become a best-selling children's writer. Also, since 1997, he has been regularly collaborating with the composer Malcolm Singer, starting with their cantataDragons. By 2011, Toczek had worked as a visiting writer in thousands of schools, visiting dozens of countries worldwide in the course of this work. He is also a professional close-up magician, a skilled puppeteer, an authority on far-right neo-Nazi and racist groups, a prolific print journalist and an experienced broadcaster.
Life and work
Nick Toczek was brought up in Bradford, where he was educated at Frizinghall Road School, Victoria Park Preparatory School and Bradford Grammar School. He then took a BSc in Industrial Metallurgy at the University of Birmingham, graduating with 3rd class Hons in 1971.While at university, he began to read his poetry in public and was co-founder and co-editor of the campus poetry magazine, Black Columbus.
He lived in Moseley in Birmingham until the summer of 1977. Based in a flat on Queenswood Road, he launched his own poetry magazine, The Little Word Machine, in 1972. Eleven editions appeared before it folded in 1979. In 1977, as a spin-off from the magazine, he published and co-edited Britain's first substantial anthology of black writing, Melanthika: An Anthology of Pan-Caribbean Writing, under the imprint LWM Publications.
In 1974, Toczek co-founded the annual Moseley Community Arts Festival and was its director for several years. In 1975, he was a founder-member of the poetry and music group, Stereo Graffiti, which debuted at the Ilkley Literature Festival in May of that year. Thereafter, the group toured throughout the UK before disbanding in 1977.
Toczek writes every day. He says: "If I was an athlete, I’d need to train on a daily basis. As a writer, I therefore make myself write every day. It's a routine I’ve followed since I was a teenager."
In the late 1960s, his poetry began to appear regularly in journals. Some of his short punning poems appeared in The Sunday Times and again in two collections they published entitled Worse Verse and More Worse Verse.
After a poetry reading in a Birmingham pub, he was invited by J. C. R. Green, director of the Birmingham-based Aquila Publishing Company to submit a short manuscript. In 1972, this first collection duly appeared as a pamphlet entitled Because the Evenings. It was the start of a decade-long working relationship that saw Aquila publish four more collections of his poetry and an early novella, Autobiography of a Friend. Over this period, various other small presses also published single collections.
During the last half of 1976 and the first few months of 1977, Toczek was drawn into punk after seeing Birmingham gigs featuring The Clash, Ramones, The Adverts, The Slits, The Vibrators, Blondie, The Prefects, Talking Heads and others. After he and his then-partner and fellow Stereo Graffiti member, Kay Russell, moved to Bradford in the summer of 1977, they formed the band Ulterior Motives, releasing a single – "Y'Gotta Shout" c/w "Another Lover" – on their own label, Motive Music, in 1979. That December, the pair co-edited and published the first edition of the seminal indie rock mag, The Wool City Rocker. Toczek and Russell split up in mid-December and, at a Christmas Day party, he met his future wife, Gaynor.
Under Toczek's editorship, The Wool City Rocker appeared monthly throughout 1980 during which time it changed from being Bradford-focussed to covering the whole of the north of England, later editions each including a free flexi-disc of northern bands. A final edition, No. 14, appeared in the summer of 1981.
Toczek continued to tour and record with Ulterior Motives until the band split up in 1982. Since then, he has toured as a solo artist.
For four years, from March 1982 until April 1986, Toczek ran weekly punk gigs at assorted venues throughout the Leeds-Bradford area, sometimes as many as five a week, each with suitably lurid names. In September 1986, Toczek formed a business partnership with Willi Beckett to run a weekly alternative cabaret club under the name of his long-defunct show, Stereo Graffiti. The alternative cabaret scene soon took off and this project blossomed, continuing under different names and in a variety of West Yorkshire venues until the mid-nineties. It spawned various side projects including Bradford Writers' Group and a Festival of European Community Literature.
On 8 September 1984, Toczek and Gaynor were married. Their daughter, Rebecca, was born on 23 December 1986 and their son, Matthew, on 20 August 1990.
In the autumn of 1993, Toczek began a two-year stint as W. H. Smith resident storyteller at Eureka! the children's museum in Halifax, West Yorkshire. In 1995 and again in 1996, he was an MP in the Channel 4 TV debating programme The People's Parliament.
Since 1997, Toczek has collaborated with the composer Malcolm Singer. Their first joint work, a cantata using Toczek's dragon poems, was performed at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1998. Toczek later worked on a storyline and then a play-script in order to turn the cantata into a musical which was published as Dragons! The Musical by Golden Apple in 2005. While he was working on this, Toczek was asked to write a pantomime for Golden Apple. This was Sleeping Beauty's Dream which they published in 2003. In 2004, Perfect Pitch, another Toczek-Singer cantata, this time based on Toczek's football poems, was performed at The Barbican in London. A further collaboration, this time a political opera entitled The Jailer's Tale, was premiered at The Arts Depot, also in London, in February 2010.
Toczek has produced weekly shows for Bradford Community Broadcasting since it was founded in the mid-1980s His current show, InTOCZEKated, has been running since 1991.
The 1997 poetry anthology The Spirit of Bradford, which Toczek co-edited with David Tipton, won a Raymond Williams Community Publishing Award. A short programme on writing poetry which he made in 2000 for the Channel 4 Education series, Just Write, was BAFTA-nominated. In 2002/3, his poem "Responsibilities" featured in an award-winning TV advert. In 2004/5, he was employed as a consultant and contributor on BBC TV's new digital curriculum for schools.
Since 2004, he has also worked regularly as a professional magician. He says: "It's another of those things that I started as a hobby and it just escalated."
Toczek has been writing lyrics and recording his songs with a wide variety of musicians since the mid-1970s, releasing album and EPs, and contributing to compilation albums. He co-wrote the lyrics of the popular Babyshambles song "Baddie's Boogie".
His first full-length political book, "Haiters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and the UK Far-Right", was published by Routledge at the end of 2015. He is currently working on the follow-up, "Farage Faces Foreigners", covering the history of British Euro-scepticism, Islamophobia and wider xenophobia.
Toczek has released two albums with German musician Thies Marsen. Their collaboration began in 2012 when Marsen used the vocals from a Toczek spoken word track on his own composition. Toczek gave permission for Marsen to use more of his vocals to be used this way and this led to the release of The Bavariations EP in 2012. More tracks were added to make a full album, The Bavariations Album, released on CD in 2019. A follow-up album, Death & Other Destinations: the Second Bavariations Album, was recorded by Marsen using Toczek's pre-recorded vocals and released as a vinyl LP in 2021.
In 2019, Toczek began collaborating with Matt Webster, former drummer with many bands on the Bradford punk and indie scene of the 80s and 90s, including Western Dance, Primate, Grim and Zed. Webster had begun recording and releasing material under the name Signia Alpha in 2018. In 2019, the pair started recording the album Shooting the Messenger, released on CD and vinyl in 2020. Although Webster plays drums, guitar, bass on keyboards on the album, a number of guest musicians augmented the line-up of Signia Alpha. These included jazz saxophonist Keith Jafrate, flautist Chris Walsh, bassist Mark Cranmer and guitarists Jack Atkinson, Stephen Andrews and Emmanuel Williams. Bassist Jonny Botterell and rapper Dee Bo General appeared on one track apiece. All are veterans of the Bradford music scene. The album was a mix of indie, jazz and funk grooves with Nick Toczek’s surreal poems and stories over the top.
A second album by Nick Toczek and Signia Alpha followed in 2021. Walking the Tightrope featured many of the same musicians alongside Webster and Toczek with the addition of guitarists Wulf Ingham and Simon Nolan. The album again had jazz and funk elements but was rockier in feel and included a guest appearance by The Damned’s Paul Gray, who played bass on the track “Best Wishes”.
Toczek and Webster recorded their third album in 2021. Due to the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 epidemic, most of the other musicians recorded their parts remotely. The Columbus Memoirs was released on vinyl and CD in 2022. Again, Matt Webster played many of the instruments with contributions from most of the musicians featured on the first two albums, including Paul Gray, who played bass on four of the ten tracks. A new addition to the line-up was Bradford singer-songwriter Harris, who added guitar and vocals to several tracks. The album is a mix of genres. The tracks that feature Paul Gray on bass are generally post-punk influenced, while the seven-minute title track is a Frank Zappa influenced improvised jazz piece based around Toczek’s surreal retelling of the history of the USA.
The first single from the album,