Nick Toczek

Nick Toczek (born 20 September 1950; Shipley, England) is a British writer and performer working variously as poet, journalist, magician, vocalist, lyricist and radio broadcaster.

In the late 1960s, his poetry began to appear regularly in journals.

He was raised in Bradford and then took a degree in Industrial Metallurgy at Birmingham University (1968–71) where he began reading and publishing his poetry.

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 (nine editions, one per term, 1969–72).

He then took a BSc in Industrial Metallurgy at the University of Birmingham, graduating with 3rd class Hons in 1971.

Some of his short punning poems appeared in The Sunday Times and again in two collections they published entitled Worse Verse (1971) and More Worse Verse (1972).

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.

Based in a flat on Queenswood Road, he launched his own poetry magazine, The Little Word Machine, in 1972.

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.

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 (and manager) of the poetry and music group, Stereo Graffiti, which debuted at the Ilkley Literature Festival in May of that year.

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.

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.

He lived in Moseley in Birmingham until the summer of 1977.

In 1977, as a spin-off from the magazine, he published and co-edited (with Philip Nanton and Yann Lovelock) Britain's first substantial anthology of black writing, Melanthika: An Anthology of Pan-Caribbean Writing, under the imprint LWM Publications.

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."

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.

Eleven editions appeared before it folded in 1979.

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 (first with Macmillan and later with Hodder, LDA, Caboodle, etc.) have seen him become a best-selling children's writer.

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 (and later indie) gigs at assorted venues throughout the Leeds-Bradford area, sometimes as many as five a week, each with suitably lurid names (including Gory Details, Fatal Shocks and Natural Disasters).

In September 1986, Toczek formed a business partnership with Willi Beckett (performance poet, frontman of The Psycho Surgeons and leading light of the Monster Raving Loony Party) 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.

Also, since 1997, he has been regularly collaborating with the composer Malcolm Singer, starting with their Dragons Cantata.

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.

Nick Toczek was brought up in Bradford, where he was educated at Frizinghall Road School (briefly), Victoria Park Preparatory School and Bradford Grammar School.