Tosches, who has died aged 69, wrote about everything from drugs to modern art – and his punkish
music writing pricked the pretensions of his peers
The late Nick Tosches would doubtless have been furious to be described as a music journalist. He wrote far more about other subjects than he ever did about rock and pop: biographies of sportsmen and mafia-linked Italian bankers, books about drugs, books inspired by modern art, a slew of novels and poetry collections. Even when he reprinted his early work as a rock critic in the 2000 collection The Nick Tosches Reader, he was inclined to dismiss it as “making a mess on the page”.
Indeed, there was a grain of truth in that description. Like the other pioneering rock critics who earned the soubriquet the Noise Boys – Richard Metzger and Lester Bangs – Tosches was clearly a lavishly gifted writer from the off, but his early work had as much to do with a particularly rabid form of iconoclasm as it did prose. Not for Tosches et al the scholarly approach of contemporaries Greil Marcus or the self-appointed “Dean of
American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau (“a pompous asshole,” according to a drunken Bangs). The Noise Boys arrived during an era, not wildly unlike our own, where certain artists had become so revered as to be untouchable, apparently beyond criticism: never a healthy state of affairs, and one they set about trying to dismantle. For Lester Bangs, rock music had lost its way since the mid-60s: what was needed was a return to the basic values that informed garage rock.