New York Dolls frontman David Johansen dies aged 75

As part of the US band, Johansen played a part in creating punk rock, and influenced bands including The Smiths, the Sex Pistols and The Damned.

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New York Dolls frontman David Johansen has died aged 75.

Johansen died on Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson.

Earlier this year it was revealed that he had stage four cancer and a brain tumour.

Johansen helped to redefine what rock and roll could be, providing the blueprint for the British punk bands who followed, with tracks such as Looking For A Kiss, Trash and Personality Crisis.

Born in New York City to an Irish American mother and Norwegian American father, Johansen’s gravelly yet camped-up vocals were the perfect complement to the band’s cross-dressing style and hard and fast blues punk sound.

The singer began his career in Staten Island band the Vagabond Missionaries in the late 1960s, before being invited to join the New York Dolls in 1971, after guitarist Johnny Thunders decided he no longer wanted to be the group’s lead singer.

The reformed New York Dolls, left to right, Sylvain Sylvain, Steve Conte, Brian Delaney, Sami Yaffa and David Johansen, in the dressing room at Koko in London (Jane Mingay/PA)

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The band, who took their name from the New York Doll Hospital, a doll repair shop, released their self-titled debut LP in 1973, produced by Todd Rundgren, which achieved limited commercial success at the time, and saw them voted both the best and worst group of the year in US rock publication Creem.

Following the album’s release, the band toured Europe and landed a spot on BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, hosted by Bob Harris.

After the band performed Jet Boy on the show, Harris, who preferred the folk and country music of the day, infamously branded them “mock rock”, with the moment bringing the group to wider attention in the UK.

It is reported that Harris made the remarks after Johansen told him he had “bunny teeth” prior to the performance.

During their heyday, the band became a favourite and friends of David Bowie, with Johansen once recalling a story of the pair being catcalled in New York after a passing driver had mistaken them for women due to their feminine style.

The band released their second album Too Much Too Soon in 1974, bringing in George “Shadow” Morton on production.

Morton had worked with girl group the Shangri-Las, from whose track Give Him A Great Big Kiss the band took their Looking For A Kiss’s “when I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L.U.V” intro.

Too Much Too Soon saw limited sales, despite Morton’s production receiving critical acclaim for bringing out the band’s raw sound.

In 1975, the band appointed Malcolm McLaren as manager, who would go on to achieve success with the Sex Pistols.

McLaren dressed the band in red leather outfits and made them perform against a communist flag backdrop.

The change in style was unsuccessful and the band split up in 1976, amid creative differences and drug and alcohol problems among some of its members.

Shortly after their demise, the band would be quoted as a major influence on British punk bands such as The Clash, The Damned and the Sex Pistols, who wrote the deprecating New York about the Dolls.

David Johansen performing with the reformed New York Dolls (Yui Mok/PA)

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After the break-up of the band, Johansen embarked on a solo career which spawned four studio albums from 1978 to 1984, with former New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain regularly reuniting with him for live performances during that time.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, he would go on to have some commercial success, releasing four albums under the pseudonym Buster Poindexter, which saw a change in style to novelty, blues, pop and swing.

Johansen also embarked on an acting career which saw him appear as the Ghost Of Christmas Past in Scrooged (1988).

In 2004, with the help of The Smiths’ lead singer Morrissey, who had been the head of the Dolls’ UK fan club and regularly described the group as his favourite, the band’s three surviving original members Arthur “Killer” Kane, Sylvain and Johansen reunited.

The trio performed their first reunion gig at the Meltdown Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall, curated by Morrissey, which was released as a live album and DVD.

The band continued to perform until 2011, having returned to recording with One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This (2006), Cause I Sez So (2009) and Dancing Backward In High Heels (2011).

In 2016, Johansen re-recorded the Dolls’ Personality Crisis and cover of Stranded In The Jungle for Martin Scorsese’s HBO series Vinyl, which saw the singer portrayed by Christian Peslak in the series’ opening sequence, which shows the band performing at the Mercer Arts Centre in New York.

Scorsese also directed a 2023 documentary on Johansen’s life entitled Personality Crisis: One Night Only.

At the time of his death, Johansen was the sole surviving member of the band, after Kane died just days after the first reunion concert in 2004, Sylvain died in 2021 after a cancer diagnosis, Thunders died in 1991, and drummers Jerry Nolan and Billy Mercia died in 1992 and 1972 respectively.

Up until his death, the singer had continued to present his US radio show David Johansen’s Mansion Of Fun on Sirius XM.

In 2013, Johansen married artist Mara Hennessey, and he is also survived by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey.

Prior to his death, his stepdaughter revealed Johansen had been suffering with stage four cancer for “most of the past decade” and had been diagnosed with a brain tumour at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

She also said he had broken his back in two places, leaving him “bedridden and incapacitated”, in a post on the singer’s fundraising page, but said he remained “hilarious and wise” in his final days.

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