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Wild, waspish and whip-smart, there are few rock stars as great as David Johansen | Alexis Petridis

He looked the part – and sounded even better. And the frontman of New York Dolls, who has died aged 75, was deeper than many gave him credit for

Frontman David Johansen never appears to stop talking throughout, an endless, wildly entertaining source of tall tales – at one juncture, he claims to have been an underage star of gay porn films – hysterical bitching about other artists (John Lennon is an “asshole hypocrite”, Keith Richards is “past it”, Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter has “terrible piggy eyes”) and eminently quotable statements: “We attract only degenerates to our concerts”; “We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.” Whatever you made of New York Dolls’ music – and, as the evident distaste with which host Bob Harris greeted their appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test proved, it was nothing if not divisive – you would have a hard time arguing that Johansen wasn’t fantastically good at the business of being a rock star. Their early residency at the Lower East Side’s Mercer Arts Centre attracted not just an equally flamboyant crowd of followers, but celebrities including David Bowie, Elton John, Lou Reed and Bette Midler, while Rod Stewart invited them to support Faces in London before they’d even released a note of music. Vietnamese Baby pondered the effects of the Vietnam war and collective guilt on attitudes to hedonism (“everything connects,” it suggests); Frankenstein was a garbled hymn to the alternately glitzy and grubby allure of New York; Subway Train quoted the lyrics of the 19th-century folk song I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.

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