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

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

• News – David Johansen, frontman of New York Dolls, dies aged 75
• Gallery – David Johansen: a life in pictures

Nick Kent’s fabled 1974 NME piece about New York Dolls, Dead End Kids on the Champs-Élysées, is packed with characters and incident. The band have arrived in France after a showcase gig at London boutique Biba, marred by various members getting caught while attempting to shoplift from the store. Their famously dissolute guitarist Johnny Thunders vomits copiously in front of the assembled press at a record company reception to welcome the band to France, then pukes again midway through a “horrendous, tuneless” Dolls gig at Paris’s prestigious Olympia theatre. Bassist Arthur Kane, a large man clad in a ballerina’s tutu who apparently looks “like he’d just been run over by a truck load of Valium” confides that he’s in fear of his life: the last groupie he slept with tied him up in his sleep and attempted to cut off his thumb with a knife.

And yet, even in such exalted company, there’s no doubt who the star of the show is. 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.

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Trump says in social media post he plans to pardon the late Pete Rose

  • US president says he will issue ‘complete PARDON’
  • Career hits leader was given lifetime ban from baseball

US president Donald Trump says he plans to issue “a complete PARDON of Pete Rose”, baseball’s late career hits leader who was banned from MLB and the Hall of Fame for sports betting.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday night to say Rose, who died in September at 83, “shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING”.

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Soul singer Angie Stone dies in a car crash at 63

The star, who had been in the Sequence before solo hit Wish I Didn’t Miss You, was died from her injuries in Alabama

Singer Angie Stone, known for her hit Wish I Didn’t Miss You, has died at the age of 63.

A representative for the singer confirmed to Variety that Stone was killed in a car crash in Montgomery, Alabama. She had reportedly been on her way home from a show and was the only person who died in the crash.

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Trump officials fume at Zelenskyy for disregarding advice before meeting

Officials say minerals deal would serve as commitment to US security guarantee and Ukraine leader shouldn’t have pressed issue

Inside the Trump White House, officials blamed the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, and expressed frustration that he pushed for security guarantees even though the US had made clear they wanted to negotiate that later, according to people familiar with the matter.

The officials had told their Ukrainian counterparts in advance of the meeting that Trump wanted to sign an economic partnership this week at a ministerial level, as aides worked on the details about security guarantees.

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