Cartoonist, Promoter and sometime musician and film maker. Known as Brick.
Worked with Harry Stephenson of Plummet Airlines and Gaffa as a driver / roadie.
John told me a little about his career, March 2026.
“I was a RAF child, born in Switzerland. I travelled around the world with my parents until I got dumped into a public school. Not knowing what I wanted to do, I chose art, as a lot of us did, and went looking for a college. The only reason I knew Nottingham was because I’d been once before was to see Harry Worth in pantomime. So, I came up to Nottingham in the late sixties. I came up here because the coppers were big. I came up looking for a college and I bumped into Tug Wilson, the policeman. He was as tall like me although bigger build. He said the Nottingham coppers are the biggest. Back home, getting hold of clothes for tall people was a nightmare. Also in the AA book, it said there were four women to every man in Nottingham which must have been based on the rag trade at the time. Also, I’d never seen a city with so many trees. Those were the three things that attracted to me“.
“I started at the Nottingham Art School in 1969 and bumped into the likes of Harry Stephenson. Harry appears in films I made. He starred in a piss take of a porn movie as ‘The rampant Vicar’. We were actually doing fine art, there was no film course at the time so we made our own film course using our own equipment. Half a dozen of us. The college had to respond and get some lecturers in who knew nothing really. At the time the only place you could do a film course down in London at the London Film School. When I came out the world started to change. If you were applying for funding from the Arts Council put in for stupid things like catering, clap-boy all that sort of rubbish and becoming a long elongated thing and you are going to spend three quarters of your time with admin. It gave me an insight into what that world would be like. In our time at college you got a mate who could use a tape recorder, somebody else with a camera and got on with it. So I thought, film is not for me, and went into cartoons and comics“.
“Anyway, unlike a lot of the other students, me, Harry and a couple of others got on with the ‘townies’ and we stumbled upon the clubs and pubs of Nottingham, particularly the Imperial on St James’s Street, which was the place for local groups. Harry had a band. I actually played bass for Harry in 71-72 in “The Brothel Creepers”. I’m not really a musician. We played up at the Running Horse a lot. When Plummet Airlines started I knew them. Daryl Hunt he was the bass guitarist“.
“I ended up being the driver / roadie along with Cheyenne for Gaffa. Wayne Evans has never stopped believing. Never stopped believing in being a big fish in a small sea. I was there when Gaffa blew it onstage, I would say intentionally, when Jake Riviera and co were watching. Same with Harry. Jake was interested in Harry too but Harry wouldn’t leave the rest of the band“.
“So, I made my living as a cartoonist (Brick). A lot of us, artists etc, started on the social. I got into drawing cartoons for street magazines, CIA magazine, Nottingham News, City Wise, Peace news. Learning your craft as it were. Not really earning a living but getting by. I did work off and on. I was also a bouncer at ad lib before they were properly registered. “We want a bloke on the door and you’ll do”. Enterprise allowance in the 80’s gave us a little more money to get your business going. Flogging myself around London and eventually made a living for 40 years“.
“Brick started out as Navvie Brick, the Brick because I was regularly lending money to co-workers struggling to keep a family together on shite wages, the Navvie because I was precisely that, a tarmac labourer at the time“.
“And the reason for a pen name was because a female councillor called Barrett attacked me with her umbrella at some Council House reception when she twigged that I (using my real name) was the originator of a scathing A1 poster comic splashed around the city revealing she was an avaricious landlady owning multiple properties while also being an avid promoter of raising rents in her role as councillor responsible for housing. These were in the days of the notorious landlord Peter Rachman“.
It doesn’t end there…
“Amongst musos, particularly Gaffa, I was known as Trux (I drove their van), short for Trux Bonington, after the climber (I had a beard). It was given to me by Micky Barratt, who appeared with Trux as Carrington Fats in a number of A4 folded comics we concocted while travelling to gigs and I later drew up and sold for a pittance. Below are pages 1 & 4 of an issue… very early days, before I learned to draw!! (Ginger Jacket was John Maslen.)“
“In the late 1970’s I was part a of a group who organised the first ten ‘Rock and Reggae’ festivals. Plans are afoot for a 50th anniversary of Rock against Racism this year 2026 which rock and reggae was about and a possible exhibition“.
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Young ones, take this with a pinch of salt if you like but both John and I reminisced about those 70’s days (hippie and punk, whatever you want to call it) and felt that a modern generation wouldn’t know what we were talking about when we talked of a scene. Free festivals, art movements, bands, street politics, the dole, there was an unspoken community, music freaks, outlaws, something different in the air that we could feel. Today music is dispersed. Then it was focused. There was a ‘scene’. There isn’t a scene anymore, maybe a little here and there but if there is a scene it’s virtual. For a real scene you need physical contact with people for this world to go round, you need to be in a crowd, the sweat, the smell. it is the only way to know what is really happening. Mixing with different people can only give you a better view of reality.