Neil Hornick, Phantom Captain of the counter-culture, dies at 85

RIP Neil Hornick, legendary writer, performer and theatre director

First published 21 April 2025

Neil Hornick, a pioneer of 1960s counter-culture and alternative theatre, left the stage at the weekend aged 85.

Like many others, I met him through his script company, Reading and Righting, and found myself ushered on board the good ship Neil. True to his counter-culture roots, he was old-school generous, creative and always on the look-out for non-conforming artistry.

It was no surprise he’d take me to do street theatre (my first and only) at Jim Whiting’s Bimbotown in Leipzig in the 1990s (another legendary, counter-culture figure, Jim made Herbie Hancock’s mechanical dolls in the Rockit video.) You couldn’t wish for a whackier, more delightful experience.

Neil was sensitive, super-smart and witty. His many creative outings since founding the Phantom Captain theatre company in 1970 – including The Serviette Union, hardy har! – fed an army of creatives, sparking their imagination and allowing them an expression.

The Steampunk Opium Wars: art as subversion

In 2011 (premiered 2012) I was commissioned to create an event, and help curate, for the Royal National Maritime Museum to mark the opening of their Traders Gallery, which included the tiniest acknowledgment of the East India Company’s opium trading — less trading and more inflicted on China at the barrel of a Royal Navy gun. Britain was two years into its “Golden Age” of trading with China after Prime Minister David Cameron’s Beijing initiative, and it might have been considered churlish not to mention this considerable part of their history in the Greenwich home of the Royal Navy.

The Opium Wars were not on the school history syllabus. So I decided to give it to the narrative vacuum thus far with both barrels in The Steampunk Opium Wars.

I devised a musical extravaganza with a small but perfect cast. I was the Narrator. Writer and guitarist Charles Shaar Murray was joined by bassist Marc Jefferies. The characters Lord Palmerston (John Crow Constable), Sir Jardine Matheson (a composite narco-capitalist played by Paul Anderson) and Queen Victoria (Louise Whittle) presented the British imperialist case. William Cobstone (a composite anti-opium wars campaigner played by John Paul O’Neill) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (Hugo Trebells) argued against, while Captain Ironside would be our eye-witness to the horror of the destruction and massacre on Chinese soil by the rapacious British Empire.

And who better to play Captain Ironside than the Phantom Captain himself: Neil Hornick.

VIDEO YouTube: Neil Hornick’s speech as Captain Ironside in The Steampunk Opium Wars, 2012

Farewell to the innovators and seers

Before the show we handed out foil wraps of opium from dinky bourgie East India Company bags — actually lumps of sticky Soreen bread I’d lovingly rolled over two nights (not on my thighs, I’ll hasten to add, for we are subverting the stereotypes, not enhancing them). Neil did this wonderfully well, enchanting the audience with his English charm as he handed out poison from a pretty bag — much like Empire but with less GBH.

Afterwards, Neil/Captain Ironside ushered audiences into a side-room where actor and former Cock Sparrer guitarist and singer Gary Lammin presented the Hackney Tea Ceremony, satirising the fragrant western tourist version of the ritual with an electric kettle and heavily sugared mugs of PG Tips, all in front of a Union Jack. Mindful of his current band, The Bermondsey Joyriders, Gary subverted the subversion by renaming his activity the Bermondsey Tea Ceremony: Norf and Sarf London battling it out in a microcosm of East and West.

One of Neil’s enviable adventures was his performance at the British pavilion at Shanghai Expo in 2010. I really wished he could have got me on that gig, a longing only eased five years later when I visited China under my own steam as a speaker at the Bookworm Festival in 2015.

He will be much missed as the dwindling number of innovators and seers pass over the edge and leave us in the final waves of what had been a tremendous tsunami breaking on the shore. It is a tragedy that later generations will have no experience of these figures.

Neil died soon after his book, The Magic Eye: the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, was finally published after decades of legal threats and blocks by the temperamental director who demanded less of the critique. Neil’s integrity was not for sale.

He leaves a wife, daughter and son: Savka, Maya and Kelsang Wangdak.

Listen to Neil’s interview with Unfinished Histories.

Neil Hornick as Captain Ironside hands out opium wraps in silver foil from an East India Company bag at The Steampunk Opium Wars premiere, Royal National Maritime Museum, 2012. (Actually squished cake.)

VIDEO YouTube: Neil Hornick as Captain Ironside in a post-show discussion at The Steampunk Opium Wars premiere at the Royal National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, 16 February 2012.

Anna Chen and Neil Hornick in Phantom Captain mode at Jim Whiting's Bimbotown, Leipzig 1990s (The bed travels across the floor!)

Dreamlike: Anna Chen, Jim Whiting and Neil Hornick on a bucking mechanical sofa at Bimbotown, Leipzig, 1990s

Neil Hornick and Susan Croft at the Restaging Revolutions exhibition in Lambeth & Camden 1968-1988. Pic: Anna Chen

The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Trump Mk II: the sequel. This time everybody gets whacked

First published at Anna’s Substack 4 April 2025

My mother taught me how boom and bust works using stick-figure drawings before I even started school. She drew a TV factory scenario in a series of pictures showing what happens when too many sets are manufactured with no-one to earning enough to buy them. If the workers are on low wages, they can’t afford to purchase what they make. If they are paid high wages, the TVs cost too much for everyone else to buy.

Which means at four years old I knew more about markets than Donald Trump does with his entire army of economic advisers pretending that you can bring back manufacturing jobs like the past five decades never happened.

You may think the Don is a good-hearted idiot whose ultimate objective is to save the US economy and is merely making the wrong calls. But his tariffs “liberation day,” following on the heels of DOGE destruction at home, evokes a raging geriatric punch-drunk well past his mobster prime, in the pub at closing time, terrorising the cowering clientele. “C’mon fight with me. One hand tied behind me back with tissue paper and me boys tooled up over there.”

If, like me, you believe his objective is far from benign and what he and his cohort want to do is make as much money for themselves and screw everyone else, then this is no foolish accident. He’s trying to get right what he wasn’t able to see through in his first term. The Covid Black Swan event crashed the markets just after his mates sold at the top of the Trump Pump in February 2020, allowing them to reload at the bottom. Fortunes were made, doubled and tripled.

February: The US is officially in recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, having expanded since June 2009 after China floated the global economy out of America’s Great Crash, 2008. … 13 February 2020: US politicians dump their stocks a week before the Covid market crash “Black Swan” event.

Maybe he wants to repeat the magic. Maybe he’s got the taste for extortion with menaces. A grand heist, fortune favouring the brilliant criminal mind and all that and here’s the Joker back in the White House with all his little friends.

America’s Wile E Coyote moment

In this latest round of feckry — Trump Mk II: the sequel – this time everybody gets whacked — his gang raced straight off the starting blocks, moving fast and breaking everything in sight.

Now it’s the turn of the economy to enter the crosshairs of the dreaded trade war trashing. Again.

In 2018 I wrote a piece pointing out the erroneous claims about huge deficits (looks bigger in tiny hands) by Trump and Democrats alike in their aim to carve-up a rising China: What’s Trump’s trade war REALLY about?

US President Donald Trump’s trade war on the upcoming nation has little to do with the purported goods deficit of over $300bn. As Gary Cohn, former Goldman Sachs supremo and Trump’s ousted top economic advisor, pointed out at the recent Bloomberg conference in Singapore, the sum does not, as claimed by Trump, represent a loss of money. It actually means over $300bn of goods that Americans were able to buy cheaply, as if you’d spent at Walmart or T K Maxx, or if you’d bought groceries from the supermarket. Having consumed the goods they sold you, you wouldn’t then demand your money back with menaces. Presumably.

Even back then, the US deficit didn’t include fortunes made by US corporations in-country sales and services to China which was estimated at $24 billion in 2018. The US runs a services surplus of around $20 billion. Plus US corporations make around $40 billion in profit. Which brings the goods deficit down from $279 (in 2023) by a good chunk to a total deficit of $219 billion. But the facts don’t support his sophisticated “Look what they done to me, waa!” thesis.

They were all at it. Schumer accused China of manipulating currency down when they’d spent vast amounts of their reserves propping up the yuan. And that was according to the West’s US financial press like Bloomberg and the FT.

Liberation day for who?

MAGA supporters hail his latest moves as “genius”: pushing money out of the stock market and into Treasuries to force Powell’s hand at the FED and make him cut interests rates under threat of a recession or worse. That means 401K pensions and other institutional investments up in smoke.

Forcing companies to build factories in the US, having already gone to the expense of setting up new operations in the likes of Vietnam and Cambodia to keep prices down for American consumers – see above what my mummy taught me. Costly, capricious and unaffordable.

Can’t keep egg prices down? Pauperise farmers by forcing them to sell at home at lower prices in a screaming economy. Farmers are already suffering losses of soybean and rice sales to China. Why not go the whole hog? Not that anyone’s bringing home the bacon any more.

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