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

Anna Chen 21 April 2025, Neil Hornick

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.

In 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.

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.

He leaves a wife and daughter, Savka and Maya.

Listen to Neil’s interview with Unfinished Histories.

Neil Hornick — I just noticed for the first time that his luggage label reads “Survivor” and I blubbed.

The Steampunk Opium Wars

VIDEO of Neil Hornick in costume as Captain Ironside, 2013

Neil Hornick at Unfinished Histories in Camden, 2013.

The Steampunk Opium Wars: inside the belly of the beast.

Neil Hornick’s interview with Unfinished Histories.