Jonny Banger

“You just couldn’t write it could you?” laughs Jon Wright, more commonly known as Jonny Banger, as he settles into the sofa of his Tottenham studio and lights the first of many Marlboro Lights to be chain smoked over the next hour, and begins to recount his journey from mischief making T-shirt bootlegger to respected artist and fashion designer.

If you’ve been within a mile of a club, festival, gig or party in the last ten years, then you will have seen one of Sports Banger’s omnipresent, subversive, T-shirt designs. There’s the now iconic NHS tee, with the blue NHS logo flanked by a cheekily borrowed blue Nike tick. Originally designed as a show of solidarity with striking junior doctors in 2015, the T-shirt was nominated for The Design Museum’s, Design of the Year award in 2015 and has taken on extra meaning as our National Health Service has come under increasing threat of privatisation and had to deal with the strain of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Then there’s the upside down Reebok logo, or the classic Sports Banger branding, or more recently the white T-shirt simply emblazoned with the bold capital letters statement ‘SOLIDARITY WITH STRIKING WORKERS’, and recently worn by actor Samantha Morton during an interview on ‘Good Morning Britain’.

The tees are just one strand of the 34_DISCO_POGO Sports Banger operation now though and the brand’s show at this year’s London Fashion Week became one of the most talked about events of the week (singled out by everyone from Vogue to The Evening Standard). The brand has just signed a deal to produce a Sports Banger book with publishers Thames & Hudson and has hosted Mega Raves everywhere from fabric to Glastonbury this year, with line-ups featuring the likes of Mella Dee, Klose One (who shares the Sports Banger studio space and originally coined the name Jonny Banger), Jay Carder, Artwork and more.

Born in Colchester, Banger learnt his DIY ethos from work experience stints at record shops and plenty of time spent on the rave scene learning from his ‘elders’. By 2013, he’d just quit a job in record distribution in London and was “skint, eating noodles on his sofa” when he decided to make himself a T-shirt as a birthday present with FREE TULISA emblazoned across it.

“I just felt it was a classic case of a working class girl being dragged through the mud by the media and men in power,” says Banger of the T-shirt he designed in support of the N-Dubz singer who, at the time, was facing a charge of supplying Class A drugs after falling prey to a sting operation by the tabloid press.

Images courtesy of Sports Banger.

Quickly, people started to notice Banger wearing the T-shirt, and with some cash borrowed from Artwork – who he’d first met just three weeks previously at Snowbombing – he printed a load more tees up and flooded that year’s Lovebox Festival with them.

“We were trying to sell them out the back of a car,” he explains. “But no one bought them so we just dished them out and all the artists ended up wearing them onstage.”

Next came a Team Nigella tee as TV cook Nigella Lawson faced down another similarly hostile tabloid media backlash and soon, with the tees popping up everywhere, Jonny needed a name for his burgeoning business, so with a cheeky nod to Sports Direct, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Sport line (Banger’s rarely seen without his trademark Ralph Lauren cap and Reebok Classics on) and the sports shops he’d been obsessed with as a kid, Sports Banger was born.

“At the start I was just running it all on a hand-me-down smartphone Nick from Dusky had given me,” he says. “And I was running to the post office every day, trying to keep up with all the orders that were coming in.”

While there’s clearly a strong, mischievous and tongue-in-cheek strain running right through the Sports Banger brand, there’s also, almost always, a strong political message too.

“I hate the term activist or activism but at heart, I’m a raver and the government has always been rave's arch nemesis,” he notes. “There’s collective values and a duty of care with rave and that doesn’t end when the rave finishes. You apply that to your wider life.”

On top of the NHS tee and recent T-shirt in support of striking workers, the phrase ‘FUCK BORIS’ has been seen plastered all over the torsos of 20-somethings and teenagers at clubs and festivals for the last few years, courtesy of Sports Banger, while during the pandemic, Banger created ‘The Covid Letters’ project, which encouraged children to express their feelings on the letters sent to every household by the government during the pandemic, with the results eventually being shown at the Foundling Museum and printed as a book.

“Activism has all these connotations of being ‘worthy’, but I love to engage people who would never usually engage with something like that,” he explains. “I don’t like shit which ain’t fair and I don’t like hypocrisy and I’ve got my way of calling that out.”

With the runway shows, Banger’s work has become increasingly experimental and abstract. His Tottenham studio (dubbed Maison De Bang Bang) is littered with new work and pieces from previous collections, including three giant Union Jacks he’s turned into Grim Reaper-style capes and titled ‘The Three Stooges’ (“I walked past them taking the flags down on Oxford Street by chance and was literally stood at the bottom shouting: ‘Give them to me,’” he says), a dress mimicking a bottle of Lucozade, which DJ and producer Eliza Rose recently wore on the press shots for

her number one single ‘B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)’, and a postman’s outfit which Skepta famously wore on the ‘Top of the Pops’ Christmas Special in 2015.

“It was five days after the postal strikes had happened so I dressed him up as a postman to do ‘Shutdown’,” laughs Banger. “Obviously, his album is a first class stamp with his face on and it was on right before The Queen’s speech so there were all these little references in it.”

It’s this work which has captured the attention of multi-disciplinary artist Jeremy Deller who worked on the 'Covid Letters' exhibition with him and recently told The Guardian that Jon reminds him of Victorian designer and philosopher William Morris, recognising their shared belief in art being “something that everyone should have and not just for the rich.” It’s also grabbed the attention of ‘Brass Eye’’s Chris Morris who came to the 'Covid Letters' exhibition and ‘Spitting Image’ co-creator Roger Law, who has opened up his vast archive to Sports Banger. Both, perhaps, recognising Banger’s place in the pantheon of British satirists.

“You see five-year-olds wearing our T-shirts and then you see 85-year-olds wearing them and everyone in between,” he says. “It started in this quite specific London scene but has grown to be something everyone can understand, relate to and get.”

With record label arm Heras (named after the company who make the fencing you see at festivals), plans for a tenth-anniversary exhibition, plus talk of making the brand a little less UK-centric with their next collection, Wright’s got a clear vision of where he wants to take Sports Banger in the next decade. No time for sitting on the sofa eating noodles anymore, then. SEAN GRIFFITHS36_DISCO_POGO