Sports Banger is the clever, witty and bootleg-heavy T-shirt and sportswear ‘fashion collective’, started by Jonny Banger.
It also stages fashion shows, has a record label called Heras and organises raves and club nights across the UK.
Banger’s most notorious products include a T-shirt that combined the NHS logo with the Nike swoosh, one with an image of Margaret Thatcher interpolated with a mounted policeman during the Battle of Orgeave and an upside-down Ralph Lauren Polo horse and one that asked to ‘Free Tulisa’, after the N-Dubz singer was stitched-up offering drugs to the 'Fake Sheikh' from the News of The World in 2013.
There have also been official collaborations with brands including Tommy Hilfiger and Slazenger.
Jonny Banger has joined political protests, set up food banks and organised The Covid Letters, a project that became an exhibition and a book that invited children to deface the Government’s “Stay at Home’ letters sent to every home in the country by Boris Johnson in March 2020.
He grew up in Colchester, the son of a psychiatric nurse who died from leukaemia when he was 15. He has been bootlegging T-shirts since he was ten – initially using a heat press machine, and selling fake sportwear via a mate of his dad’s (the mate eventually went to prison).
Work experience in a record shop led to raves, pirate radio stations and starting a record label. Which is where the name Jonny Banger comes from.
Last month he published a 300+ page thumping hardback book Sports Banger: Lifestyles of the poor, rich and famous that collected his work to date and included contributions from the artist Jeremy Deller, the writer and curator Anastasiia Fedorova and reviews from Vogue.
Today, 3o November, comes a special edition of that book, released at Dover Street Market in London – which will also sell a selection of archive Banger t-shirts.
After a decade, it’s Sports Banger’s first stockist.
What can you tell us about this new edition of the book?
It’s a special edition for Dover Street. We printed 100 copies with an alternative cover with a yellow print. And a number of them come with a bookmark, which is crowbar. ‘The essential DIY tool’.
And special t-shirts, too?
Yes. Dover Street delved into our archives, so we’ve got selected t-shirts from there. As well as a collaboration t-shirt with the KLF. Dover Street will be our first ever stockist. After 10 years – we’ve very much played the long game. It’s the only place we really wanted to be stocked. Because it covers fashion, streetwear and art.
Does that mean you’ve turned down other stockists?
We’ve always had people asking to stock us. But it’s never really sat right with us. Even when we went into Dover Street we said we wanted to be the cheapest thing in there. Which they said they’d never heard before.
Dover Street isn’t known for its bargains
Exactly! You can go cop a bargain in Dover Street now! Which I don’t think anyone’s ever heard of.
How did you approach putting 10 years of Sports Banger into a book?
It was a lot of work. We laughed as we were making it because we realised there was a copyright infringement on every page. Having the stamp of Thames & Hudson… it’s quite removed from what they do. It takes the form of a DIY cookbook. It was built to inspire, really. It’s the sort of book which, if I’d have got it when I was 16, I would have fully lost my shit. People have been quite blown away by it. It makes us happy to see it come alive.
Please explain the genius idea behind the cover
Well, early incarnations of it featured a pigeon. Pigeons are in my blood. My grandad was a pigeon fancier [the highly-rated Billy Wright]. He used them during the war and worked with the National Pigeon Service [pigeons were used by the Royal Air Force, the Army and the Intelligence Services during World War 2]. But we were really struggling with the cover. To make it punchy and say what it was. And I just Googled ‘Best book cover ever’. It came up with the first-edition copy of Psycho by [celebrated graphic designer] Tony Palladino, and it’s essentially the same font as our ‘Banger’ stamp. So we just picked up a ‘Banger’ stamp off the studio floor and ripped it in the same place and scanned it.
That Psycho font is pretty good
It’s fucking great. I couldn’t believe it when I Googled it.
There’s something to be said for Googling ‘what’s the best [something] ever’
Oh, absolutely. The tools are there. And with our work leaning into bootlegging, it was quite mad that the cover become a bootleg itself. That was never the plan.
Tell us about the KLF T-shirt
We’re working on a bigger project with them. But I asked Jim[my Caulty] and Bill [Drummond] if I could take their classic KLF logo, turn it upside down and give it back to the people – and they fucking loved it. We don’t normally ask permission. So it was quite mad asking permission from the Kopyright Liberation Front [one of the supposed names for the KLF, as befits a dance act known for wilful sampling of other artist’s records – The Beatles; Abba – without asking] for permission. I’ll keep the plans under wraps. We’ve got a lot of things planned for next year. We didn’t do a fashion show this year, due to being skint. Next year we will return to the catwalk with ‘Bangtasia’ which really blurs the lines between rave and a fashion show. The big idea is to democratise a fashion show, so all the people can come to our shows. Usually, we do 200 people and bring them down to our level. This one we want to ramp up and allow everyone to come. [So it could be] 2,000 people, so it realty blows your mind. It’s going to be great.
Going back the The KLF. They would seem to be perfect collaborator, given their background in DIY/ bootlegging/ provocations/ raves…
Hang on… I’ve got the back of the [Sports Banger] book here, where we really managed to nail it. [Reads] ‘T Shirts. Bootlegging. Rave. Fashion. Pop Culture. Art. DIY. Anarchy. Politics. Class. Activism. Pigeons.’ That’s the world of Sports Banger, basically.
Your dad got you into bootlegging T-shirts. But you obviously have a very good eye for graphics and design. Where does that come from?
It was only when I started Sports Banger that I remembered that history – from the ages of 10 to 15, in car boots and markets, selling loads of counterfeit gear. I think the editing process [ie: cut-and-pasting graphics onto t-shirts] comes down to DJing. That’s all about sampling and original hardcore sounds from Essex. I’ve got a good ‘edit switch’, I think. We don’t push things round for a long time. It’s usually a spontaneous thing that jumps out at us. We’re not sitting at a computer going ‘Hmm, put that there’. Any [product] retains the original idea of where it came from. The political side of what we do… it’s when you can really feel it in the air. That tangible sense of something’s goes on… people talking on a bus or smoking at a rave. That’s where we pick these things up. When you can feel it and you can’t help but be influenced by it. The book covers ten years under a steady decline of a government that we all share.
Have there been moments when those connections felt particularly strong?
The Covid Letters Project was amazing for us. When we put our work out into the world, it often explains itself back to us. And the fact that that was an online action – we suddenly realised that every childrens’ art competition needs an online action. So we gathered up all the physical copies of these letters… and we hadn’t anticipated that [one consequence] of defacing a letter from the Government was that we’d get lots of letters from parents saying ‘thank you’. Because it enabled them to talk to their five-year-olds, their seven-year-olds, about welfare, about the NHS, about all these things. How do you even talk to a child about that? But the act of defacing a letter allowed them to do that. Also a letter from the Government is a one-way thing. And it should be a two-way transaction. So to bring that communication out was amazing. That was community. And that was using what you’ve got. Which was not much. But, actually, you can make good things happen.
You’ve had multiple cease-and-desist letters over the years. Ten from Jeremy Hunt, the then-health secretary, alone. Did any of them make you think twice?
Not really. I never thought that what I was doing was bad. In terms of bootlegging, I see that as reclaiming the logos which are shoved into your face every day and giving them back to the people.
This is a shallow point. Both the NHS logo and the Nike swoosh are great, aren’t they?
They are fucking great! I love a great logo. And sometimes turning it upside down is all you need to do.
What makes a great logo?
It’s got to be punchy and simple. Maybe some nice angles on it. It’s got to take the form of one shape. Logos that are all over the place, with loads of different parts, don’t really work for me. Turing the Burberry logo upside down doesn’t work. It’s not a nice logo.
How did the T-shirts lead to the fashion shows?
My first studio was next door to Tottenham Textiles [north London sportswear ‘atelier’]. I knew about music equipment and music studios. But I was now in a studio that had all these machines. So it was understanding the process. If you’re going to build a house, you’re going to have an electrician, a plumber, a bricklayer… so it’s understanding to make clothes you’re going to have a pattern cutter, you’ve got a machinist, you’ve got the grading people. Knowing that process really helped us. T-shirts were our original method [of getting a message across] and now clothes could be that, too. For the fashion shows we always take out cues from the T-shirts. So the ‘Free Tulisa’ T-shirt was reinterpreted as a pink two-piece Chanel [suit], with ‘Free’ embroidered over it, which replicated a pink suit which Tulisa wore into court [for her drugs trial which dramatically collapsed in 2014]. Or the NHS logo t-shirt, which had all the cease-and-desist letters from the Government. And also the letters of thanks from health care workers – they were printed onto scrubs and worn by a midwife down the catwalk. The Team Nigella [parka] was made using the newspapers I collected at the time where she [Nigella Lawson] was being dragged through he mud by the tabloids. We scanned those newspapers and made a giant parka out of that.
Lucozade sponsored one of your shows. Someone smart is working in their marketing department
With that show [2022’s ‘The People Deserve Beauty’] we had already created NRG! t-shirts [riffing on Lucozade Energy]. I went through my phone and remembered I had a number ‘Wesley Lucozade’. And on the off-chance I called him up and they came on as an official sponsor the week before the event. So then everything sort of became official. We made a Lucozade bottle dress. Eliza Rose wore it. And then it also ended up in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Would you mind if people started bootlegging Sports Banger designs?
People have done! And people are welcome to do whatever they want with our work. But there is some sort of honour amongst thieves. We’re independent. We don’t bootleg independent people or artists. We take big brands. As should be done.
Is rave culture alive and kicking in 2023?
It’s really alive and kicking! You’ve got huge venues opening up… But that means we’re losing small venues every day. And it’s the small ones that really cultivate the scene. But the free party scene is alive and kicking. You just have to know where to look. Hardcore will never die.
Have you been playing out much yourself?
We had a load of gigs this year. We do the Shangri-La area at Glastonbury every year. Our Mega Rave series… that’s still going. The last month or so I’ve been doing the book tour. Going to loads of DIY community spaces and bookshops. When I’m in a bookshop and I ask the people there ‘Have you been into a bookshop before?’ the answer is often ‘No’. So it’s been about breaking down barriers. The bookshop has become like the record shop for me now. I found the power of books during lockdown and I haven’t been able to stop now. Bookshops are my place of calm and peace and inspiration.
Next year is a big year for politics, here and in America. Are you optimistic?
Always optimistic. At Sports Banger we do it with a lot of joy. Sports Banger is a celebration of people and our relationships with each other. And you can’t help but be optimistic when you’re surrounded by good people. And it confuses people because we do things with joy and fun. And then we tell people to fuck off as well.
Fun isn’t always a word associated with fashion
It’s so po-faced, it’s insane! The most important thing is the people. Clothes aren’t anything if no one’s wearing them. Celebrating the people that are wearing them brings it to life. That’s what we always do with our fashion shows. On our catwalk we have professional runway walkers who are friends of ours. But then we also have carpenters and plumbers and ravers.
You can buy Sports Banger: Lifestyles of the poor, rich and famous here. And the Dover Street Market info is here
