DIDCOT (UNITED KINGDOM)
The Guardian [London, England]
November 4, 2026
By Anna Moore
Daukes was an outgoing 10-year-old when he met boys’ club leader John Phillips. As an adult, he lived through years of chaos and self-sabotage, while repressing his experiences. Then he found out his brother had been abused by Phillips too
In early 2020, Johnny Daukes found an old storage box in his loft with a big black folder inside marked Toxic Hazard. It was stuffed with old sheets of paper: every song he’d written, starting as a teenager, just a boy with a guitar, then for Fin, his 90s indie band, and then his five solo albums.
By that time in his life, Daukes was 55 and deep in turmoil. He and his younger brother were working with the Metropolitan police to build a criminal case against the man who had sexually abused them both as children. Every case of historical abuse can disrupt a family, but this one was truly labyrinthine. Their abuser, John Phillips, had gone on to marry their sister and have 10 children. Every relationship was affected – cousins, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, godchildren and every variety of in-law.
Initially, if Daukes had been asked why the abuse had taken so long to surface, he might have replied that, for years, he hadn’t known it happened, that somehow he’d completely buried it. Now, up in that loft, reading these lyrics, Daukes could see it wasn’t that simple. His song Shadowman was one example of many. (“All he wants is one ambiguous touch / a secret between you that’s never discussed.”) Heaven Is Hell was another. (“I mustn’t let myself relax or fall asleep / Stay still, stay calm, this panic will retreat.”) Then there was Squid. (“Squid’s been abused and his mind is confused in a way that he can’t understand …”)
“I spent weeks sifting through them and I was blindsided by some of the songs,” says Daukes. “I still am now. It’s nuts. When I wrote Squid in 1992, in my brain I thought I was writing about our soundman Phil because he had dark eyes, like a shark. Now it’s obvious that Squid was me, the 12-year-old. How was it possible?”
These songs form the basis of his one-man show Squid: A Victim Impact Statement, which opens shortly at London’s Arcola theatre. Daukes uses them as a route into a childhood, to tell a story that he is still making sense of. He now sees them as cries for help, messages in a bottle.
But the clues weren’t just in his songs. The dark references, the family secrets, hiding under blankets from footsteps on the landing, fumbling in tents – the themes repeat in his scripts and sketches, and much of his life’s work.
Daukes isn’t just a musician. He has written comedy shows for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Three. His film Acts of Godfrey, starring Simon Callow and Celia Imrie, written entirely in rhyming couplets, opened the 2011 Raindance festival and was nominated for a British independent film award. (He calls it a “poem that got out of hand”.) He was the voice of Eurotrash for 16 series, has worked as a motorcycle stuntman and, as his day job, is a film editor. He also published a memoir, Shadowman: Records of a Life Corrupted, in 2022. If all this sounds impressive, Daukes doesn’t see it that way. “I try a lot,” he says. “But at the first sign of difficulty, I jump across and do something different. I cringe at the disasters.”
It’s only recently that Daukes has started to understand what may lie behind so much self-sabotage – splitting his band, firing his agent, the breakdown of two marriages (he’s now on his third). “When I met John Phillips, I was 10, a very confident, funny little kid,” says Daukes. “By the time the abuse ended, I was 16, and I was like a husk, riddled with self-doubt. The most injurious thing he did to me wasn’t physical. Between 10 and 15, you work out so much and I not only didn’t work it out, it got perverted. I didn’t know what to think, I second-guessed myself, and I’ve struggled with this all my life. There’s another song I wrote in the 90s that says it for me: ‘Have you ever been strange, felt like you had been wrongly assembled?’” He takes a long sigh. “You’re just fucked up.”
Daukes grew up in Didcot, Oxfordshire, the fourth of eight children. He remembers his first 10 years as wonderfully ordinary and typically 1970s – the space hoppers, the Raleigh Choppers, jumping from bridges into the River Thames, taking out inflatable dinghies with no adults watching, zero health and safety. His family, he says, was “chaotic and fun”, but for Daukes, the dynamic changed radically when his mother became involved with Opus Dei, an international Catholic organisation whose stated mission is to help people seek Christian perfection through ordinary life. Every member has a spiritual adviser who is also their “confessor”. (Some celibate members also practise self-mortification with metal chains or whips, known as “disciplines”.)
What all this meant for Daukes was firstly that his mother, once the beating heart of the family, now seemed to be focused elsewhere. Opus Dei became her central reference point. Secondly, at 10, Daukes was taken to an Opus Dei boys’ club in Oxford, where fun activities such as camping and football were laced with prayer and confession. It was run by John Phillips, who was 20 – Daukes remembers him then as “ruddy-faced, asthmatic and slightly chubby”. He quickly singled out Daukes and became his spiritual adviser.
Now Daukes can see the sure signs of grooming. Though always obsequious around his parents, Phillips mocked and criticised them behind their backs. “He’d say: ‘Your family have no manners – don’t be like that!’, ‘Your older brother’s a bighead – don’t be like him!’” Daukes says. “As my spiritual adviser, I would have to tell him everything in my head, and of course with him that always came down to an obsession with ‘impure thoughts’. I had to tell him every single occasion on which I had a sexual thought or fantasy, and that went on and on and on.”
Phillips’s trusted role meant that no questions were asked when Daukes stayed the night at the boys’ club, and then later, regularly at Phillips’s home, or when Phillips took him away on trips. In tents, in sleeping bags, in spare rooms, Daukes would wake in the dark, a presence beside him. “I know that I always fought him,” he says. “I say it in Shadowman, ‘He’s an eight-armed beast.’ He was like a bloody octopus.”
Finally, at 16, Daukes was in his bedroom getting changed when Phillips barged in. “He had this sixth sense for when I was vulnerable,” says Daukes. “Closed doors were catnip for him.” He dived towards Daukes and licked his face – and this time, Daukes shoved him hard into a wall and yelled: “Fuck off!”
Five years of sexual abuse stopped there – and for decades, somehow, Daukes gave it no conscious thought. “I’m not a psychoanalyst but I imagine that I just wanted it to go away, so I probably buried it,” he says. “Except ‘buried’ isn’t the word. I think these experiences were hardwired and encoded into me.”
For a long time, in sixth form and beyond, he remained “on the outside” of friendships, gravitating towards solitary pursuits such as playing the guitar or distance running. For years, his only close relationship was with his first wife, whom he met at 18 – but in their entire 18 years together, he never mentioned anything of this. At his core was a truth he couldn’t share.
There were recurring nightmares – in the form of a vague dawning horror of a presence beside him – and there was anger too, a tendency to blow up his life. Fin is one example. The band had success – releasing four EPs to positive reviews, TV and radio coverage, they supported Elastica and the Cranberries and were supported by Supergrass and Catatonia. Still, after less than three years, Daukes split up the band to form a new one, which signed a publishing deal with Chrysalis Music, then also split a year later. Somehow, he believes, he’d imbibed the message that he “wasn’t good enough”. Daukes has since researched the impact of “shame” on victims of child sexual abuse, how it can lead to a deep sense of unworthiness, of “not deserving”. It was, he says, “like looking in a mirror”.
The basic facts are that paedophiles are known, trusted and, in a lot of cases, loved
It was after the breakdown of his first marriage, when he was in a new relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, that the abuse surfaced. By then, Daukes was 38. “We were in bed and I had this flashback,” he says. He shivers. “I told Sarah: ‘That was weird.’” As they talked that night, more memories and fragments came out – Daukes says he was “vomiting it up, like a cat throwing up a furball”. By then, Phillips was embedded in his family. Through the years, Daukes had seen him regularly at family events, birthday parties, get-togethers. “There was this unspoken thing that he was a bit weird, a bit handsy,” he says. “To me, he was just this buffoon.”
Days later, while Daukes was still reeling from his new memories, his brother Nick came to stay. “Nick is six years younger and very, very different to me,” says Daukes. “He’d joined the Royal Marines, the Special Boat Service. He’s very bright, very funny. I have so much admiration for him.
“We’d had a load to drink; we were walking to the living room with a bottle of brandy when I stopped and said: ‘I was abused by John Phillips.’ I saw his eyes well up a bit and he just said: ‘Me too.’” For Daukes, it was as if all the air was sucked from the room. “We talked for hours,” he says. “Both of us were crying our eyes out. The only person who truly understood what this felt like was there in front of us.”
Many more years passed before they found any kind of justice. The brothers had quickly called the police child protection unit closest to where Phillips – and their sister, and their 10 nieces and nephews – lived. Shortly after, their home was raided by the Criminal Investigation Department. The wider family’s reaction quickly seemed to morph from shock and sympathy for Daukes and his brother to impatience to minimisation. Daukes says his mum urged them to think of his sister and the children. He remembers an awkward call from his dad, saying: “Look, this business … don’t you think it’s gone far enough?”
Ultimately, a family member hand-delivered a letter from Phillips that carried a full confession. In it, Phillips said that he’d been raised in a loveless family and had “fallen in love” with Daukes and Nick, confusing it for sexual urges. He stated that he’d never abused another child and, should any other victim present themselves, they could take this letter to the police. Daukes eventually withdrew the charges and the case collapsed. “It’s really hard to understand,” he says, “a decision I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to understand.”
It wasn’t until 2019, when they learned there had been not just a third victim but a fourth, that the two brothers went back to the police. Earlier this year, Phillips pleaded guilty to 11 charges of sexual abuse and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“For me, what that’s done is remove any doubt,” says Daukes. “In my family, there was always this moral ambiguity and ambivalence, and this has removed any of that. He was tried in a court of law, we all went to the sentencing and heard 32 pages read out, the submission for the prosecution, and it did not spare any detail. A lot of people came away saying: ‘I had no idea.’” Daukes’ two daughters, Pepper, 18, and Betty, 22, were there too. At the end, Daukes apologised for all they’d had to hear. Pepper gave him a huge hug and said: “It was a lot.” “I could have called my bloody book that!” says Daukes. “It was a lot!”
He thinks he’s calmer now, and credits his third wife, Julie, with much of this – they’ve been together for about 16 years. “She has been absolutely essential,” says Daukes. They live in Putney in south-west London, but when we meet it’s a few miles away at the home of Sarah, the mother of his children. Pepper shows me to his studio at the bottom of the garden, where he’s putting the finishing touches to his show. “We all rub along together,” says Daukes. “It’s amicable.”
Recovery is slow but he believes it’s happening. “It’s very, very gentle,” he says. “If what I had was like tar that had hardened on a plate, you can’t go at it with a knife. You have to rub it and rub it and gently, gently, you start to believe it’s coming off. It’s gradually eroding.”
This play, retelling his story before an audience, is part of this process – though, for Daukes, his message goes beyond the personal. “When I finished my book, I sent the manuscript to 70 people – lawyers, agents, friends, editors – and more than one in 10 came back saying that the material was a bit close to them and it wasn’t something they’d ever admitted before. Man, this is widespread,” he says. “In a time where the phrase ‘paedo’ is basically used as a hand grenade to chuck at someone with different cultural or political views, the basic facts are that paedophiles are known, trusted and, in a lot of cases, loved. They’re fathers, grandfathers, uncles, stepfathers. And that’s the truth of it.”
Squid: A Victim Impact Statement is at Arcola theatre, London, from 11 to 14 November
In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International