[2] Rodgers was awarded the 1983 Vada Jefferies Prize Griffith University Queensland Conservatorium of Music.
During this time they performed in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and in 1984 undertook a tour of European Festivals.
Rodgers chose not to follow the path that led to a career in classical music, instead forming controversial sex-and-death cult rock band Madam Bones Brothel with Pearly Black and together they released a CD Family of Abjects in 1994.
[5] He later played improvised music in ensembles such as The John Rodgers Trio and Artisan's Workshop early 1990s.
In 2011 John Shand in the Sydney Morning Herald said of the collective, "[it] stands in the forefront of the world's improvisers ... shared harmonic and rhythmic conceptions and vocabularies ... For the listener, the upshot is moments of stunning confluence materialising from nowhere and an intriguing dichotomy between the intellectual and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the visceral.