Build fails on Ubuntu with ScriptPluginFactory error

[dryprogrammer]

Ubuntu 18.04
openjdk 11.0.4

./gradlew clean build fails with following output:

dry@dry-Latitude-7390:~/dev/pencil-stencil-generator$ ./gradlew clean build
Downloading https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.7-all.zip
........................................................................................................
Unzipping /home/dry/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-4.7-all/4cret0dgl5o3b21weaoncl7ys/gradle-4.7-all.zip to /home/dry/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-
4.7-all/4cret0dgl5o3b21weaoncl7ys
Set executable permissions for: /home/dry/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-4.7-all/4cret0dgl5o3b21weaoncl7ys/gradle-4.7/bin/gradle

Welcome to Gradle 4.7!

Here are the highlights of this release:
 - Incremental annotation processing
 - JDK 10 support
 - Grouped non-interactive console logs
 - Failed tests are re-run first for quicker feedback

For more details see https://docs.gradle.org/4.7/release-notes.html

Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster)

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Could not create service of type ScriptPluginFactory using BuildScopeServices.createScriptPluginFactory().
> Could not create service of type PluginResolutionStrategyInternal using BuildScopeServices.createPluginResolutionStrategy().

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output. Run with --scan to get full insig
hts.

* Get more help at https://help.gradle.org

BUILD FAILED in 20s