ARTIST’S ANARCHIC GRAPHICS HELPED DEFINE STYLE OF THE SEX PISTOLS
Jamie Reid, whose searing cover art and other graphics for the Sex Pistols, featuring ransom-note lettering and defaced images of the queen, outraged polite British society nearly as much as the seminal punk band’s anarchic anthems and obscenity-laced tirades, died Aug. 8 at his home in Liverpool. He was 76.
No cause was given. Reid was a product of the radical left of the 1960s, and his fiery political attitudes matched his incendiary art over a career that spanned more than six decades. He was eventually embraced by the art establishment: His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
But in 1970s Britain, a more proper era when bowler hats were still seen on the streets of London, his agitprop graphics on behalf of a band of musical Visigoths, doing their part to ransack the rock-industrial complex and the British class system, were enough to cause scandal.
His sleeve for the single “God Save the Queen,” released in 1977 as Britons were preparing to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, featured a stately photo of the queen with her eyes and mouth torn away, replaced by the band’s name and the song’s title. It hit with all the subtlety of a car bomb.
“It was very shocking,” Jon Savage, the British music writer who collaborated
with Reid on the 1987 book “Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid,” said in a phone interview. “The printers refused to print the sleeve at first.”
Reid used the same image,
superimposed over the British flag, for a promotional poster for the single. It became an enduring logo for the band, a punk equivalent of the Rolling Stones’ omnipresent tongue graphic.
With the Pistols, there was also a heavy dash of pranksterism. “A lot of people completely misconstrue what we were trying to do with the Sex Pistols,” Reid said in a 2018 interview with Another Man, a British style and culture magazine. He noted that he and Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, “were very much into the politics, but I was bringing a lot of humor into it, too.”
For “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” (1977), the band’s only album before they broke up in 1978, he conjured a sense of mystery and malevolence using cutout letters. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named it the second-best cover in rock history, behind the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Discordant and disruptive, like the band itself, Reid’s indelible work became as central to the Sex Pistols’ ferocious image as the rag-doll shirts, bondage pants and safety pins worn by John Lydon, the lead singer better known as Johnny Rotten, courtesy of the iconoclastic designer Vivienne Westwood, or the sleeveless swastika T-shirt worn by bassist Sid Vicious.
Brilliant marketing in the guise of anti-marketing, Reid’s designs sold the essence of punk to a baffled public.
“Punk was a very complex package, and it was difficult for a lot of people to get ahold of by the music alone, particularly with a group as confrontational as the Sex Pistols,” Savage said. “Visuals were another way in.”