Jamie Reid, artist for Sex Pistols who defined punk style, at age 76
Jamie Reid, an artist who translated the buzz-saw anarchy of 1970s punk rock into images for British group the Sex Pistols, helping define punk art and fashion with works such as a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes and mouth torn away, died Aug. 8 at his home in Liverpool. He was 76.
The death was confirmed by John Marchant, whose gallery in Brighton, England, represented Mr. Reid. The cause was not immediately known.
Mr. Reid’s more than halfcentury career as an artist, graphic designer, and activist explored subjects as varied as ancient Druid mysticism, runaway consumerism, and the interplay of nature and cities, including a project in a 2016 initiative to distribute 10,000 wildflower seed packages across Liverpool.
His embrace of rebellion and irreverence fit perfectly with the punk sound taking shape in the 1970s with groups such as Television, the New York Dolls, and the Ramones, using strippeddown music and pounding chords.
Mr. Reid was far away from it all at the time: in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands studying traditional farming methods and working at a newspaper. In 1976, he received a telegram from a close friend from art school, Malcolm McLaren, who was getting involved in London’s music scene.
“Got these guys,” wrote McLaren. “Interested in working with you again.” The group McLaren had pulled together was the Sex Pistols, which took over punk with a snarling and nihilistic swagger. The Sex Pistols were introduced to most of Britain in an August 1976 television performance as lead singer, with the stage name Johnny Rotten, barked out the lyrics to “Anarchy in the U.K., as a woman in Nazi-style garb danced just offstage.
Mr. Reid took on the challenge of trying to visually convey the moment. He drew on his interest in an anti-establishment movement known as Situationism, which included work by artists repurposing advertisements and other corporate images. The Sex Pistols’ 1976 single “Anarchy in the U.K.” featured art by Mr. Reid showing a half-burned British flag with the band’s name spelled out in letters ripped from publications, crafted like a ransom note.
In 1977, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, Mr. Reid unveiled one of the most influential images of the punk era. He started with the official portrait for the queen’s 25th year on the throne, then tore away her eyes and mouth and replaced them with rippedout lettering of the band’s name and the title of its new single, “God Save the Queen.”
The song begins: “God save the queen/The fascist regime.”
The song and image were such lightning rods in Britain that the BBC banned its broadcast and some major retailers refused to stock the record. Mr. Reid created other versions of the cover art, including adding a safety pin through the queen’s mouth and putting swastikas in her eyes.
The overall effect of Mr. Reid’s work — sneering and insolent and taboo-busting — became the pillar of the punk aesthetic as it built momentum in music and style.
Mr. Reid created the cover for the Sex Pistols’ only studio album, “Never Mind the Bollocks” (1977), which in some versions featured a pink background with the band’s name, in disjointed letters, over a slab of lime green. (Other covers had a yellow background.) The group broke up in 1978.
Art directors, bands, and street artists adopted the jagged, torn-from-pages lettering. Mr. Reid’s use of DIY-style collages and black-and-white images from copiers also came to symbolize the punk scene’s edgy energy. Designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes incorporated safety pins, rips, and other elements that tapped into Mr. Reid’s vision.
“Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief . . . . Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist,” Mr. Reid said in a 1987 interview. “They belong to anyone who can use them.”
In June 1977, Mr. Reid was with the Sex Pistols on a boat in the Thames, blasting out “God Save the Queen” on a loudspeaker. Mr. Reid and others were arrested after they docked. In a neighboring holding cell were people detained for a soccer match brawl. They began to sing “God Save the Queen.”
“Our version,” Mr. Reid recounted to journalists. “We were there together.”
As punk style gained more general popularity, Mr. Reid was happy to move on to new projects. His outlier instincts took over. He didn’t want to be perceived as getting stale or cashing in.
”Radical ideas will always get appropriated by the mainstream,” Mr. Reid told the lifestyle magazine Another Man in 2018. “A lot of it is to do with the fact that the establishment and the people in authority actually lack the ability to be creative . . . . You always have to move on, and move on, and move on.”
Jamie Macgregor Reid was born Jan. 16, 1947, in London and raised in the South London borough of Croydon in what he described as a “die-hard socialist” family. His father was an editor at the Daily Sketch tabloid. His mother was a homemaker and active in local politics.
He first enrolled at the Wimbledon College of Art in 1962 and transferred to the Croydon College of Art, where he met McLaren. In one self-portrait Mr. Reid made as a student, he is juggling the sun and planets and McLaren — with hints of his trademark ginger-colored curly hair — is a smaller figure at his feet.
In 1970, Mr. Reid cofounded a left-leaning newspaper, Suburban Press. Partly to save money, Mr. Reid experimented with cutout words and images for illustrations. The newspaper closed in 1975, but Mr. Reid credited his work there as essential building blocks of his artistic identity.
McLaren, meanwhile, had opened a shop on King’s Road in London selling clothes designed by Westwood, who was his girlfriend at the time. They later shifted to leather and fetish gear, which became part of the evolving punk look.
Mr. Reid moved in different artistic directions, including abstract works that carried echoes of traditional African textiles, and crafted album covers and logo artwork for a band, Afro Celt Sound System. His work is part of the collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Gallery in London and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions.
In 2007, to mark the 30th anniversary of “God Save the Queen,” he released a new print of the queen design that he titled: “Never Trust a Punk.” He also returned to political subjects on occasion: making an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin in a balaclava to oppose crackdowns on the feminist activists Pussy Riot, and mocking then-President Donald Trump, who was depicted in a cowboy hat, lipstick, and blue eye shadow.
He started a public quarrel in 2009 with British conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who threatened to sue a student for copyright infringement. Mr. Reid described Hirst as a "hypocritical and greedy art bully” and made a piece using an image of a Hirst artwork, a diamond-encrusted skull, with the words “God Save Damien Hirst.”
Survivors include his wife, Maria Hughes; a daughter, Rowan Reid, from a relationship with actress Margi Clarke; and one granddaughter.