The outbreak of musical and social anarchy in the UK triggered by the arrival of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s was not merely a musical phenomenon, but a sociological and political one too. Pivotal to the group’s tumultuous impact was the graphic design work of Jamie Reid, whose artwork for the band was as thrilling and unforgettable as their music, and who has died aged 76.
Reid’s sleeve for the November 1976 single Anarchy in the UK, with its ripped Union Jack pierced by safety pins holding the band name and song title in blackmailer-style cut-up lettering, set the tone (Reid also contributed ideas to the song’s lyrics). But his most enduring coup was the sleeve for the second single, God Save the Queen (May 1977), depicting the monarch (and based on a portrait by the royal photographer Peter Grugeon) in her Silver Jubilee year, blindfolded by the song’s title, and rendered mute by having her lips sealed by the words “Sex Pistols”. The image is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Reid’s original version of the design, featuring the sovereign with a safety pin through her lips and swastikas in her eyes, had been submitted to A&M records, but it did not survive the group’s farcical week-long tenure with the label and subsequent move to the Virgin label. In 2017 Reid revisited the same visual concept with two artworks that replaced the Queen’s head with Donald Trump’s, one of them bearing the slogan “God Save the USA”.
Record industry machinations and a ban by the BBC ensured that God Save the Queen reached only No 2, though it topped the NME chart. But the band’s solitary album, Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), adorned with Reid’s unmistakable artwork in pink, yellow and black, debuted at No 1 on the UK chart, and spent 48 weeks in the Top 75.
Reid’s involvement with the Pistols began when he received a telegram from their manager Malcolm McLaren, whom he had met when they were both attending Croydon College of Art in south London in the 1960s. By the time of the telegram, Reid was on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, working for the leftwing weekly newspaper the West Highland Free Press and learning the traditional art of crofting. Reid liked McLaren, and his Pistols work would earn him global notoriety, but he saw it as merely a phase in his career.
For instance, he regarded his work with the Suburban Press in Croydon from 1970-75, where, in collaboration with Nigel Edwards and Jeremy Brook, he produced literature for women’s groups and anarchists, as more significant. Reid described it as “one of the first community-cum-libertarian-cum-anarchist presses in Britain”, and it also created a magazine called the Suburban Press. It was there that he began developing his “ransom note” visual style. This was “every bit as interesting to me as what I’m doing now, or the Pistols, as it had its time and its place,” he told the Face in 1983. Reid felt a strong affinity with a British radical tradition that included Thomas Paine, William Blake and the Romantic poets.
The son of Nora (nee Gardner) and John MacGregor Reid, he was born and grew up in the Croydon suburb of Shirley, in south London. His father, a native of Inverness, was the city editor of the Daily Sketch, but both parents were steeped in socialism and left-leaning politics, and had first met at a Labour party rally in the 1920s. Jamie’s maternal grandfather, Robert Gardner, had written the book In The Heart of Democracy, focusing on themes of socialism, contemporary literature and Christianity, and had raised Nora as a naturist (in the sense of having an empathy with the natural world, rather than nudism).
Jamie’s father had lost his previous job at Oxford University Press after his involvement in the General Strike of 1926, after which he worked to support striking miners. From 1958, Jamie was taken by his parents to the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons.
Reid’s great-uncle was George Watson MacGregor Reid, head of the Druid Order in England and founder of the Church of the Universal Bond. Reid’s lifelong connection to the druids was expressed in his Eight Fold Year Book (2017), a collection of images and texts ruminating on the eight festivals in the druidic calendar.
He attended the John Ruskin grammar school in Croydon, then went to Wimbledon College of Art at 15. Two years later he moved to Croydon College of Art, where his rapport with McLaren culminated in them organising a sit-in. However, apathetic support from fellow students caused the protest to fizzle out, whereupon Reid took a trip to Paris in the fevered aftermath of the 1968 student riots.
Here, he was smitten by the work of the situationists, a group of avant-garde artists and political provocateurs whose roots lay in dadaism and surrealism. He felt that the mood in Paris “had a tremendous sense of festival, a tremendous sense of excitement, and a tremendous humour.”
All of this fed into his Sex Pistols work, combining with McLaren’s flair for creating outrageous publicity, but self-destruction was inevitable, indeed desirable.
Reid had many alternative avenues he wanted to pursue. He campaigned on several issues, supported Extinction Rebellion, created artwork for the band Afro Celt Sound System, and in 2012 sprang to the defence of the Russian female punk trio Pussy Riot, following their arrest for staging an anti-Putin protest in Moscow. Reid created a dramatic poster depicting a sinister Putin in black balaclava and lipstick, with text in his familiar cut-up style.
In 2018, Reid, who had moved to Liverpool in the 1980s, staged his first retrospective, Jamie Reid XXXXX: 50 Years of Subversion and the Spirit, at the Humber Street Gallery in Hull. In August 2022, he created Wildflower Wonder at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in St Austell, Cornwall, a “land-art” installation, using plants such as cornflowers, poppies and wild carrot, which ran until May this year.
Reid is survived by a daughter, Rowan, from his relationship with the actor Margi Clarke, from whom he was separated.
• Jamie McGregor Reid, artist, designer and activist, born 16 January 1947; died 8 August 2023
