Jamie Reid was the man who held music to ransom for forty-five years. The artist and designer, who has died today aged 76, was best known for his décollage artworks for the Sex Pistols including the striking cover of their only studio album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, and their single God Save the Queen. His ransom-note style and provocative attitude – one version of the God Save The Queen sleeve featured a Cecil Beaton photograph of Elizabeth II, doctored to give the monarch swastika eyes and a safety pin through her lips – provided punk with its definitive aesthetic and, as a bona fide anarchist himself, Reid remained dedicated to the movement’s ethos throughout his life.
By defacing pop culture and nationalistic imagery and pasting slogans cut from newspapers across his artworks, Reid became central to the anarchistic situationist art of the 1970s and beyond, and continued to use his art as protest over the ensuing decades, producing works tackling racism, political oppression, the criminal justice system, climate change and the banking crisis of 2008.
