This is the original artwork, made in 1977, by the artist Jamie Reid (born 1947) for the front cover of the LP Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, it is currently on display in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, as part of the excellent Cut and Paste survey exhibition. The text panel that accompanies the artwork explains that, what appear to be letters taken from newspaper headlines, were, in fact, specially printed (on newsprint), then cut out, kerned, and arranged on a simple grid (just visible). I love this collision of order/disorder.
Speaking about the cover, the Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McClaren (1946-2010) recalled “The only real thing about Never Mind the Bollocks was that it had to look ugly. We came up with the ugliest cover we could think of; that in a sense would attack the idea of super-graphics. I wanted to make ugliness beautiful.” The cover is notable for not featuring a photograph of the band: Jamie Reid said “What’s the point when you’re already on the cover of the Daily Mirror and the Sun – It’s just tarting up the sleeve and they were ugly anyway. I wanted the graphics to articulate what the attitude of the songs was, what the attitude of the whole band was…”
The unique artwork, made of printing ink and cut paper collage on cardboard, measures 271 mm x 271 mm, and is owned by the V&A, as part of the Theatre and Performance Collection. The final cover was, of course, printed in lurid fluorescent inks, which, along with the title, were, according to the V&A website, ‘chosen in order to be noticed and to offend … McLaren, has said that, to this end, Reid’s “style subverted the spectacle and commodification of every day life by being bolder and more shocking”.’
Although the sleeve looks simple, Jon Savage, in the book Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, describes it as a ‘printing tour de force’ because the sleeve featured a series of complex overlays, with yellow and fluorescent inks, both notoriously difficult to print. This technically-challenging sleeve, coupled with multiple changes to the title of the album and the track listing, as well as changes to the release date, meant that there were several iterations of the design, alongside a series of printer’s proofs that reveal the many attempts by Reid to get the design and printing of the sleeve right.
The design, which became one of the most defining images of Punk, spawning a host of imitations, reflects Reid’s interest in the ideas of the avant-garde political group, the Situationist International. Reid had co-founded the Situationist-influenced Suburban Press in 1970, after leaving Croydon Art College; he also collaborated with Christopher Gray on the 1974 book Leaving The 20th Century, the first anthology of writings by the situationists ever published in English. At the Suburban Press, Reid developed the style of radical cut-up graphics that formed the basis of the artwork that he produced for the Sex Pistols – Reid noted that “The images and techniques were very similar to those we’d developed over five years at the Suburban Press. There was hardly any time to think about developing a new style for the Sex Pistols”. Of the sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks, Reid said that it is “intended to articulate ideas, many of which were anti-establishment and quite theoretical and complicated”. “The Sex Pistols seemed very much a perfect vehicle to communicate the ideas that had been formulated during that period [the late 1960s and early 1970s], and to get them across very directly to people who weren't getting the message out of the left-wing politics of the time.”
More than forty years later, it is difficult to imagine the magnitude of the furore that the Sex Pistols, their music, image and their record covers generated. Punks were attacked because of their clothing and hairstyles: Jamie Reid was beaten up outside a rockabilly pub in the Borough because of a t-shirt that he was wearing that featured his own artwork for the Pistol’s God Save the Queen single. Many record stores refused to carry Never Mind the Bollocks and some record charts refused to list its title, showing just a blank space instead. A Virgin Records shop manager in Nottingham was arrested for displaying the record after being warned by the police, citing the 1899 Indecent Advertisements Act, to cover up the word ‘bollocks’. Even the word ‘sex’ in the band’s name seemed confrontational. Seeing this artwork framed as an artwork in a gallery would have been unimaginable in 1977, but this image still has the power – if not to shock – to arrest the viewer; it has endured because it was created with an attention to detail that powerfully transmits the complex, radical and politically-charged ideas that informed Punk.
“Punk was like an exorcism which cleared up a lot of the shit that was left over from the Sixties. Punk was about spontaneity and it also carried with it a really vicious sense of humour” – Jamie Reid.
