JAMIE REID
Punk’s visual provocateur (1947–2023)
JAMIE Reid was living on the Isle of Lewis, dividing his energies between left-wing paper West Highland Free Press and helping friends establish a small farm, when he received a telegram from Malcolm McLaren in 1976: “Come down, we’ve got this project in London we want you to work on.” Intrigued, Reid answered the call of his former Croydon Art School colleague and swapped the Outer Hebrides for the English capital. McLaren’s brief was to create subversive artwork for his new charges, the Sex Pistols.
Reid’s striking décollage posters and sleeves, using ransom-note lettering and vandalised imagery from pop culture and national institutions, came to define the punk aesthetic. He stuck safety pins into a ripped Union Jack flag for “Anarchy In The UK”, created the lurid pink and yellow cover of Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols and, perhaps most memorably, defaced Peter Grugeon’s Jubilee portrait of the monarch for “God Save The Queen”.
A free-thinking anarchist with a socialist and druidic family background, London-born Reid enrolled at Croydon Art School in 1964. He and McLaren eventually bonded over a shared interest in avant-garde movement the Situationist International,, which he ran during the early ’70s. “I think I learned more about graphic design being a printer than three years at art school,” he told in 2018. “It gave me that ability to mess about with things.”
