Punk design by Augusta Kučynska

PUNK AESTHETIC

JAMIE REID

JAMIE REID AND SEX PISTOLS

BARNEY BUBBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AN ‘ANTI’ MOVEMENT Youth culture is known for rebellion. But insurgence may have hit a fever pitch in 1970s Britain with the start of punk and the emergence of the punk aesthetic. The young generation in 1970s Britain were disillusioned. Suffering from a high rate of unemployment and with many young people living below the poverty line, the country’s frustrated youth found an outlet in the emerging punk rock music scene. Punk was an ‘anti’ movement — anticonsumerist, anti-conformist, and anti-establishment. Maintaining the ideology that ‘anyone can do it,’ the young punks of the time began transforming the music scene from polished and produced to something fast and aggressive. Independently made 7-inch vinyl became the center of design for the nihilistic disruptors influenced by Dadaist collage, the 1960s underground press and counter-culture protest graphics from decades prior. Taking the stage to articulate the feelings of a dissatisfied generation calling for change were the Sex Pistols, who played their first gig in 1975 at St Martins College of Art. Their outrageous behaviour and contempt for established conventions announced the beginning of Punk. The music was angry, raw, loud and messy, and the flyers and album artwork created for gigs and record releases mirrored this, with cut and paste collaging, haphazard stencil typography, and abrasive, acid-bright colors. The DIY ethos and uncontrolled, homemade style was revolutionary at the time and launched a new era in British music, fashion and design.

Poly Styrene X-Ray Spex at The Round House 1978

Punk was about opposition—whether that meant fashion trends, literature, venues or music. According to Russ Bestley’s HitsvilleUK site, the general rule of thumb when it came to music was, ‘if it can’t be said in three minutes, it’s not worth saying.’This credo followed punk throughout its sub-genres, from Proto Punk and Novelty Punk to Anarcho Punk and Real Punk. And was highly reflected in the graphic design of the culture.

These choices weren’t made from lack of planning or knowledge of design. No. Each design was created with the intention of questioning the standards and defying the norms of contemporary culture. Plenty of Punk musicians even had backgrounds in graphic design. For example, both Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, co-founders of the highly-regarded band Crass, were trained in graphic design, specifically working with books and typesetting. ‘…A lot of the projects at college were: “This is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you corporate idea?” …It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image,’ says Rimbaud.

HOW DID IT LOOK? Fast, messy, unpolished—whether it was an album cover, a promotional poster or a DIY zine, these tenets held steadfast.

Malcolm Garrett Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict 1977

THE PIONEER OF PUNK DESIGN Jamie Reid (born 16 January 1947 in London, United Kingdom) is an English artist and anarchist with connections to the Situationists. His work, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note, came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK.

letters out of newspapers and magazines, collaging them together to be photographed. By doing this he could see what he was creating as he went along, trying out different font styles and sizes and seeing the results instantly. Treating type as if it was a photograph also freed him from the restrictions of typesetting within a structured grid. What is revealing about Reid’s work, whether seen in the context of the neo-punk or viewed as a retrospective, are the elements of humour, spontaneity and political commitment which have survived intact over the last three decades. Reid has avoided joining the ranks of mainstream graphic design and the commercial fine art establishment, opting instead to continue to subvert conventional forms of art and design practice. Reid set down the template for a new rawness and imperfection in design. The style became hugely popular, in part because it democratised the design process. Instead of expensive, rigid typesetting, amateur and professional designers alike could create their own haphazard designs using collage and rubber stamping.

VISUAL ANARCHIST Jamie Reid had developed his unique collaged ‘ransom note’ typography whilst art directing a radical political magazine. In the ’70s graphic designers needed to commission a typesetter to create the type and they wouldn’t see what it looked like until it came back as finished copy printed out on a sheet. Instead, Reid cut

THE INFLUENCE OF SEX PISTOLS Taking the stage to articulate the feelings of a dissatisfied generation calling for change were the Sex Pistols, who played their first gig in 1975 at St Martins College of Art. Their outrageous behaviour and contempt for established conventions announced the beginning of Punk. The DIY ethos and uncontrolled, homemade style was revolutionary at the time and launched a new era in British music, fashion and design.

Jamie Reid, Virgin Records Album back cover for Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks 1977

In 1977 Jamie Reid created the now iconic ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ album cover for the band who were the defining icons of punk—the Sex Pistols. Jamie Reid also designed the band’s logo and many of their other record covers. Vinyl records were mass produced, disposable items (although treasured by their owners), a 45” Sex Pistols single cost about 70p. No one imagined at the time that they would go on to become such significant pieces of work, charting the start of a major art and design movement which would change the face of Britain.

Jamie Reid, Virgin Records Album cover for Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks 1977

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN Released in 1977, the year in which England celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, the single ‘God Save the Queen’ not surprisingly created controversy, as much for the graphics of its poster and record cover as for the song itself. Concealing the Queen’s eyes with the title implied her refusal to see or understand the circumstances of an increasingly disgruntled youth, and pasting the band’s name across her mouth suggested a sexual assault that reflected punk’s own dalliance with violence and destruction. In just a few simple strokes, Reid’s work succeeded in encapsulating the underlying theme of all punk culture: to offend the establishment and draw attention to the dissatisfaction of youth with its social, political and economic condition. Jamie Reid Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen 1977

POSTER FOR THE GREAT ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SWINDLE

Jamie Reid Poster for The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle 1979

In this poster to promote the film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, Reid appropriates the advertising campaign of American Express credit cards (“Your Name Here”). The music industry itself becomes the target, including the artist (“the prostitute”), the record company (“the pimp”), and the music business as a whole (“the swindle”). The posters were withdrawn and most copies destroyed when American Express threatened legal action.

BARNEY BUBBL ES CREATING FOR THE ARTISTS AND THEIR FANS As one of the founding fathers of album cover art, Bubbles rose to prominence throughout the 70s and 80s as one of the most influential graphic designers in the music industry. From working with Stiff Records eclectic roster – Elvis Costello, the Damned, Ian Dury and the Blockheads – to making music videos for The Specials, to designing the NME logo we see today, Bubbles’ work created an identity for the artists he worked with and for their fans. Appropriating contemporary art and suburban kitsch, Bubbles remixed these references into fresh and bold statements, influencing a whole generation of future graphic designers.

ARTISTIC INFLUENCE One of the most appealing things about his work – he was creating new possibilities with his designs, infusing them with multiple meanings, potential readings, and visually rich form in a time where other designers were not operating in the same way. Bubble’s favourite medium was the record sleeve. Trivial, ephemeral, and available to everyone, it suited his lack of preciousness about his work, while giving him almost total creative freedom. Remembered with awe by one generation of rock fans for his foldout album covers for

Glastonbury Fayre and Hawkwind in the early 1970s, Bubbles is equally revered for his work for punk and new wave bands on the Stiff, Radar and F-Beat record labels. Superficially, his career might seem to span an unbridgeable gulf from the love-and-peace of the hippies to the hate-and-gob of punk. It is an indication of his intuitive grasp of what was right for the moment, and his seemingly instinctive ability to be in the right place at the right time, that his work is seminal to two such different eras. Bubbles’ mastery of graphic design and print production processes helped support his graphic authorship by exposing those processes in the work itself. He shifted the cover design of Elvis Costello’s album This Year’s Model left a few centimeters so that the CMYK color registration bars that would normally be trimmed off an album design

became one of the primary visual components. The photo on the cover shows Costello posing behind a camera on a tripod – the model becoming the photographer, both the subject and the object of the album.

HAWKWIND At Portobello Road, Bubbles started working with Hawkwind. Not only were the record sleeves that he created unlike anything that had been seen before – the cover of In Search of Space (1971) unfolds to reveal a stylised, cut-out hawk – but Bubbles also did everything from painting the drum kits to designing the stationery. Hawkwind’s Gothic sci-fi mythology was given a visual manifestation intricate enough to keep fans fascinated no matter how much acid they dropped. It was one of the first times that all of a band’s visual material had been treated as a whole, controlled by one person.

IGNITED BY PUNK Returning to London in 1976 from a year’s retreat in Ireland, Bubbles landed in the middle of punk and immediately realised its significance. Jake Riviera, an old friend from the Portobello Road days, was setting up Stiff records and Bubbles became his full-time (freelance) designer. At Stiff anything went – the more outrageous the better. Ignited by punk and fuelled by his reading, Bubble’s designs took off. It provided the perfect medium for Riviera’s stunts and ruses for making people buy records. Bubble’s unusual mixture of passion for his work, coupled with an inability to take it seriously, ensured he was at home. ‘Barney really embraced the punk philosophy,’ says Williams. ‘He was quite into nihilism and existentialism.’ Chris Morton, art director at Stiff, agrees: ‘He was suffused with the idea that this was a new start, and he was basing a lot of what he did on Russian art just after the revolution.’ Bubble’s hard-edged designs, with blocks of acid colour and sans-serif type, stood out from both the heavyserifs-plus-illustration look of most commercial design, and the unstructured agit-prop of Jamie Reid’s punk graphics of the period.

Barney Bubbles (Colin Fulcher) Hawkwind:Doremi Fasol Latido 1972

Barney Bubbles (Colin Fulcher) Generation X, Marquee Club Residency 1977

A rare interview published in 1981 in The Face magazine sheds some light over the subject with Bubbles displaying a strong sense of professional ethics. As a designer he saw himself as an interpreter of his clients wishes:

bibliography ‘Safety pins and Letraset’ eyemagazine.com

‘Barney Bubbles ‘ tunicastudio.com

‘How Punk changed Graphic Design and is history repeating itself?’ shyndman.medium.com

‘In search of Barney Bubbles’ eyemagazine.com

‘The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic’ designobserver.com ‘ “We Hate Everything”: A Visual History of Punk’ printmag.com ‘Punk for a Day: Graphic Design History and the Punk Aesthetic’ printmag.com ‘New exhibition explores visual history punk movement graphics design’ dezeen.com ‘BARNEY BUBBLES. The graphic artist whose work defined a musical revolution’ hero-magazine.com

Augusta Kučynska Vilniaus dailės akademija Grafinio dizaino katedra II kursas, skaitmeninės ir spaudos technologijos Dėstytoja: lekt. dr. Kristė Kibildytė-Klimienė