Jamie Reid interviewed by Jeremy Gluck in Swansea, 2020
Jamie Reid (1947–2023) was a British artist and anarchist best known for defining the visual language of punk. His cut-and-paste collage style used ransom-note lettering, subverted advertising, and Situationist ideas to attack monarchy, capitalism, and authority, notably for the Sex Pistols. Beyond punk, he produced political posters for radical causes, druidic and pagan-inspired works, and later protested globalisation and environmental destruction.
His art fused DIY zine aesthetics, graphic design, and agitprop, making him one of the UK’s most influential political artists.
On the eve of Dragons Revenge, his January 2020 retrospective at GS Artists on Swansea’s High Street, curated by Reid and his long-time representative John Marchant, I interviewed Jamie Reid, at 73 still an iconoclast and expressively political working artist.
Toward the end of this interview Reid, exploring the loss to us of our knowledge of nature, claims he is rambling. “Rabelaisian”, more perhaps, by definition “creating work that is a metaphor for guerrilla “civil revolt” and referring to people who have “become giants whose strength and appetite are enormous”. It’s just such a lust for revolt and life that characterises Jamie Reid, a man that – while shaping it – has been and still is of and in and out of his time.
Jeremy Gluck: It’s 2020. What is anarchy in the UK now? Brexit? After Brexit? Is there no anarchy? Have we lost all hope of anarchy?
Jamie Reid: There are reasons why, there are many. It’s absolutely appalling what’s happened in this country, probably ever since Margaret Thatcher. You now got Boris Johnson, and without getting into legal trouble if you were to watch a film, Riot Club, about where his background comes from, The Bullingdon Club, the man is like a fascist rapist who – it’s not a direct quote of his but it’s an image I’ve done for the GS exhibition where he actually ends up saying, We were born to rule over scum.
And he got voted for, but funnily enough he got voted for in a way Trump got in. Boris Johnson used the television, appearing as a guest on various programs, like Have I Got News for You, and became popular playing a buffoon. Yeah, so brings me back to my starting point, which is a society of the spectacle emerging in a situation as politics and the society of the spectacle, which has been so proven right.
JG: They’ve understood those principles of creating spectacle which the Nazis excelled at, for example. They’ve adapted it to the time, and to the audience, but there’s no mistaking there’s some sort of study going on there of that kind of manipulation. One of the images you’re exhibiting at GS is against English Heritage. What is the context for the protest?
Jamie Reid: It relates to my whole background; it was a very Socialist but Druidic background. And the English Heritage in particular to me is the way they took over something like Stonehenge and the way they seem to represent everything that’s conservative and represent the worst of English history. Whereas, I suppose, one thing I’m really involved with is that we’ve got a whole unsaid, unrecorded history. That’s just a thing to get out there actually.
With the present politics I was very taken with Margaret Atwood. I was trying to think of images for Boris Johnson and Trump and Putin, and she came up with a quote where she was asked what do you think of the present, the political situation, and she said we’re going backward at a very rapid rate. And then I suddenly saw from my end, Putin is the Czar, Trump is like the John Wayne cowboy, and Boris Johnson is a combination of Flashman and Tom Brown’s School Days and a Roman emperor. You know he’s obsessed with Roman history and that’s relevant as well…Roman history and Churchill, what a combination anyway!
JG: One of my towering muses is William Burroughs. And of course, there is a sort of lateral line to be drawn if you want to draw one between something like Burroughs and Gysin cut up and then what became your dominant style, in my humble opinion. I have a wonderful Burroughs quote that I’m going to cite and then supply a question to:
“Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.” Always endearing, Burroughs!
Jamie Reid: (Laughs) Very Situationist!
JG: No kidding. So, what came to mind when I was reading about your strident response in 2009 to Damien Hirst threatening an art student with copyright infringement: Are you content to have your own work taken, remade, stolen, exploited and appropriated?
Jamie Reid: But I just think it’s so inevitable. My heart is in the right place. And I just, initially with the whole Brit Art thing, I took great exception to people like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin saying they were inspired by punk, kinda like they were sort of radical and the whole idea.
You had Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency which was half responsible for getting Thatcher into power, taking a whole Thatcherite concept about ‘Everything is for sale’, and just making that the British art scene, turning it into a commodity. And I just see them as Thatcher’s spawn, I can’t stand it. It’s a complete sort of… There’s such a monopoly on the art scene here between critics, leading artists, gallery owners, there is a whole social network that you might have to become part of to get any recognition. It’s unbelievable.
JG: What are the chief differences to you between that world in 1977 and the one we’re inhabiting now? And how, more importantly, is it impacting your work now?
Jamie Reid: I think there is more, far more control on people’s thoughts and actions than it’s ever been, which has gradually been chipping away since the 1970s. I also think I’ve had a really interesting time. I’ve been in a hotel for about a year now and I’ve got quite addicted to listening to BBC Radio 6 and even last year they had a whole lot of pre-recorded interviews with Malcolm McLaren and it’s been very odd laying here listening to Malcolm speak for an hour. I have forgotten how fucking brilliant McLaren was, not just talking about punk.
I also had the realisation that Malcolm and I had a complete trust of each other. He never questioned anything about any artwork I did, I never questioned any directions he was taking. I’ve kept very quiet from my end about that time. But I think the Pistols and, to some extent, punk wouldn’t exist without the political experiences me and Malcolm had in the late 60s and our understanding of Situationism and putting it into practice, and positioning it in popular culture, That’s what we tried to do. And I think getting God Save the Queen to number one in 1977 is proof of that.
JG: The kind of relationship you described that you had with Malcolm McLaren reminds me of Burroughs and Gysin. The quasi-magical Third Mind creative process and bond.
Jamie Reid: Malcolm always claimed he had Aleister Crowley’s ring! Again, with Malcolm, it’s only when you hear people from other situations talking about him, I mean, in my mind he is possibly one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. But you’re never going to get art critics being able to understand that.
I heard people like New York rappers singing Malcolm’s praises, not saying he invented rap but saying if it wasn’t for him doing Buffalo Girls, it opened up the whole fucking picture for us. The same with the things he did in South Africa with African music with Trevor Horn, you get African musicians saying the same thing. What he did with opera and Madame Butterfly. To me every bit as important as the Pistols in many ways. But he’s not going to be seen like that.
JG: The term for someone like that would be a Renaissance Man, he was a Renaissance Man of his time.
Jamie Reid: A great bullshitter. There are all sorts of sides to work I’ve done every bit as important as the punk, agitprop work, and it’s funny you mentioning Jonestown because I’ve worked with a heavy metal band, who are half Dublin, half Glasgow, called The Almighty. They did an amazing record called Jonestown Mind and they’re one of those bands that could play to a quarter million people in Brazil and hardly anyone has ever heard of them here. I did a whole album and a single project with them.
I’ve also been working for getting on 15 years now integrally with a band called Afro Celt Sound System, which is a fusion of Irish, Scot, Welsh music and African music built on a realisation there is a common thread through them all. And that came out of a whole project I did, creating interiors of a recording studio in Shoreditch called The Strongroom.
And it was like being practical with magic. I’m involved at the moment doing a book with someone about magic and art and I did a studio design that was totally based on the four elements. It was aligned with earth was north and fire was south, water was west and air is east and it was all using symbols and astrology and all sorts of stuff, purely to create a space that could encourage the making of sound and music. And it works. Another level.
I’m quite a big fan of the Prodigy, and they used to use that recording studio. And Keith, the lead singer – he died recently – I was sending him all this bullshit about my beliefs and magic and spirituality. He said, Jamie don’t give me all that fucking bullshit! I said, why? He said, it’s just a brilliant space to work in, it’s just an uplifting space to work in and it is.
I suppose it links back to my beliefs in Situationism and the situation with cities and architecture. Buildings could be the most inspirational places; I have been quite involved with my painting about how you can use colour for healing and how you can use sound for healing. And there are all these fields we don’t know about. And on an almost frightening level it actually ties in with that almost complete disrespect for nature.
Look at the number of words to do with nature that are falling out of the dictionary now. And it’s like our analysis of horticulture and farming, it’s like, what is a flower and what is a weed. Most of the things we define as weeds are in fact healing weeds, plants that used for healing. We had things like Lungwort, and there’s so much of it. And it’s a lost art almost. But anyway, that’s enough.
by Jeremy Gluck
(2020)
More:
Jeremy Gluck interview with Jamie Reid:
Jamie Reid: Pinned
https://youtu.be/XS0zVWJ1U3k?si=vierWLjr_c-_UHot
also included in this, The Situationist International (full documentary)
https://youtu.be/ncH0-q9OXco?si=l5Yg_2u1o1pEFcbY
2020 exhibition walk through with Jamie Reid at the Horse Hospital, London.
