Description

Jamie Reid gave the most notorious band in Britain a sleeve with no band on it. Instead of a photograph, Never Mind the Bollocks has words: cut-out letters in the style of a ransom note, slapped onto a field of dayglo yellow with a pink band, finished to look like a cheap screen print. The effect was deliberately ugly and instantly recognisable, closer to a flyposted handbill than to the glossy rock packaging of 1977. In the United States the colours were changed to pink with a green logo.

The problem was one word. When the album came out on 28 October 1977, shops displaying it were warned by police that "bollocks" might break the 1899 Indecent Advertisements Act. A manager of Virgin's shop in Nottingham was arrested for putting the sleeve in his window after being told to cover the word. Richard Branson hired the barrister John Mortimer QC to defend him, and the case was heard at Nottingham Magistrates' Court on 24 November.

Mortimer argued that the word had a long and respectable history in English and that it only seemed obscene because it appeared on a Sex Pistols record. Johnny Rotten said it was simply working-class slang for telling someone to stop talking rubbish. The court agreed, with visible reluctance: the chairman said they must "reluctantly find you not guilty of each of the four charges." The trial made the sleeve even more famous, and Reid's typography became the visual language of punk.

Credit

Cover design by Jamie Reid