Jamie Reid is a British 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. His best known works include the Sex Pistols album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols’ and the singles “Anarchy in the UK”, “God Save The Queen” (based on a Cecil Beaton photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, with an added safety pin through her nose and swastikas in her eyes), “Pretty Vacant” and “Holidays in the Sun”. Reid created the ransom-note look used with the Sex Pistols graphics while he was designing Suburban Press, a radical political magazine he ran for five years. The fractured imagery used, is inherent to the ‘tear it up and start all over again’ ethos, which demonstrates  both deconstruction and reconstruction. This era had the do-it-yourself aesthetic and was also classified as the ‘golden age of zines’.

In the run up to the Jubilee in 1977, Reid transgressed accepted codes by displaying a torn up Union Jack held together with ‘bureaucratic, yet patriotically named’ bulldog clips, for the Sex Pistols single ‘Anarchy in the UK’, deconstructing ideoligical subject matter.