Russ Bestley: 'Turning Revolt Into Style' (2025): Notes on the Introduction

Russ Bestley: Turning Revolt Into Style 

(Manchester University Press, 2025) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Russ Bestley is Reader in Graphic Design & Subcultures at London College of Communication (UAL) and someone who knows more - and has written more - over the last thirty years about punk, graphic design, and popular culture than Monsieur Mangetout has had odd dinners [b]. 

 

And so, if one is only ever going to read one book on the process and practice of punk graphic design, I would recommend it be Bestley's latest work, Turning Revolt Into Style - a solidly written and nicely illustrated book about which I'd like to share a few thoughts here and in a series of posts to follow.

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear at the outset, I don't have a background in graphic design or the visual arts and most of the names mentioned by Bestley mean nothing to me.  

 

However, I've always regarded Jamie Reid as an important member of the Sex Pistols (referring to the wider gang, rather than merely the four-piece group consisting of Cook, Jones, Rotten and Vicious) and a strong case could be made that his designs for the record sleeves are at least as important and as powerful as the black shiny discs they enclose [c].  

 

In other words, the art (fashion and politics) of punk probably means more to me than the music [d], so Bestley's book was always going to attract my attention; especially with a title which both echoes George Melley's celebrated 1970 study of the music business [e] and a line from 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' (turning rebellion into money) [f].  

 

 

III.

 

Bestley wisely limits his study to the UK punk scene in the late 1970s and early '80s, even whilst acknowledging that punk is now a global phenomenon with a long history behind it; books that try to encompass everything and speak to everyone invariably fail. 

 

And besides, the core elements of the punk aesthetic - or what Bestley likes to call punk's visual language - were formed very early on by the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [g] who hung around at 430 King's Road. 

 

The book addresses two key questions: "how did a generation of young, punk-inspired graphic designers navigate the music graphics profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s?" and "how did significant changes in printing technology, labour relations and working practices in the design profession impact their work during that period?" [1-2] 

 

Whilst the second question is doubtless important, it doesn't really excite my interest as much as the first question. 

 

And so, whilst I will certainly read what Bestley says in relation to the latter and offer some commentary, for the most part my remarks here will focus on the answer he provides to the former (even at the risk of thereby missing the point of the book, which is to situate punk's visual aesthetic both within cultural history and the technological, professional, and political contexts that materially shaped it).  

 

 

IV. 

 

Punk, says Bestley, "is a phenomenon that is difficult to define in simple terms" [4]. 

 

And whilst I know what he means, one is tempted to suggest that the word itself has always been a misunderstanding and one that Rotten wisely rejected when asked about by it in a pre-Grundy TV interview with Maggie Norden [h].    

 

At best, the word punk acts as a point of cultural consistency within the chaotic flow of difference and becoming; it does not refer to some kind of essence upon which a stable identity can be fixed (i.e., it's a superficial marker; a convenient fiction). 

 

Personally, I would encourage individuals to break free from the term so as to enter into an anonymous and nomadic state of pure potentiality. Unfortunately, however, the world is full of idiots who identify with the term and spend their days declaring punk's not dead.   

 

Ultimately, the word punk refers to the process by which the radical ideas and images born at 430 King's Road were recuperated by mainstream culture and bourgeois society; the process by which the Sex Pistols were neutered, disarmed, and commercially commodified in exactly the manner parodied in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) and illustrated by Reid on the cover of Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols (1979) [i].  

 

V. 

I know Rotten includes a line in E. M. I. about not judging a book by its cover - unless you cover just another - but I've never liked this idiomatic piece of moralism. As D. H. Lawence says, it is born of our dread of intuitional awareness and "if you don't judge by appearances, that is, if you can't trust the impression which things make on you, you are a fool" [j].    

 

So, I smiled when Bestley seemed to lend support to the idea that whilst design "may offer an aesthetically pleasing or appropriately functional window to content" [8] it is seldom the focal point and there are very few people who would "purchase a book or record purely for its cover" [8]. 

 

And I smiled too when he wrote: "books are to be read, records to be listened to" [8]. Because there are some books, such as Deleuze and Guattari's Mille plateaux (1980), which encourage readers to play them exactly as one would a record; starting with your favourite track or chapter, skipping the ones you don't much like, etc. [k]       

 

 

VI.

 

Finally, let me just say that the section within Bestley's Introduction for which I'm most grateful is the one which provides a punk design historiography. It really is an astonishing overview that is immensely useful to one such as myself who knows very little of the literature produced on this topic. 

 

In fact, of all the books mentioned here, the only two I know well are Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (1991) and Griel Marcus's Lipstick Traces (1989); the latter of which Bestley describes as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [13][l], although I know that Malcolm always loved the book (Rotten, predictably, less so).   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this text.  

 

[b] Bestley is also Lead Editor of the academic journal Punk & Post-Punk, Series Editor and Art Director for the Global Punk book series published by Intellect Books, a founding member of the Punk Scholars Network, and head of the Subcultures Interest Group at UAL. His research archive can be accessed at hitsvilleuk.com. 

 

[c] For a post in memory of Jamie Reid who, sadly, died a couple of years ago, click here.

      Bestley is right to say that cover art "in many cases plays an intrinsic part in the cultural significance of 'iconic' albums". Never Mind the Bollocks, for example, would not be Never Mind the Bollocks, were it not for Reid's cover. It's the fluorescent pink and yellow cover that offers "special insight into the philosophy and character" of the Sex Pistols and which has a unique appeal "separate from the music" and over and above mere branding. See p. 7 of Turning Revolt Into Style.     

 

[d] Bestly recognises the tension beween "punk as attitude and ideology and punk as a new and distinct form of popular music" [5]. For McLaren, the music was the least important thing and a band that can't play is far more interesting and exciting than one who can. One of the final slogans used by Jamie Reid for his work with the Sex Pistols was: 'Music prevents you thinking for yourself.' 

  

[e] Melly, of course, borrowed the phrase revolt into style from a poem written by Thom Gunn about Elvis and published in his second collection of verse The Sense of Movement (1957). Quoting from memory, Gunn says that Presley peddles 'hackneyed words in hackneyed songs' and 'turns revolt into a style'. 

 

[f] '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' is a single by the Clash, released by CBS Records in June 1978. It got to number 32 in the UK charts.  

 

[g] This wonderful description of McLaren and company - the SEX shop people - was coined by Peter York in an article entitled 'Them' which appeared in Harpers & Queen (October 1976) and was quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329.  

 

[h] The interview I refer to was broadcast on the BBC1 show Nationwide on 12 November 1976. Rotten insists that the word punk was imposed on the band by the press. For my discussion of the word, see the post published on 13 March 2025: click here.

      When I describe the term punk as a misunderstanding, I'm thinking of what Nietzsche writes of the word Christianity; namely, that it is a term derived from a system of beliefs based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the Gospel. In this case, punk is a huge failure to grasp the concept of the Sex Pistols - and this failure becomes nowhere more laughable than in the attempts to somehow sanitise their story and "shoehorn it into a retrosectively 'progressive' narrative that belies its original complexity and inherent contradictions" [4]. 

 

[i] For me, this process of recuperation began - and was completed - much sooner that I think it was for Bestley. He notes, for example, that by the year 2000 the punk movement had been "largely recuperated and institutionalised" and was "ripe for exploitation" [12]. I would date this at least twenty years earlier. 

      But arguing over dates as to when punk 'died' has always been a bit tiresome, so I'll not make a big deal of this and I agree with Bestley that this process of recuperation was largely achieved via the "cementing of a set of visual and musical tropes that could be picked up and regurgitated in the affectation - if not the performance - of a generic 'punk' identity" [235].    

 

[j] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 192. 

      In Chapter 2 of his book, Bestley refers us to the cover of the XTC album Go2 (Virgin Records, 1978) which states that anyone who buys (or doesn't buy) an album 'merely as a consequence of the design on its cover' is FOOLISH. For the record, they were precisely the kind of band riding the crest of the new wave that I very much despised at the time. See Turning Revolt Into Style, pp. 86-87.   

 

[k] In a Foreword to his translation of this text, Brian Massumi, writes: 

      "How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a records as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business." 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. xiii-xiv.

 

[l] Later in the work Bestley will say: "Greil Marcus attempted (and largely failed) to make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [57]. That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc. 

      See what Deleuze and Guattari have to say on this in their Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3-25.