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. 

 

 

The following post in this series - Notes on Chapters 1 & 2 - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Punk History is for Pissing On: Notes on PZ77 by Simon Parker

PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022) 

by Simon Parker

 

'Ah, those days... for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. 

Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Conceived, designed, narrated, and edited by Simon Parker - and published by an independent co-operative he established in 1996 to celebrate and promote contemporary Cornish writing - PZ77 is "a unique story of time, place, friendship, community, and an almost obsessive passion for making music" [2]. 

 

The book features more than ninety personal accounts, across 392 pages, from old punks like himself who grew up in a place "others came for their holidays" (Penzance) [3].      

 

It's not the kind of book I would normally read (for reasons we'll come to shortly). 

 

However, as a 40 page extract from the work - the first five tracks - is the chosen text for discussion by the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) [4] this coming week - a group with which I'm associated - I thought I'd take this opportunity to assemble (and share) some thoughts in advance ...

 

 

II. 

There are, as Russ Bestley reminds us, now hundreds of books on punk in the mid-late 1970s, and it sometimes feels as if everyone and their dog who was in any way connected to the scene has now had their say on the subject or shared their memories of the time. 

 

For those over a certain age, punk nihilism has now given way to punk nostalgia; the chaos of a life lived blissfully in the moment (now/here) has been replaced with a comforting and conformist vision of the past. 

 

In other words, instead of going with the flow of events and strange becomings that carry them beyond the constraints of a fixed identity, many old punks now prefer to relive the past as best they can at the Rebellion Festival [5] and produce narratives which reinforce the mythology of punk by "re-articulating variations of the same story, often through a nostalgic lens centred on personal experience and memories" [6].  

 

 

III.   

To be fair to Parker, PZ77 might be read as an attempt to give a voice to many punk fans whose stories and memories of the time might otherwise have gone unrecorded, thereby expanding our understanding of punk (certainly as it unfolded in Corwall in 1977).  

 

As Bestley rightly points out, "punk's standard narrative has become so deeply embedded, its cultural and historical position so neatly summarized, that there is a desperate need for alternative perspectives that might sustain a sense of engagement and highlight new contributions to knowledge within a tired and over-familiar field of study" [7]. 

 

However, from what I've read of the work, I don't like it ... 

 

And the reason I don't like it is because, as a Deleuzian - and as a member of the extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars [8] - I don't like writing that attempts to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience and I don't like writing that is merely a form of personal overcoding; i.e., an opportunity for an author to give whatever it is they write about a familiar face that somehow resembles their own. 

 

Any form of writing that is heavily reliant upon the recounting of youthful memories is usually not only bad writing but dead writing; for as Deleuze says, literature dies from an excess of autobiography just as surely as from an overdose of emotion or imagination [9].   

 

Rather than transport us away from Oeidpal structures towards a zone of indiscernibility where we might lose ourselves, PZ77 attempts to take us back to a better time where we might rediscover our passions and dreams, renew old friendships, etc. 

 

Whereas I still believe in the ruins, Parker believes in building a sense of community. The interviews with participants in his project indicate a level of acceptance that punk has become part of mainstream culture; nice people, performing nice gestures, and leading nice lives, etc. 

 

 

IV. 

Ultimately, I was never going to like a book written by an obsessive Ramones fan: they may have been Sid's favourite band, but they were never my favourite band. 

 

And whereas Parker, a grammar school boy from a Methodist fishing village who likes to see the good in people is, by his own admission, "always thinking about music" [10], I don't care about the music; to paraphrase Malcolm, if punk had just been about the music it would have died a death long ago.   

  

It's his best mate, Grev Williams, however, who really irritates me. Thinking back to the Summer of Hate, he ponders just how important the period was to him: 

 

"Punk bursting into our lives was hugely invigorating and inspiring [...]  but I'd be lying if I said I found any expression of my inner self in it [... and] the idea that I was revolting against my background and community would be wholly false. I was blessed with the strength of knowing where I came from, I didn't want to smash it up - I loved it. Punk wasn't a spit-filled, nihilist cul-de-sac for me, it was a launch pad. As a budding musician it provided opportunities and informed my attitude, not my taste. [...] Anyway, long story short and truth be told, I didn't hate or revolt against much [...] [11]

 

Whilst aknowledging the benefit of his experiences in 1977, Williams has to ask himself whether he was ever really a 'punk': "As with so much, I'm really not sure." [12]

 

It's not, of course, my role to help him decide the matter. 

 

But I would say, given his confession above - every aspect of which (apart from his uncertainty) I find objectionable - that whilst he may or may not have been a punk, he was clearly not a Sex Pistol as I understand the term; i.e. in a manner largely shaped by McLaren's description in the Oliver Twist Manifesto (1977) - click here - and the ideas developed in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

I look forward to discussing this with other members of the SIG, including Russ Bestley [13]. 

 

However, I won't be buying a copy of Parker's PZ77. For those who like this sort of thing, as Miss Brodie would say, this is the sort of thing they like: but, for me, punk history is for pissing on ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] J. L. Carr, A Month In The Country (Harvester Press, 1980). 

      This quote was used as an epigraph to PZ77. It should be noted, however, that the narrator of the novel goes on to ask himself would he have always remained happy had he somehow been able to stay in the same time and place. And the answer is: "No, I suppose not."  

 

[2] I'm quoting here from the Scryfa website: click here. 

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] The Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) is an informal collective operating out of the University of the Arts London (UAL), concerned with what we might briefly describe as the politics of style and offering resistance to temporal colonisation; i.e., the imposition of a perpetual present in which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a future (or remember a past) that is radically different. 

      I have published several SIG-themed posts here on Torpedo the Ark, which can be read by clicking here.    

      

[5] For those who don't know, Rebellion is the biggest independently run punk festival in the UK, that takes place each summer in the historic Winter Gardens, Blackpool. I haven't been and I don't want to go to this family-oriented event which celebrates Punk in all its forms with the blessing of the local council. For further information, click here. 

 

[6] Russ Bestley, 'Going Through the Motions: Punk Nostalgia and Conformity', in Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2. (Intellect Books, 2021), pp. 179-196. 

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] This wonderful phrase was coined by Peter York to describe the denizens of 430 King's Road (i.e., the SEX people). It was used in his article 'Them' that appeared in Harpers & Queen (October 1976) and is cited by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329.

 

[9] See the post dated 30 August 2013 entitled 'A Deleuzean Approach to Literature' - click here. 

 

[10] Simon Parker, PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022), p. 11.

 

[11] Grev Williams quoted by Simon Parker in PZ77 ... pp. 38-39.

 

[12] Ibid., p. 41.

 

[13] Russ Bestley's own review of Simon Parker's PZ77 can be found in Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb 2023), p. 131 - 134. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to gain free access to this text online, so couldn't discuss it here.    

 

 

What's in a Word: Punk

 'The cult is called punk; the music punk rock ...'

 

 

I. 

 

In a pre-Grundy television interview, Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten is asked by Maggie Norden:

 

"What about the word 'punk' - it means worthless, nasty - are you happy with this word?"

 

A crucial question to which he replies: 

 

"No, the press gave us it. It's their problem, not ours. We never called ourselves punk." [1]

 

It's a somewhat surprising response which every idiot who proclaims that they'll be a punk until they die might care to consider ...

 

 

II.  

 

When Rotten refers to the press, he was more than likely thinking of posho freelance journalist and photographer Caroline Coon, who, having risen to prominence as part of the British Underground scene in the 1960s, attached herself to the new youth movement spearheaded by the Sex Pistols in the mid-70s [2].

For it was Coon, writing for the influential music paper Melody Maker, who famously described this anarchic subculture held together with safety pins and bondage straps as punk - a name by which, for better or for worse, it has been known ever since (despite Rotten's disavowal of the term) [3].

 

Personally, I always think it a pity when something as beautifully fluid, ambiguous, and messed up as the scene that grew out of 430 King's Road is identified and codified; to name is to know and to know is to kill. Calling the Sex Pistols a punk band was to suggest they were not something radically new or different; that they could, in fact, be compared with other groups and to prevailing rock trends.

 

That's undoubtedly true of the Clash - the band with whom Coon became most closely associated - but it's absolutely not true of the Sex Pistols as conceived by McLaren and Westwood. And not true either of Alan Jones, Jordan, and all those others who either worked at or hung around 430, King's Road. 

 

Assuming that a collective term of reference is at least provisionally needed, what should we call this assemblage of individuals ?   

 

Perhaps the best answer to this question was supplied by cultural critic Peter York, who, in October '76, referred to the "Sex shop people" and characterised them as the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [4]. 

 

That, I think, is spot on: and very much in line with how I think of the Sex Pistols and those closely associated with them - as more funny peculiar than punk; i.e., as unusual, strange, abnormal, deviant, perverse, extraordinary, singular, exceptional, outlandish ... 

 

The photo below perfectly captures just how queer things were before being named and tamed by the media and the music business and before an army of identikit punks emerged.         

 

The Sex shop people: (L-R) Steve Jones, Danielle, Alan Jones, 

Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, and Vivienne Westwood 

Photo by David Dagley (Forum, June 1976)

 

Notes

 

[1] The full six minute interview with McLaren and Rotten - including a pre-recorded performance of 'Anarchy in the UK' - was on the tea-time current affairs show Nationwide (BBC1 12 Nov 1976). It can be found in the BBC Archive on Facebook: click here. A shorter version - without the band's performance - can also be found on YouTube: click here.   

 

[2] Acting on the recommendation of Alan Jones, then working as an assistant alongside Jordan at McLaren and Westwood's shop on the King's Road, Coon attended an early Sex Pistols gig and, like many others, she was captivated by what she saw happening both on and off stage and immediately began to document this new scene.  

 

[3] See Coon's Melody Maker article entitled 'Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System' (7 August 1976).       

      Although the word punk had already been used fairly widely for several years in connection to rock music in the US - and, indeed, has a much longer and more complex history than that: click here - it was Coon's piece that played a crucial role in introducing a slightly revised version of the term to a British audience and helping to identify a novel (but not radically new) genre of music.

      Coon obviously had a gift for this kind of thing as, interestingly, she was also the person who named the hardcore group of friends who followed the Sex Pistols as the 'Bromley Contingent'.

 

[4] Peter York, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329. York was writing in an article entitled 'Them', in Harpers & Queen (October, 1976).

 

 

Get Off Your Knees and Hear the Insect Prayer: Notes on the Ant People

Get Off Your Knees and Hear the Insect Prayer

 

I. 

 

When I came across a reference the other day to the Ant People, I immediately thought of the Adam and the Ants slogan: Ant Music for Sex People: Sex Music for Ant People [1]. 

 

I had long believed that this line simply referred to those whom the cultural commentator Peter York once described as the "'extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars'" [2] - i.e., those who used to hang around Sex - and, secondly, to those who were hardcore fans of Adam and the Ants.

I now discover, however, that existing long before Adam and Marco ever walked through the doors of 430 King's Road, were a legendary race of highly advanced beings (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) known as the Ant People, and venerated by the Hopi Indians; a tribe of Native Americans who have lived on the high arid mesas of northern Arizona for thousands of years [3]. 

 

 

II. 

 

According to Hopi legend, in times of global catastrophe, it was the Anu Sinom, or Ant People, who come to their rescue and offered them sanctuary in underground caves, which essentially formed a natural network of subterranean prayer chambers, or what the Hopi call kivas (a word which etymologically means beautiful dwelling place).      

 

No wonder then that the Hopi refer to the Ant People with their elongated skulls, almond-shaped eyes, tiny waists, and long skinny arms and legs, as their friends: Anu-naki.  

 

And one can only hope that if members of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are correct in their dire predictions of a coming eco-apocalypse, that we palefaces will have some benevolent insects come to our rescue (although I doubt it and don't think we deserve such).    

 

Notes

 

[1] This line is a refrain in the Adam and the Ants track 'Don't Be Square (Be There)', found on the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS Records, 1980): click here.   

[2] Peter York, writing in an article entitled 'Them', Harpers & Queen (October 1976), quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329. 

[3] See Gary A. David, 'The Ant People of the Hopi' (13 October, 2013) on the website Ancient Origins: click here.