Uneasy Listening

Punk was such a compelling moment that its legacy and - improbable as it might seem - its cultural capital are still being claimed, more than 20 years later, on behalf of everyone from young British artists to digital media theorists. That its influence is just as keenly felt in visual media as it is in music is not so surprising. With the passage of time, punk is memorable as much for its imagery and for its ferocious graphic signature as for its snarling assaults on the eardrum. An exhibition held in - of all places - the Royal Festival Hall recently bashed the point home with hundreds of record sleeves, fanzines and posters from 1976 to 1982. At least some of the fun came from watching the crowd: the early middle-aged revisiting the site of youthful excitement, energy and anger, the occasional punk's-not-dead anarchist in tatty leathers and, since this was the South Bank, the well-heeled home counties oldsters, casting a tolerant eye over the mayhem, long past being shocked by anything as nicely packaged as this.

In such an environment, the exhibition's title, 'Destroy', only served to confirm punk's domestication. The curators, Paul Khera and Maria Beddoes, went to enormous trouble to assemble a fascinating body of material, but disappointingly, attempted no commentary beyond a handful of routine captions. The year-by-year layout didn't lend itself to the thematic appraisal the material cries out for now. There was no catalogue. As design, punk and new wave graphics have received plenty of lip service, and indeed, some key figures emerged from the subculture: Malcolm Garrett, Neville Brody, Peter Saville. But there has been hardly any real analysis, apart from in a couple of necessarily selective mid-80s books, Street Style (1987) by Catherine McDermott and Cross-Overs: Art into Pop/Pop into Art (1987) by John A. Walker.

Authentic punk graphic design, like punk itself, was shortlived. By 1977, in a four-colour poster for the Dead Boys' 'UK Invasion Tour' (hollow boast), the torn edges and stencilled letters familiar from a hundred scabrous fanzines, cut and glued and scrawled in suburban bedrooms, were no more than a reflex, empty of critical content. The same year, Nicholas de Ville, designer in the early 70s of the Roxy Music covers, created a 7-inch sleeve for 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' by The Adverts, which aestheticised the thrown-together look into an exquisitely tasteful fusion of rhythm and colour. The mannerisms hung around for a while on the largely forgotten sleeves of groups like Stiff Little Fingers, Television Personalities and Subway Sect, but by the end of 1977, punk as a viable graphic style had run its course.

Punk graphics was always most biting when its devices were used in the cause of a larger idea. Jamie Reid, pure punk's only designer with a claim to greatness, wielded confrontational imagery with the force and accuracy of a cosh: the safety-pinned Queen, the Boredom and Nowhere buses, the cracked glass in an empty frame for the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant. The ransom note lettering wasn't merely expedient: it sniggered 'deviant' and 'criminal'. His black on yellow 'Never Mind the Bans' poster, a crazy-paving montage of correspondence refusing the Pistols the right to play, exposed local censorship and rubbed the faces of assorted directors of tourism and leisure in their own pusillanimity. Reid's calculated acts of détournement never failed to hit the mark - as the threat of litigation showed. The Holidays in the Sun cover was withdrawn after complaints by the Belgian tour operator whose promotional material had been lifted, and American Express failed to see the funny side of Reid's Sex Pistols credit card sleeve for The Great Rock'n' Roll Swindle.

In retrospect, Reid's poster for the record is one of the definitive graphic texts of the period, a bottom-line summary of the music business that leaves little more to be said. Under the heading 'YOUNG FLESH REQUIRED', Reid lays out the transaction between the artist (The Prostitute), the record company (The Pimp) and the business (The Swindle). The object of the business is to exploit your talent for maximum profit while paying you as little as possible. Everyone is at it, including the manager, the promoter, the press and the disc jockeys - 'and if you're smart, You'. In the post-punk period, there was a growing cynicism about the realities of commerce. Malcolm Garrett designed a plastic carrier bag for the Buzzcocks emblazoned with the word 'Product'. The cover of Public Image Ltd's first LP in 1978, with a spruced-up 'corporate' John Lydon, resembles a glossy magazine; the P(ublic)IM(ag)E logo on the back cover is a take-off of Time.

As the decade turned, these foregrounding strategies became more blatant, as though the artists hoped that by winking at the buyer they could be let off the hook, while at the same time they did indeed have every intention of following Jamie Reid's advice and cashing in. In the space of three years, Scritti Politti moved from the design-zero of Skank Bloc Bologna to a 12-inch sleeve by Keith Breeden for Asylums in Jerusalem/Jacques Derrida (1981) that distils elements from the Courvoisier cognac label into a graphic metaphor for the irresistible lure of luxury and the commodification of consumer desire: acknowledge how good it makes you feel and enjoy it, while further savouring your theoretical sophistication in brazenly claiming your share of jouissance. In Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement, released the same year (but absent from 'Destroy'), the group's mission to be their own right-on corporation, while singing songs such as '(We don't need this) Fascist Groove Thang', is made explicit in a corporate brochure-style cover illustration that depicts the worldly young trio - 'The New Partnership that's opening doors all over the world', according to a coverline - coming on like contenders for a Businessmen of the Year award. Here, if you can ignore the ponytails and revolting ties, is a prescient early blueprint for the power-suited self-determination of the City-minded 80s.

Most intriguing of all, though, because 20 years later the sensibility is still hard to pin down, are the sleeves of Throbbing Gristle, the band that emerged from Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti's COUM Transmissions performance art group - responsible in October 1976 for the notorious 'Prostitution' exhibition at the ICA. The lugubrious electro-dirge United (1978), released on their own Industrial Records label, juxtaposes cannisters of the Nazi's Zyklon extermination gas with a domestic shower scene. The design is austere but considered - that's part of its horror - and has the look of technical literature - it is certainly not 'punk' (TG designs were uncredited, though Peter Christopherson had belonged to the Hipgnosis design team). 20 Jazz Funk Greats, on the other hand, an album of musical disturbance and lyrical trauma released in 1979, is packaged with an open-air portrait of the kind found on easy listening albums. The four group members, otherwise given to wearing paramilitary uniforms and heavy boots, pose on a cliff in bland casual clothes, in front of their distant Range Rover.

There is black humour here, but there is also something fundamentally recalcitrant, slightly out of reach: a power that punk's more explicit graphic testaments hardly ever attain. The precise ways in which sophisticated music graphics interact with musical content to establish a tone or a stance, to direct or even determine our interpretation and response, remains a subject that has hardly been considered. When a favourite group's work is repackaged, it will often seem subtly weaker and slightly less compelling once detached from the imagery with which it had become tightly linked, just as a tape-recording, minus the original graphics, misses some of the intensity and pleasure of the package as a whole. Looking at the covers in 'Destroy', many of them obscure even at the time, will have made many a visitor want to listen all over again.