24th September – 30th October, 2010 @ Haunch of Venison, London
The Mott Collection is a compelling portrait of a particular moment in British popular culture, at the bitter end of the post-war period. It tells its story through a unique collection of several hundred posters, flyers and other ephemera assembled by artist and erstwhile punk, Toby Mott.
The exhibition recalls the anarchic spirit of authenticity and amateurism, the volatile and ambiguous celebration of negativity, creativity, violence and protest that was Punk. It seeks to capture punk’s cataclysmic collision with the cultural, social and political values of the time and show the enduring legacy it left in its wake.”
Mott said “But even then it was apparent to me that what was going on was much more than a musical movement.”
Ephemeral and throwaway as each of these objects were, collected together they tell, in uniquely immediate and visual terms, a part of the history of Britain, the history of ideas, and the history of art. More than any movement before or since, “Punk was defined by the Poster“.
Banned by TV and daytime radio and largely ignored by the mainstream press, the Punk movement found a cheap and effective way of communicating with the public in the form of the poster. The outrageous style that the Punk movement centred around meant that many graphic designers could experiement with racy or exciting imagery that their day job wouldn’t allow.
The collection delivers a gripping snapshot of the Britain of that time, a country rife with divisions which was slowly awakening to the reality of its reduced status in the post-war world.
While the Sex Pistols and the Clash wreaked havoc on Britain’s pop scene, their disciples were busy with glue and scissors, channelling punk’s energy and DIY spirit into hundreds of posters, fanzines and sleeve art. However respectable they may appear now, some of design’s heavyweights cut their teeth in the gritty sphere of punk posters and DIY aesthetics.
photos @ courtesy of Pat Mott.
As well as iconic works from Jamie Reid, who fashioned many a poster for The Sex Pistols and work for the Buzzcocks by Linder Sterling, the exhibition will show posters crafted by Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett and Gerald Holtom, who designed the Nuclear Disarmament logo.
Mott says, ‘I began this collection as a teenager in the 1970s. I loved Punk music and the attitude that went with it, but I was equally taken with the subversive way the bands promoted themselves – Jamie Reid’s famous Sex Pistols poster of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose being a stand-out example.’
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Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols Album Poster, 1977
A riff on the notorious album cover, this promotional poster features the same acid-bright colours and ransom-note text. Jamie Reid’s artwork for the Sex Pistols was integral to their image and caused almost as much controversy. John Mortimer QC helped successfully fight an indecency ban on the album and the poster
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Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict Poster, 1977
Artist and sometime punk singer Linder Stirling’s most famous artwork adorns the cover of the Buzzcocks’ 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’: a collage of a naked woman with eyes for nipples and an iron for a face. This lesser-known image breaks with punk tradition for a starker, more figurative approach. Orgasm Addict was the Buzzocks first single following the departure of Howard Devoto and signing to United Artists. The poster is an expanded version of the single sleeve with an in-your-face Linder Sterling collage tastefully typeset by Malcolm Garrett creating a brash punk statement.
Alternative T.V, How Much Longer / You Bastard Single Poster, 1977
A silk-screened poster for Alternative TV’s second single released on the Deptford Fun City label. Mark Perry of ATV was also the editor of Sniffin’ Glue, the most famous punk fanzine, which had given away the group’s first single, ‘Low Lies Limp’, as a flexi-disc. This relatively sophisticated poster is a riff on the single cover, which had the group playing on the television
The Clash, Clash City Rockers / Jail Guitar Doors Poster, 1978
The Clash seldom appeared on their tour or record posters, even when the subject, as here, was blatant self-mythology. By 1978, their artwork had changed from standard punk cut-and-paste collage to a less frenetic style utilising colour and found imagery. The graffiti-style lettering on the bus remains primitive and punkish; a group referencing its roots even as it leaves them behind
Poster advertising the Anti Nazi League Carnival 2, 24 September 1978
The Anti Nazi League were formed to combat extreme-right organisations like the National Front, who targeted hard-core punk gigs as potential recruiting grounds. 100,000 people attended the second Anti-Nazi League carnival in Brockwell Park, in Brixton, on 24 September 1978 to hear Elvis Costello, Sham 69 and reggae groups Aswad and Misty. Russian Constructivism meets Modist graphics in this striking poster for the event
Cortinas – Independance Day / Defiant Pose Single, 1977
The Cortinas were a short-lived Bristol-based punk group who signed to the Step Forward label. Gleefully juvenile imagery was a constant trope of punk rebellion, and here a young punk throws up at the dinner table behind his unknowing parents. The bright colours and high contrast of the silk-screened poster to promote the single add an unreal edge to the montage
Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the U.K. tour publication, 1976
Featuring London punk icon, Soo Catwoman, this very rare one-off magazine was designed by Jamie Reid for sale on the Sex Pistols’ 1976 Anarchy tour. It features graphics and slogans from Reid’s political magazine, Suburban Press, which he founded in 1970. Reid remains the most well-known and influential graphic artist of the punk era
National Front Young, Don’t Waste Your Life, 1970’s
In the late 1970s, the National Front promoted various national youth services, and often used the inflammatory political ephemera from the time, including recruitment posters that show just how much the extreme right, as well as the radical left, utilised punk graphics and imagery in their attempts to attract Britain’s disenfranchised youth. ‘You could go to certain punk gigs, Sham 69, say, and just as likely to be handed a National Front leaflet as an Anti-Nazi League one. It was a very aggressive and polarised political time moment as well as a cultural one. Those ideas of the extreme were always in the room’
The Vibrators, London Girls Single Poster, 1977
Poster advertising London Girls with Stiff Little Fingers as its B-side. The group Stiff Little Fingers took their name from this track.
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Sex Pistols’ first single Anarchy in the UK poster by Jamie Reid
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Sex Pistols’ single Pretty Vacant poster by Jamie Reid
Toby Mott celebrated his 14th birthday in the Roxy in Covent Garden, London’s now legendary punk club. He remembers “loud pounding darkness, cheap lager, the smell of cigarettes, sweat and piss… a few floors almost empty, like a kind of youth club”.
Back then, he belonged to a gang of kids from Pimlico comprehensive that called themselves the ASA (Anarchist Street Army) and hung out daily in an independent record shop on nearby Wilton Road called Recordsville.
Toby aged 14 at Pimlico in 1977
There, he started buying seven-inch singles by the punk vanguard: “In the City” by the Jam, “New Rose” by the Damned, “White Riot” by the Clash, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” by X-Ray Spex.
There, too, he discovered the dubious delights of several second-division punk groups that have long since faded into obscurity, the likes of the Boys, the Cortinas, Eater, Headache, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Snivelling Shits…
Mott also started collecting fanzines, flyers and posters. “I’d go around to Recordsville when they were putting up new posters and nab the ones that had just been taken down. I’d go to Rough Trade or Beaufort Market in Chelsea and pick up flyers for gigs. Most of it was produced in such relatively small quantities for these specialist record shops. I knew, even then, that they had a certain value. They helped make you a serious punk.”
Mott thinks that punk has been misrepresented since, both by rock historians who have over-intellectualised its meaning and context, and by curators who over-emphasise its artistic links to previous avant-gardes. Ironically, the academic essays that accompany the exhibition fall into the same trap, calling up the Bauhaus, the Futurists, the Situationists, as well as Andy Warhol.
“Punk was what it was,” says Mott. “It doesn’t need all that. Jamie Reid, who created the Sex Pistols‘ posters, came from a radical 60s art-school background, and knew the history of disruptive art movements, but mostly it was kids in suburban bedrooms and garages with scissors, paste and photocopiers.
The graphics sprang from the same place as the music, the do-it-yourself-and-do-it-now attitude that underpinned punk. It was an incredibly proactive time, the opposite of today’s consumer-led pop culture. Everything was fast, aggressive, disposable, a furious outburst against the boredom of life in 70s Britain.”
Mott’s collection contains several rare Jamie Reid works, including a poster entitled “Never Mind the Bans”, advertising the Sex Pistols’ troubled British tour in 1977, when the group’s notoriety was such that several town councils banned them from performing.
Buzzcocks promotional poster for Beating Hearts, 1979
There is work, too, by the artist Linder Sterling, who created the iconic artwork for the Buzzcocks‘ single “Orgasm Addict”, and posters utilising the images of established music photographers like Pennie Smith and Kate Simon, both of whom helped create the outlaw mythology of the Clash.
What interests Mott most about his own collection, though, are what he calls “the anonymous artefacts” produced in small numbers by fired-up teenagers. To this end, he has included crudely made Xeroxed fanzines like Sniffin’ Glue, Alternative Ulster, Ripped & Torn, London’s Burning and the wonderfully named Chelmsford’s Dead.
“In a way, these are artefacts left over from a dead culture,” says Mott, “but they speak more powerfully about what punk was really about, that moment of momentum and self-empowerment. It was not about making a profit or building a fucking brand.
It seems odd now that the establishment were so threatened by it, but they were. You can’t imagine a pop group today being a threat to the nation. Back then, we thought we were all about the future, but punk really was the last gasp of postwar radical culture.”
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The Mott collection offers a fascinating insight of a nation of unrest, torn by extremism, recording attempts by political extremes of both left and right to co-opt the power of youth.
He collected – often inflammatory – political ephemera from the time, including National Front recruitment , posters that show just how much the extreme right, as well as the radical left, utilised punk graphics and imagery in their attempts to attract Britain’s disenfranchised youth
“You could go to certain punk gigs, Sham 69, say, and were just as likely to be handed a National Front leaflet as an Anti-Nazi League one. It was a very aggressive and polarised political time, as well as a cultural one. Those ideas of the extreme were always in the room.”
The rise of the National Front is charted through its incendiary propaganda, while the posters advertising ‘Rock Against Racism’ events show how this was opposed and how the designers adopted punk’s stark graphical styles to entice young supporters.
Anti Nazi League Carnival against the Nazis, 1978
On April 30, 1978. This concert was fully publicised by groups from the political left, and the music press. The Carnival began with a march to Victoria Park where the Clash, Tom Robinson, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex and others played to an audience of at least 80,000 people.
Sunday Mirra , 1978
Sunday Mirra was edited by Broose Wayne and Dick Grayson from their base in Hayes, London. Their third and final issue appeared in January 1978. Punk was in many respects an invention of the media and the tabloid press were particularly prone to sensationalist coverage of the movement. This fanzine is a classic example of how the punks re-appropriated this negative coverage as a style to use for their own ends
Ripped and Torn 7, 1977
The issue features articles on the Sex Pistols, The Clash and New York Dolls amongst others. The cover photograph is of the Sex Pistols who by then had replaced original bass guitar player Glenn Matlock with Sid Vicious (Simon John Ritchie). Started by Tony Drayton, the publication ran for three years until 1979. He would then go on to begin publication of a new fanzine, Kill Your Pet Puppy.
Vortex, 999 / Art Attack / The Flies / Now Concert Flyer 1977
Flyer advertising 999, Art Attax, The Flies and Now at Crackers at The Vortex. According to Record Mirror journalist Jane Suck: ‘Crackers is designed like a sewer. One path leads to the toilets, one path leads to the bar, and if you are lucky you will find the stage in half an hour’
Candybeat 504 , 1977
This fanzine features Siouxsie and the Banshees concert in Plymouth with stories about Elvis Costello, Sham 69, Wire and X-ray Spex.
Toby Mott
Born in London in 1964
Toby Mott lives and works in London. .
Toby Victor Mott (born 12 January 1964) is a British artist and designer best known for his work with the Grey Organisation, an artists’ collective that was active in the 1980s, and for his fashion brand Toby Pimlico. More recently he has won acclaim for the Mott Collection, an archive of UK punk rock ephemera that includes over 1,000 posters, flyers and fanzines.
Toby Mott attended several schools, including Pimlico Comprehensive, and later studied art at Kingsway College, Clerkenwell.
In the early 1980s he lived at the Carburton Street squats, a centre of artistic activity at the time – other residents included Boy George, Marilyn, Cerith Wyn Evans, Fiona Russell-Powell and Mark Lebon. During this period Mott appeared in a number of films made by the British director Derek Jarman, notably The Angelic Conversation.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was based in New York and Los Angeles working as an art director for MTV and making music videos for various groups, among them Public Enemy, A Tribe called Quest and The Rolling Stones. He also produced album cover graphics for De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Information Society
Mott began his Punk Poster collection in the late 1970s. In addition to the iconic works of the era, notably those produced by Jamie Reid for The Sex Pistols and Linder Sterling for the Buzzcocks, it includes propaganda from political groups such as Rock Against Racism and the British National Front and memorabilia from the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, an event that collided with punk’s high watermark in 1977.
The collection was first exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Leónin March, 2010.
In a A Punk’s Journey, an essay by Mott which appears in Loud Flash, he writes: ” In 1977 my bedroom was covered in posters, flyers and shelves of records and fanzines, and when I left home these significant symbols of my past were stored away. In 1997 I returned from living in America and started to add to my collection. I appreciated the visual immediacy which never seemed tired or dated. The ideals of self empowerment, motivation, action and common cause are evident throughout – To me they are the spirit of punk”.
Mott was a co-founder of the East London art group the Grey Organisation (GO) who were active from 1983 to 1991. GO worked in several mediums including film and video and participated in over 20 international exhibitions. In January 1985 the group committed an act of art terrorism by smuggling one of their paintings into the International Contemporary Arts Fair in London. The following year they mounted an attack on Cork Street, then the centre of the London art world, splashing grey paint on the windows of a number of galleries. After this, members of the group were arrested and for a time banned from central London. This resulted in them relocating to New York City where they exhibited at The Civilian Warfare Gallery in the East Village. When TGO disbanded in 1991, Mott pursued a solo career exhibiting at White Columns NYC, The Thomas Soloman Garage, Los Angeles and Interim Art, London. He was for many years represented by the Maureen Paley gallery.
The Toby Pimlico label was launched at London Fashion Week in 1998. Mott transferred the slogans from his school-detention line paintings – example: ‘I must not chase the boys’ – onto clothing. The popularity and commercial success of these designs was greatly enhanced by endorsements from the supermodel Kate Moss, the actress Sienna Miller, Geri Halliwell from The Spice Girls and It Girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. It also received praise from the Prince of Wales.
In 2005, Mott was involved in an incident with a “gang” of youths near his home in Notting Hill Gate; according to the British newspaper The Daily Mail, Mott called the police after the assault and told them he was carrying CS gas for his own protection. He was then arrested for possession of a weapon and held for 11 hours at high-security Paddington Green police station.
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The Observer / Sunday 29 August 2010 by Sean O’Hagan
In 1977, Toby Mott celebrated his 14th birthday in the Roxy in Covent Garden, London’s now legendary punk club.
He remembers “loud pounding darkness, cheap lager, the smell of cigarettes, sweat and piss… a few floors almost empty, like a kind of youth club”. Back then, he belonged to a gang of kids from Pimlico comprehensive that called themselves the ASA (Anarchist Street Army) and hung out daily in an independent record shop on nearby Wilton Road called Recordsville. There, he started buying seven-inch singles by the punk vanguard: “In the City” by the Jam, “New Rose” by the Damned, “White Riot” by the Clash, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” by X-Ray Spex.
There, too, he discovered the dubious delights of several second-division punk groups that have long since faded into obscurity, the likes of the Boys, the Cortinas, Eater, Headache, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Snivelling Shits…Mott also started collecting fanzines, flyers and posters.
“I’d go around to Recordsville when they were putting up new posters and nab the ones that had just been taken down. I’d go to Rough Trade or Beaufort Market in Chelsea and pick up flyers for gigs. Most of it was produced in such relatively small quantities for these specialist record shops. I knew, even then, that they had a certain value. They helped make you a serious punk.”
Mott, who is now an artist and curator, has been collecting punk ephemera ever since, watching its value grow in the three decades since. An exhibition of his British punk paraphernalia, Loud Flash, opens at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London next month.
It will also feature often inflammatory political ephemera from the time, including National Front recruitment posters that show just how much the extreme right, as well as the radical left, utilised punk graphics and imagery in their attempts to attract Britain’s disenfranchised youth.
“You could go to certain punk gigs, Sham 69, say, and were just as likely to be handed a National Front leaflet as an Anti-Nazi League one. It was a very aggressive and polarised political time, as well as a cultural one. Those ideas of the extreme were always in the room.”
Mott thinks that punk has been misrepresented since, both by rock historians who have over-intellectualised its meaning and context, and by curators who over-emphasise its artistic links to previous avant-gardes. Ironically, the academic essays that accompany the exhibition fall into the same trap, calling up the Bauhaus, the Futurists, the Situationists, as well as Andy Warhol.”Punk was what it was,” says Mott. “
It doesn’t need all that. Jamie Reid, who created the Sex Pistols’ posters, came from a radical 60s art-school background, and knew the history of disruptive art movements, but mostly it was kids in suburban bedrooms and garages with scissors, paste and photocopiers. The graphics sprang from the same place as the music, the do-it-yourself-and-do-it-now attitude that underpinned punk. It was an incredibly proactive time, the opposite of today’s consumer-led pop culture. Everything was fast, aggressive, disposable, a furious outburst against the boredom of life in 70s Britain.”
Mott’s collection contains several rare Jamie Reid works, including a poster entitled “Never Mind the Bans”, advertising the Sex Pistols’ troubled British tour in 1977, when the group’s notoriety was such that several town councils banned them from performing.
There is work, too, by the artist Linder Sterling, who created the iconic artwork for the Buzzcocks’ single “Orgasm Addict”, and posters utilising the images of established music photographers like Pennie Smith and Kate Simon, both of whom helped create the outlaw mythology of the Clash.
What interests Mott most about his own collection, though, are what he calls “the anonymous artefacts” produced in small numbers by fired-up teenagers. To this end, he has included crudely made Xeroxed fanzines like Sniffin’ Glue, Alternative Ulster, Ripped & Torn, London’s Burning and the wonderfully named Chelmsford’s Dead.
“In a way, these are artefacts left over from a dead culture,” says Mott, “but they speak more powerfully about what punk was really about, that moment of momentum and self-empowerment. It was not about making a profit or building a fucking brand. It seems odd now that the establishment were so threatened by it, but they were. You can’t imagine a pop group today being a threat to the nation. Back then, we thought we were all about the future, but punk really was the last gasp of postwar radical culture.”
The Boo-Hooray gallery exhibited the punk-era collage/montage work of Jon Savage and Linder Sterling.
Jon Savage is the noted author of England’s Dreaming and Teenage.
Linder Sterling is a visual, performance and installation artist represented in the Tate permanent collection.
Jon Savage and Linder published the art fanzine “The Secret Public” in Manchester during the first month of 1978. It was the second New Hormones product– catalogue number ORG 2– after the Buzzcocks’ already iconic “Spiral Scratch,” and was distributed through Rough Trade and other independent outlets.This was followed by the portfolio “Mixed Media Montages” published in late 1978.
Some of these images originally appeared as flyers and as posters for the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, Magazine and Factory Records circa 1977-1980.
Haunch of Venison
Founded in London in 2002, Christie’s Haunch of Venison works with some of the most important and exciting artists working today, presenting a broad and critically acclaimed programme of exhibitions at international gallery spaces in London, Berlin and New York.
