Past Episodes.
S1E6.
“In 1977, the ‘Dada’ movement I was looking for walked through the door: it was a band called the Sex Pistols.”
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Malcolm Garrett: conceptual continuity.
Published: Jan 15, 2025.
“I was ambivalent about modernism. So, whilst a lot of my work was grid-orientated in the classic Josef Müller-Brockmann tradition, it also had a willfully random component in the Brian Eno tradition, so I’d always straddle the idea of using and misusing systems.”
INTRODUCTION: The influence of punk can’t be discussed without also talking about the cultural explosion of the 1980s. This seismic shift was felt all over the world and reimagined punk’s crude essence into a new wave of music and fashion.
The Blitz Club in London became the epicenter of this change, where future style icons like Boy George and Steve Strange fused the glam rock androgyny of the past with a new romantic fantasy, immortalized in David Bowie’s video for “Ashes to Ashes,” which quickly became the soundtrack of reinvention.
And as the raw rebellion of punk evolved into pop-tastic anthems like “Don’t You Forget About Me,” punk’s leather jackets and bondage wear gave way to shoulder pads and big hair.
Bands like Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Simple Minds dominated, crafting melodies that would define the decade, amplified by the birth of MTV and films like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.
But the era wasn’t just a departure from punk, it took its rebellious spirit and turned it upside down.
My name is Richard Smith, and I’m your host. I’m an art director and a filmmaker, and in episode six we meet a graphic designer and a cultural iconoclast whose bold, eclectic work blended high art and pop culture and helped define a new era of rebellion that brought together his love of design and music into a high-octane dream.
“You can map out the trajectory of my life as a child going through primary school and entering his teens alongside the development of The Beatles.”
RICHARD SMITH: My guest today is a design hero. Growing up, I obsessed over his work for bands like the Buzzcocks, Magazine, and particularly Simple Minds. Its complexity and irreverent style enthralled me, and I often wondered how did he do that and why. He’s a super fan of technology, a passionate educator, as well as a cultural iconoclast. Please welcome to the show the very talented Mr. Malcolm Garrett. Malcolm, thank you for being here.
MALCOLM GARRETT: Thank you. You’re very welcome.
RS: I wanted to start by talking about something you’ve done recently that you’re excited about.
MG: It’s that period in time where some bands that I’ve worked with are coming up to significant milestones. And there seems to be a renewed interest in music that I worked on and bands that I worked with.
RS: For instance?
We’ve just repackaged the first five or six Magazine studio albums. We’ve repackaged the first five Duran Duran LPs. Simple Minds, I’ve had a program of re-releasing things for a while. And the Buzzcocks sleeves were repackaged not so long back. But so, there always seems to be some anniversary or some reason for re-releasing.
And of course, almost all of those sleeves were done in the days before computers. So, creating digital versions from archived copies of things has been an interesting challenge in some cases.
RS: How do you do that? Do you have all that artwork?
MG: Good grief, no. For a couple of reasons. One, we didn’t think you needed to keep it. It was not until later in my career that I realized that I should be archiving things. And secondly, it didn’t always come back to you from the printer or the record company.
And so when you’re designing a record sleeve and you’re still at college, you are not thinking, “Oh, I’d better double-check that I keep this for when you release it in 40 years.” You’re not really thinking in those terms.
Interestingly, something that I found with the Magazine albums like Secondhand Daylight and The Correct Use of Soap and Magic, Murder, and the Weather—they were done at a period when I was deliberately trying to find obscure typefaces. I was very interested in this whole concept of what is a good typeface and what isn’t a good typeface.
“I would go into Rare Records, and they had listening booths, and they stocked German electronic music. So, that’s where I first listened to Neu!, or Amon Düül, or Can. And just through listening to the first side of that first Neu! album, I was convinced there’s a whole sphere of music, a little strand of music, that’s much more interesting.”
My view was always a good typeface is how you use it and what it’s used for. And so there is no such thing as an inherently good or bad typeface. It’s only the way you use it.
I was ambivalent about modernism. So, whilst a lot of my work was grid-orientated in the classic Josef Müller-Brockmann tradition, it also had a willfully random component in the Brian Eno tradition, so I’d always straddle the idea of using and misusing systems.
The reason I mention that is one of the challenges I had was trying to re-typeset all of the type on Magic, Murder, and the Weather. Both “What typeface had I used for the lettering for Magazine, the band name,” then the actual typeface. What was it? It’s a classic serif font, but which one?
The way I finally solved it was by tracking down which typeface had that lowercase italic “w” for “weather,” because it had a little loop in the middle. And that proved quite a challenge.
RS: For all the type nerds out there, what typeface was it, or is it?
MG: Oh, fuck, you expect me to remember that?
RS: I seem to recall—correct me if I’m wrong—that The Correct Use of Soap was Vendôme or something?
MG: Oh yeah, that was a relatively straightforward answer. That one I remember. And again, the whole process gives you great pleasure because it’s now typeset much more accurately and beautifully than it ever was before. And I’ve tweaked the kerning here and there to satisfy my more sophisticated gaze.
RS: Let’s go back a little bit further in your life. You are from Cheshire, just outside Manchester. What was driving you growing up? What were the things that you were interested in? What spurred you on in that period of your life?
MG: I had a general interest in all sorts of things, possibly starting with being bought records by The Beatles when I was seven or eight. And then an interest in architecture, weirdly enough—both medieval and Victorian and modernist.
Architecture was always of interest to me. We used to go to North Wales for family holidays when I was young. So, I loved the castles like Conway Castle and Beaumaris Castle. I loved the solidity of those, and I loved the plans as well. And things like that were influential, I think I’d always intended to be an architect when I grew up.
RS: But why did you digress? Why did you not pursue that?
MG: Because I discovered other things in life, in no particular order—music, girls and drugs. It became more interesting than going to university. And we had an enlightened art teacher who—when I say “we,” you’re bound to get onto the fact that in my art class was also Peter Saville and Keith Breeden, who were great friends and great influences on me. And our art teacher looked at the kind of work we were doing.
Our art teacher, Mr. Hancock, he took a great interest in us because we were interested in his subject. And he introduced us to the idea that there was a subject out there called graphic design that we might want to study, or we might… as a field we might want to go into. So, I swung away from architecture and into graphic design as being something that I guess an impatient teenager would find more realizable. The prospect of seven years of university studying engineering kind of lost its appeal.
RS: I wanted to get back to growing up in the shadow of Liverpool and hearing The Beatles at such an early age—that must have had a huge impact on you and inspired you maybe.
MG: You can map out the trajectory of my life as a child going through primary school and entering his teens alongside the development of The Beatles. My parents were from Liverpool, and so we would visit Liverpool quite frequently. And the sixties were a great period.
The Liverpool Football Team was doing really well. As you say, you had The Beatles, you had Mersey Beat, you had comedians like Jimmy Tarbuck and Ken Dodd, and others. There was a huge visible cultural scene based around Liverpool that wasn’t, at the time, echoed in Manchester. There always was a huge rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester, and so Manchester wasn’t considered as a place that you should even think about.
But then when I went to grammar school—and that happened to be 20 miles away from where I lived, and much closer to Manchester—it was just outside Altrincham in Greater Manchester. So, as a mid-teenager, 13 going on 14, sometimes you’d be encouraged to use your train pass to bypass going into school and go straight into Manchester and hang out at the stage door for the Free Trade Hall and help the roadies carry the equipment in.
“I was always conscious of the fact that I could not play a single note on any instrument. I’d half-heartedly tried to learn guitar on my sister’s nylon-stringed acoustic guitar and got as far as almost mastering “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, which I came to realize later was an entry point for lots of guitarists, including the late great (Magazine, Banshees guitarist) John McGeoch.”
RS: Did you do that?
MG: Absolutely. I just learned it from people in the year above me, you know, some kid had come in and he’s got guitar strings that he’s been given by Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd because he helped Pink Floyd carry their equipment in. I said, “Oh, I could do that.” So, I did that quite a few times, but also there were some great record shops.
I could go into Rare Records in a basement on John Dalton Street, and they had listening booths, and they stocked German electronic music. And so that’s where I first listened to Neu!, or Amon Düül, or Can. The music press was just beginning to write about these bands, and I got very interested in them.
And just through listening to the first side of that first Neu! album, I was just convinced there’s a whole sphere of music, a little strand of music, that’s much more interesting than—I guess it was parallel to David Bowie, but I didn’t get David Bowie immediately, weirdly, because I didn’t actually get on with the kids in my class who were into him. I felt I was a little bit cooler.
RS: Peer pressure would definitely do that.
MG: Yeah, and my peer pressure was negative peer pressure. I always thought I knew better than anyone else. And so that was always a driving force to stand out somehow.
RS: You told me recently you were… you had a band.
MG: No, no, I said I put out some music under the name The Pathfinders.
RS: But the band had a name. The entity—Malcolm Garrett and his friend—had a name.
MG: We both had synthesizers. But we weren’t a band. I graduated by this time, so I was getting on for my early twenties by the time I made some recordings with an ARP, and my Roger had access to a VCS3, and we met and we shared an apartment and we worked together.
He became my assistant at Assorted Images, the earliest kind of Assorted Images. I think he was the second person who worked at Assorted Images. And we made recordings, but being graphic designers, we gave a hypothetical name to this duo.
And so we called ourselves The Pathfinders simply because that was the tagline for the advertising campaign for ICI—Imperial Chemical Industries—which my dad, my elder brother, and my younger sister had all worked at. Anyway, that was 1980. Just to get all the timing right, that was 1981, so I’m 24 going on 25 by then.
RS: You’d already done work with Buzzcocks by that time.
MG: Yeah. Of course.
RS: This wasn’t like a childhood endeavor.
MG: No. I was always conscious of the fact that I could not play a single note on any instrument. I’d half-heartedly tried to learn guitar on my sister’s nylon-stringed acoustic guitar and got as far as almost mastering “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, which I came to realize later was an entry point for lots of guitarists, including the late great (Magazine, Banshees guitarist) John McGeoch. He told me that the first thing he ever played on the guitar was the riff from “Sunshine of Your Love.” So no, no, I was not a musician. I can’t play anything.
RS: I didn’t say you were a musician. I said you were in a band.
MG: Well, it was a group, but we mostly made the recording separately on a TR4 track reel-to-reel tape.
RS: And then you combined them?
MG: And we worked on them, and a lot of this stuff just ended up on a cassette and lay languishing for years and years. And then my friend Philip, who has a cassette-only label called Tapeworm, got wind of the fact that there were some recordings somewhere lying around and pressured me to find them.
And they were eventually found and released on the Tapeworm label, I think in probably 2021 or ’22, I can’t remember, on a cassette that we called “Imagine Something Yesterday.” We manufactured the same number of copies as the catalogue number, which was 147. And then, when that sold out, I wanted to repress it. We did a negative version—his sleeves are always black on white, so I did a version that is white on black, which reversed everything. And I pressed 53 copies. And I treated it like a limited-edition print. There are still maybe ten or a dozen of them left, which you can track down on Bandcamp.
RS: I love it. It’s like, you’re still a punk to this day.
MG: Absolutely.
RS: Jumping back a little bit again to school, growing up, what were you like then? Were you a bit of a rebel? Who were you hanging out with?
MG: I associated with the bad boys in the class. We weren’t that bad. It was a grammar school, and we were all fairly intelligent. Being bad involved, you know, growing your hair long and not wearing a tie and not wearing school uniform, wearing stacked-heel boots.
I remember I had black patent leather boots, which I really rather liked, and loon pants and an embroidered kaftan— you know, that post-hippie countercultural look. I identified with bands like Hawkwind, who had an immense cultural influence on me as much as anything. As much as enjoying their music, I enjoyed the whole vibe of occupying an alternative part of society, if you like.
So yeah, I was driven by being rebellious and contrary. But I also suffered from the fact that I was quite good in school. I was effortlessly quite good, and I mean, I got bloody 10 O-levels. You know, but by extension of that, I hadn’t yet decided that architecture wasn’t the course for me because I did choose to do Maths and Physics A-levels.
“I associated with the bad boys in the class. I remember I had black patent leather boots, which I really rather liked, and loon pants and an embroidered kaftan, that post-hippie countercultural look. I identified with bands like Hawkwind, who had an immense cultural influence on me as much as anything. As much as enjoying their music, I enjoyed the whole vibe of occupying an alternative part of society.”
After all, Maths, Physics, and Art were the three A-levels that would be most useful for getting you into a study of architecture. And so, I think that caused a little bit of interest when I went to Reading University for an interview for the Typography & Graphic Communication. It’s like, “Here’s this guy with a Physics A-level. Normally, it would be English or something that has no clear definition, but Maths and Physics.” And at the same time, turning up in a long Afghan coat, long hair, and his fingernails painted black and silver. I didn’t quite fit any particular strand of that.
RS: It sounds like you never wanted to follow convention. It seems like you probably hated that thing of being put in a box.
MG: Yeah, although you could say I was putting myself in my own box by identifying with others in the box that appealed to me.
RS: Speaking of boxes… so you’re in this classroom, there’s Peter Saville, there’s Keith Breeden, there’s you, the future 20th-century graphic design pioneers
MG: Something like that. Keith was more of a rebel than I was, but he was also naturally talented. He could draw and he could paint, and he had an amazing imagination, and he was really driven. He was a huge influence on me.
But he was frustrated by the fact that, because of the way his paintings looked, they were very hard-edged, they were very graphic, and so he was always being pushed to do graphic design, and ultimately, he didn’t want to do it.
Even when, later on, he came to work alongside me—independently, but alongside me in the same studio—he still wasn’t really that happy in it, and eventually, in the mid-’80s, after doing some great stuff with Scritti Politti and ABC, he upped and left, and he hated London, so he upped and left London and moved to Wales, which is where he still is, and he’s now a very successful portrait painter, member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, because he was a genius. He was an absolute genius. He was brilliant.
RS: You mentioned your teacher pointing you in the direction of graphic design, but why? What was going on in the classroom that pointed all of you in that direction? Or maybe you and Peter, perhaps?
MG: Because we were very heavily influenced by music, and it was the work we were interested in was very graphic. Whether it was designing posters for the theatre group or the paintings we were doing were very pop-art-influenced as well.
We were looking a lot at Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, of course, and the British pop artists like Peter Phillips and Allen Jones. This aesthetic, mingled with an appreciation of music. Peter was very into Roxy Music, I was into Hawkwind, Keith was into West Coast psychedelia like The Byrds, and all of that overlapped and interlinked.
And the one common denominator was that we were enthusiastic, and we spent a lot of time doing things that were just self-driven, rather than doing stuff that was dictated by the curriculum.
RS: Through all of that, that brought you personally initially to Reading studying typography, but then on to Manchester again with Peter Saville.
MG: Again, I’ve never had a five-year plan. I’ve never really thought about what’s going to happen next week, let alone next year. That sounds flippant, but being at a Catholic boys’ grammar school, you were guided towards going to university—applying to university as opposed to Polytechnic, which were seen as second-class universities at that time.
So there wasn’t much information about what they used to call vocational courses at Polytechnics, and so the university handbook had the sum total of exactly one course that was a vague, even a vague interest to me, and that was Typography & Graphic Communication at Reading University, which I later found out was a relatively new course set up by Michael Twyman to teach what is an incredibly important subject that touches every single person’s life in the Western world every minute of every day, yet you’d be forgiven for having no idea what it was.
“(Peter, Keith, and I), were very heavily influenced by music, and the work we were interested in was very graphic. We were looking at Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and the British pop artists like Peter Phillips and Allen Jones. This aesthetic, mingled with an appreciation of music. Peter was into Roxy Music, I was into Hawkwind, Keith was into The Byrds, and all of that overlapped and interlinked. The one common denominator was that we were enthusiastic, and we spent a lot of time doing things that were self-driven, rather than stuff that was dictated by the curriculum.”
Anyway, I was guided towards applying for this one course. Peter Saville, on the other hand, lived in Altrincham, and his nearest foundation course was at Manchester Polytechnic. So, I decided I would just apply for this university course—no hope of me getting in. And of course, they were intrigued by who this person was, who looked this way, had this interest in pop art, but very little experience of what graphic design was.
I mean, that was one of the questions in the interview: “What is graphic design?” Or they’d hold up one of my paintings and say, “Is this graphic design?” which is flawed, because I had no way of answering it. Anyway, I got in—they only took 12 people a year—and it proved to be an amazing, amazing course for me. It was the right thing for me. But my friend Peter seemed to be doing work that was much more creative, shall we say, and less academic, and I was slightly envious of him.
RS: You were focusing on kerning and serifs.
MG: And also, psychology—the psychology of perception—and the history of art, and the history of typography.
RS: Brilliant background.
MG: Stuff that came in extremely valuable later, but at the time, my little blink-and-short-sighted view then was, “Peter’s having more fun.” So, our paths coincided, and we both applied to do graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic, and we both started at the same time on that course.
And so, we found ourselves at the heart of this thing called punk rock as it was emerging, because it emerged no more strongly outside of London than in Manchester, with the people who I went on to work with—Buzzcocks—effectively forming to support a gig that they were putting on at the Lesser Free Trade Hall of the Sex Pistols. So, they brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester, and it’s one of those things: all the ley lines all crossed.
“Typography is an incredibly important subject that touches every single person’s life in the Western world every minute of every day, yet you’d be forgiven for having no idea what it was.”
RS: It’s a brilliant confluence of different things all coming to a head.
MG: Yeah, and which worked for me. So, there was no planning whatsoever. The only planning I ever did was to keep my eyes open and always say yes to everything.
RS: You touched on an interest in pop art. I know you’re also anti-art, I think, driven by Dadaism.
MG: Well, for me, there were two important painters in the 20th century. One was Marcel Duchamp, who said anything can be art. And the other was Andy Warhol, who said, “Yeah, anything can be art, but let’s make it look pretty.” And in between times, again, I was conflicted.
I was interested in and driven by the visual arts without having a full understanding of what fine art was, or what commercial art was. All these things interested me, but what I distrusted was the idea of learning how to be an artist just to sell paintings.
I instinctively felt that art should have some kind of purpose. And Dada, or anti-art, was both of those. It was visually driven in many ways, but its purpose was to question everything. And to question what is and what isn’t art.
And so that appealed to me. In my first year at Manchester Polytechnic, I was half-heartedly trying, looking around, “What else am I going to do?” And so, with another couple of students, we got very interested in Dada and thought the time was right for a new Dada movement. Of course, the time was not right for a new Dada movement. We were 50, or 60 years out of date.
It was time for punk. And as soon as I discovered punk, or this thing bubbling under with bands like The Clash and The Sex Pistols and Generation X and Buzzcocks, of course, I realized this was the Dada that I wanted, but it was real, and it was contemporary and it was essential.
“We found ourselves at the heart of this thing called punk rock as it was emerging, because it emerged no more strongly outside of London than in Manchester, with the people who I went on to work with, Buzzcocks, effectively forming to support a gig that they were putting on at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. So, they brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester, and it’s one of those things: all the ley lines all crossed.”
RS: It was that moment that you felt you could be part of something and actualize that, that thought of trying to change the world or be disruptive.
MG: It was less about changing the world and more about being able to have a vehicle for the artworks or visual manifestation of things that said something or had a sense of purpose and was relevant.
No longer did I need to pretend or wish that I’d been around when Hawkwind was happening. I had my own thing. And again, you only realize these things when you look back—at the time, it’s just all instinctive, right? You just go, “This is right.” You don’t stop and think, why is this right? And you don’t write an academic paper about it.
You just get stuck in, go to a lot of gigs, and the work you do at college starts to be based on what you’re seeing and what you’re inspired by. And then as luck would have it, one of those bands might come in and say, “Can you design a poster for us?”
RS: That must’ve been amazing. So, you’re still at college. There’s a relationship between Richard Boone, the manager of Buzzcocks, and Linder Stirling.
MG: Linder was a friend, but she was a year older than me. She was in the third year when I was in the second year at Manchester Polytechnic. She was doing illustration, and she’d been to see Buzzcocks before any of us and introduced us to Buzzcocks. And she started to design some handbills for them early in 1977—late ’76, early ’77.
But she didn’t want to be a graphic designer. And she quickly established a relationship with Howard Devoto, the singer, and his school friend was Richard Boone. Howard left Buzzcocks very early, straight after Spiral Scratch came out, and Richard had set up the record label New Hormones to put out Spiral Scratch.
Richard and Howard then took over management of the new version of Buzzcocks and encouraged Linder to do more design work for them. But Linder didn’t want to do it because it was not what she wanted to do, but she wanted to be creatively involved.
And Linder introduced them to me as being somebody who would want to do that stuff. So, Linder introduced me to Howard and Richard, and they asked me to design a poster, and I designed a poster. And it all sort of blossomed from there.
“I was interested in and driven by the visual arts without having a full understanding of what fine art was, or what commercial art was. All these things interested me, but what I distrusted was the idea of learning how to be an artist just to sell paintings.”
RS: That must have been an amazing experience.
MG: Again, you know, how amazing is it? They weren’t signed. They’ve got a do-it-yourself record out, and there were way more people who disliked it and wanted it to go away than liked it, which again I guess was appealing.
So, you didn’t think in terms— it’s not like the fucking Rolling Stones coming through the door and you’re going, “Oh my God,” it’s some band playing in the pub down the road, right? It wasn’t really a big deal. But it was something I could get enthusiastic about. And yes, in retrospect, wow, how amazing.
RS: The first cover you did was “Orgasm Addict,” correct?
MG: Yes.
RS: You’ve talked about how you approached that. You brought your contrary point of view to the table with that. Talk me through how that came about.
MG: We wanted to use one of Linder’s montages. So, it was a collective decision to choose that one. That seemed to work. The record company would only pay for two-color printing on the sleeve. And so, being contrary, I didn’t want one of those colors to be black.
The idea of doing a black-and-red sleeve seemed too punk rock. One of the driving things was to be different from everything else, but also to be equally different from the Sex Pistols—you know, the Sex Pistols’ ransom-note style was already recognizable. So that’s why we liked the montages. Nobody was doing anything like that. We felt that was quite distinctive and quite us.
“It was less about changing the world and more about being able to have a vehicle for the artworks or visual manifestation of things that said something or had a sense of purpose and was relevant.”
So, to reproduce a full-color illustration in monochrome and not have it be black and white, I decided, “Well, it should be like midnight blue and white, then it would hold the definition.” And so, what’s the second color that will go with that? Yellow will work with it. That’s blue and yellow. That’s very Bauhaus.
There are a lot of influences coming from lots of different directions that are defining what this is going to look like. So, there’s the John Heartfield montage, which is drawing on Dada. There’s the typography on the back that’s drawn from pioneers of modern typography and early futurist or constructivist typography. There are a lot of references, but we weren’t wanting it to look like anything else other than how it came out.
RS: It’s interesting, you touched on something that I’ve not thought about before, but the Pistols and The Clash, let’s say the visual aesthetic, was very haphazard, and it was very DIY. And then what I was thinking as you were talking was you and Peter, because of your training—your education in design—the work cut through all of that because it wasn’t that it maybe had elements of that but in a very different way.
MG: It was both DIY and formal. In my view, only Barney Bubbles—who was a very skilled graphic designer who gave up mainstream graphic design to work within the underground press, and then he went on to design everything for Hawkwind.
He was my role model in many ways, as being somebody who didn’t work for a record company or didn’t work for “the man” but worked with the band. And so that was my model: I’m not working for United Artists Records; I’ll work with them, and I’ll deliver, and I’ll take on board the constraints they’d have to put on me to design a sleeve or whatever, but I’m working with the band.
I’m working with Howard and Peter and Richard and Linder and Steve and everyone else. And that’s one of the things that changed with punk, is that Jamie Reid working with the Pistols and other bands, if you like, adopted their “tame graphic designer,” possibly without fully realizing what they were doing other than being instinctively wanting to keep control within their little group.
As opposed to letting EMI take over.
“Linder (Sterling) introduced me to Howard (Devoto) and Richard (Boone), and they asked me to design a poster, and I designed a poster. And it all sort of blossomed from there.”
RS: Someone else who I know you were inspired by was Frank Zappa and his idea of… conceptual continuity. Talk to me about what that is and how that has manifested itself in your work.
MG: Well, Zappa I discovered quite early on. Hot Rats was a huge album in, I think, 1970 it might have come out. So, I was like 14, and that was my introduction to Frank Zappa, and then I started working backward.
He’d already released about half a dozen albums as The Mothers of Invention, which is a great name. And he was very formal, but very experimental, very contrary, and very political, so he had a huge influence on me. He worked with a single designer, Cal Schenkel—the great Cal Schenkel—and he had great control over all his output.
But his output, like mine, was quite eclectic. It would go off in multiple directions, whether that was avant-garde music, or whether it was classical, or whether it was rock, or whether it was surf music. He brought a lot of things together with his vision. And because he was in control of it, I always liked the way he described how he could link two things that, on the face of it, may appear completely unlinkable.
“One of the driving things was to be different from everything else, but also to be equally different from the Sex Pistols, the Sex Pistols’ ransom-note style was already recognizable. So that’s why we liked the montages. Nobody was doing anything like that. We felt that was quite distinctive.”
Or he’d pick up one little element from something he’d done two years ago and move it forward. And he just called it conceptual continuity, as if nothing was done by accident—everything had a role, had a purpose, and had an evolution of ideas through it. And so that, I found inspiring: that you can evolve ideas through a series of visual links, whether that be posters or press advertising or button badges.
RS: Is that why some of your early work with Simple Minds and Duran Duran was so simple?
MG: Well, I like the idea of working with the same people over a period of time and setting myself the challenge of becoming the visual spokesperson, if you like, for those bands. And it takes a while to get under the skin, to really understand somebody you’ve only been maybe introduced to last week, or you’ve only just heard their music this week.
My approach was to keep it as simple and as plain as possible but introduce some elements that I might be able to utilize later on because the interesting thing—or one of the exciting things—about working in music: you don’t know what the band’s going to put out next week.
They’re in the studio all the time, they’re in the rehearsal studio, they’re writing all the time, and everything is new. I quickly learned that if I could introduce some things, some visual hooks, then I might be able to refer back to them in some way.
With Buzzcocks, it might be as simple as we just use two colors. And then with Duran Duran, I referred back to Müller-Brockmann, and I drew a grid so the visuals we might use on the next release or the release after that may be completely different, but they’ll fit into this grid that I’ve just designed.
And with Simple Minds, it was photographs that aren’t actually of anything, and then when you put them all together, they create something that is also not of anything, but it’s an interesting mix of lots of pictures.
I guess throughout my career, especially at that time and the bands I worked with, that was how I was able to progress. And lo and behold, you look back on it and you see, oh, there are eight single sleeves for Buzzcocks, and they somehow all seem to fit together. But you could not possibly have predicted that on day one when you were designing “Orgasm Addict.” You pick it up as you go along.
“Barney Bubbles was my role model in many ways, as being somebody who didn’t work for a record company or didn’t work for “the man” but worked with the band. That was my model: I’m not working for United Artists; I’ll work with them, and I’ll take on board the constraints they’d have to put on me to design a sleeve or whatever, but I’m working with the band.”
RS: Let’s talk about punk. And when you discovered that—you talked about Manchester being this destination of bands and musicians coming, and the Buzzcocks, the famous Lesser Free Trade Hall gig. When was the first time you heard the Pistols, and what was that moment like?
MG: Well, late in ’76, I’d heard of the Sex Pistols, but I didn’t really know about them, and a lot of the prevailing opinion was that they were crap. They couldn’t play their instruments, they were terrible, and so there was no way you could actively go out and listen to them unless you went to see them live because they weren’t being played on the radio. They didn’t really exist.
I’d heard of them, but I didn’t have a television at home. I missed the Lesser Free Trade Hall, so I missed any appearances, but at the end of ’76, I came to London. I went to stay in a flat that an old school friend was living in, just near Bond Street tube station. And her boyfriend was into the Eddie and the Hot Rods and the 101’ers and these pre-punk bands. And he told me about the Sex Pistols, and that sort of coincided with “Anarchy in the U.K.” just coming out.
So, I walked down to the Virgin Records store in London, which was then in New Oxford Street. So, I went downstairs, heading there to buy my copy of “Anarchy in the U.K.” And there was a video of the Sex Pistols playing behind the counter. So, that’s the first time I saw them. I thought, “Fuck, who is it that thinks this band can’t play?” This was incredible. This was so powerful. And just from that very first chord of the first chords, it’s like, “This has got so much power.”
RS: You talked about that moment defining you, and very much it was like a switch.
MG: Interestingly, almost everybody who talks about being inspired at that time uses the same terminology. They always say it only took one listen. Suddenly you were going, “This is what we’ve been waiting for, this is what we want, this has got energy, this has got passion.”
RS: You had already had anarchy floating around in your head—not the song, but the idea of anarchy?
MG: Probably through listening to Frank Zappa, who was described as anarchic. So, you’ve got this vision, this view in your head of what an anarchist is, and an anarchist is somebody who wears a black raincoat and carries a spherical black thing with a lit fuse on top that says “bomb” on the side, taken from the pages of Mad Magazine or something like that.
“Frank Zappa’s output, like mine, was quite eclectic. It would go off in multiple directions and he brought a lot of things together. I always liked the way he’d pick up one little element from something he’d done two years ago and move it forward – he called it conceptual continuity.”
So, I decided I wanted to be an anarchist way before I’d even heard that the Pistols had a song about that. And again, everything just fitted in. I liken it to a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are from a different puzzle.
RS: Do you think there will ever be something like the Sex Pistols again?
MG: There’ll be something. It’ll be the same and completely different. It’ll be the same in as much as it’ll be something that galvanizes or brings together a lot of people who are feeling disenfranchised dissatisfied or frustrated.
Those are things that don’t go away. One of the things that don’t go away is music being something that you have a passion for in your mid-to-late teens that shapes who you are and who you become. So that won’t change. What will change is the circumstances and the things that will happen.
I’m interested in whether we should be looking at the world of AI and what that precipitates because it’s obviously something that is worrying the world and will inevitably have immense importance. So, looking at ways that that is going to be used. I’m at the wrong stage in my life to have been given the same motivation that the Sex Pistols gave to me, but there are plenty of people out there who are. And so, I look with interest at what might happen in that space.
“I liked the idea of working with the same people over a period of time and setting myself the challenge of becoming the visual spokesperson for those bands.”
RS: You’ve been interested in AI and technology and computers for a long time.
MG: Absolutely.
RS: “Assorted Images” being an AI reference of sorts.
MG: I like a good acronym.
RS: How has it impacted your work, your career, the technology, and the use of computers and so on?
MG: It’s had an immense impact. But I don’t want to just focus on technology being laptop computers or iPhones or whatever—technology goes beyond that. I’m holding in my right hand a pencil, which is an incredible piece of technology. How did somebody manage to wrap a piece of firm graphite that can make a mark on a piece of paper with a bit of wood around it so you can hold it? That’s incredible technology, but we don’t think of it as technology, right?
“I was always interested in those TV programs that had technology driving them, whether that was Stingray or Fireball XL5 or Thunderbirds or, later, The Avengers or James Bond – storytelling and creativity are indelibly interlinked for me.”
All my creative work, if not every bit of creative work ever, is dictated by the technologies of the day, the technologies you must work with. And I guess I’ve always instinctively known that. My interest in technology—digital or mechanical—comes from, again, from childhood.
I was always interested in or always watched those TV programs that had technology driving them, whether that was Stingray or Fireball XL5 or Thunderbirds or, later, The Avengers or James Bond. Storytelling and creativity are sort of indelibly interlinked for me, you know.
Why did I want to be an architect? Because I had a Lego set, and Lego is an incredibly simple technology, simply and effectively making structures that are bright and colorful. Lego is probably more influential on me than I give it credit for. I’ve just thought, all those colored bricks—they’re all Bauhaus colors. I was into the Bauhaus ten years before I knew what the Bauhaus was.
RS: You could also take all these components—typography, pictures, color—and piece them all together and make something out of them. Not to make too much of a stretch.
MG: I was going to say because I wasn’t a particularly good draftsman, but I was somebody who liked to piece things together. I was influenced by John Heartfield and other surrealist creatives, and I was working on—I called it collage. So, I was working in that sphere because it doesn’t require the same type of draftsmanship to create interesting visuals, cutting things out of newspapers or magazines and sticking them together is a nice shortcut for creating random images.
Where did I get that from? Frank Zappa, Cal Schenkel, on albums like Absolutely Free and We’re Only in It for the Money and other albums from those early Mothers days. Again, there’s no one place that you can say, “That’s where I got that idea.” You see references and ideas in lots of different places at around the same time, and somehow, they all coalesce and come together.
RS: It seems like you have an eye on the zeitgeist, the cultural zeitgeist, and you embrace it rather than perhaps reject it, or you are intrigued by it…
MG: I’m generally positive while at the same time being questioning and contrary. So, if those things come together in good ways…
“I’m not overly political as a person, but I’m political enough to steer right away from right-wing politics, and I’m very interested in the politics of community and the politics of humanity, and so there’s a lot of things I have a dim view of going on in this world now. So, when I was invited to join the Hard Art collective by the two guys who handled the graphics for Extinction Rebellion—Clive and Charlie—then I said yes.”
RS: You talked about questioning things. Are you involved in any kind of activism?
MG: I’ve been following Extinction Rebellion for some time, and I guess the counterculture of the late ’60s, early ’70s, I found very influential. But I’m not overly political as a person, but I’m political enough to steer right away from right-wing politics, and I’m very interested in the politics of community and the politics of humanity, and so there’s a lot of things I have a dim view of going on in this world now.
When I was invited to join the Hard Art collective by the two guys who handled the graphics for Extinction Rebellion—Clive and Charlie—then I said yes, and I’ll go along. The Hard Artists meet frequently at Brian Eno’s studio. He’s one of the founders of Hard Artists, but he would be at pains to point out that it’s not a Brian Eno initiative; he’s just one of many, but it’s not something he wants his name to lead on.
I go along to not as many of the things as possible that Hard Art does, simply because that’s the way life is. I’m not as active an activist as I would like to be, because I don’t want to put my hand up and say, “Yes, I’m an activist.” Mentally, I’m an activist, but I could be doing a lot more and would like to be doing a lot more.
Hard Art is looking at how artists, designers, and activists can come together to make the world a better place. It’s as simple as that in all sorts of ways, and they staged a four-day event in Manchester last year called “The FATE of Britain”—FATE as in party—again, “Look at what the fuck’s going on in this country.” And because not everyone is evil—we’re not all fucking Trump or Musk, you know—most people are not evil. Most people are good people. And so how do we make it so that the good guys—I’ve always considered myself to be in amongst the good guys, and I want to be one of the good guys. So yes, I am a Hard Artist but arguably could be harder.
RS: It’s like a Marvel movie. Artists take on the world. I love it.
MG: Maybe we’ll be the masters of AI and between us… that’s one of our aims. Can we reprogram social media? Now it seems to be programmed to be divisive. But surely, we can program it so the algorithms can be written to bring people together to be more positive, right? So that’s one challenge that is regularly discussed at Hard meetings—how do we turn things around as opposed to just ignoring it? How can we make it better? What can we, in small ways or big ways or whatever ways, do to improve things and make the world a better place?
“Hard Art is looking at how artists, designers, and activists can come together to make the world a better place. It’s as simple as that.”
RS: Speaking of making the world a better place, what’s one of the things you’re most proud of in your career?
MG: Oh God, don’t ask me that. That’s… that’s impossible. That’s impossible.
RS: Are you proud of being a member of the British Empire?
MG: I almost turned it down.
RS: Did you really?
MG: Yeah, well, my immediate thought was when I opened that letter saying, “We’d like to invite you to give you an MBE—will you accept it?” because you have to accept—my immediate thought was “Fuck it.” You know, John Lennon sent his back. It’s like, I don’t give a fuck about Empire. I don’t give a fuck about monarchy. I don’t give a fuck about religion for God and empire. It’s like no.
And so I called a couple of people whose pragmatic and left-leaning views could influence me, half-expecting one of them to say, “No, don’t you dare.” And they both said, “Remember, it’s not the government that’s giving you this. It’s not the monarchy that’s giving you this. This is being given by your peers. So, you’ve been nominated.” So, I decided to accept it, but to accept it on behalf of all those graphic designers who have not been given it, because they give out hundreds of these fucking things every year, and how many graphic designers are there? Half a dozen, maybe.
“My immediate thought when I opened that letter saying, “We’d like to invite you to give you an MBE—will you accept it?” was I don’t give a fuck about Empire. I don’t give a fuck about monarchy. I don’t give a fuck about religion for God and empire. It’s like no.”
RS: Obviously Neville Brody just received an OBE, right?
MG: That’s right, yeah.
RS: And Peter Saville, CBE—was that before you or after you?
MG: Peter was a year before me …but I’m at the bottom of the list, you know because they have the hierarchy. M is the lowest one you can get. I’ve always been the one that nobody’s heard of, which I like because I’ve— it’s fair to say I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to hide my presence.
RS: Speaking of brilliant things, the thing I wanted to talk about was Torn Apart, which is an exhibition in Florida, which is ending soon.
MG: Torn Apart is an exhibition of posters from the collection of Andrew Krivine. Andrew Krivine has links way back to punk in 1976 and has been collecting posters ever since then. He’s got something like four and a half thousand punk, pre-punk, post-punk, and new-wave posters.
And Torn Apart is fundamentally an exhibition of these posters. But Andrew being Andrew, wanted to take it a little bit wider. So, he invited Sheila Rock, the photographer, whom I’d worked with back in the ’70s and early ’80s. She took lots of behind-the-scenes photos of the Pistols and other people. And Andrew wanted to show her photos alongside it.
Also— we could do a whole other podcast on the obsessive person that I am— but I collect things, so I have a—not a massive amount but in some ways a significant amount—of punk and street clothes from the late ’70s and early ’80s, about 30 or 40 of which are on display alongside these posters in the Orlando Museum of Art, which is on until January the 31st, I think.
Then we’re looking to bring the entire show, expanded or otherwise, first of all to London in late 2026, which coincides with the 50-year anniversary of Punk, and then take it to Manchester later in 2027, which coincides with most punk things taking off in Manchester from Spiral Scratch.
“Torn Apart is an exhibition of posters from the collection of Andrew Krivine. He also invited Sheila Rock, to show her photos alongside a significant amount of punk and street clothes from the late ’70s and early ’80s, which are on display alongside these posters in the Orlando Museum of Art.”
RS: What has been the response?
MG: Really well. It really is successful. It serves two purposes. There’s a nostalgia thing for people as old as me going, “Oh my God, I remember that” and a new young audience that’s going, “Oh my God, have you seen this? This is amazing.” They haven’t seen, so it’s doing the job in exactly the way we want it.
RS: I wanted to segue into your work, not necessarily as an educator, but in education, inspiring the younger generations, etc. Do you see this as being something doing that or what else are you doing that does that?
MG: It definitely forms part of this. If you’re not going to be able to time-travel and be 40 years younger and be vital in the same ways you used to be, then what can you do? You can use your 40-odd years of experience to introduce things that you think are relevant and interesting to people who might also find them relevant and interesting, who are at the beginning of their careers.
I’ve always been interested in that aspect of education, in raising awareness. And for the past dozen years, I’ve been a member of the Sir Misha Black Awards Committee. The Sir Misha Black Awards were set up to celebrate his life and introduce the Sir Misha Black Medal, which was specifically to be awarded to people doing great work, and excellent work, in design education, because design education is not really celebrated enough.
I’ve been on the awards committee since 2012, I think, or 2013, and last year I was elected the chairman of the committee. Each year we give two awards: we give a medal, which is like a lifetime achievement award, and we give an award that recognizes innovation in contemporary design education, and I’m very enthusiastic about that.
RS: Beyond that, I was interested also to learn how you are taking all of your experience and the things that have influenced you to inspire and support young designers.
MG: Well, everything’s part of everything, isn’t it? It’s all part of that conceptual continuity. I do have active relationships with various art colleges around the country and Europe. I’ve worked with Moda FAD in Barcelona, for instance, to support innovation, and student creative innovation in the world of fashion.
I’m part of the mentoring scheme at Manchester School of Art, and I’m always happy to talk to students. There’s barely a month that goes by without being contacted by a student who wants to ask me questions about something they’re studying or their thesis they’re writing or whatever.
“If you’re not going to be able to time-travel and be 40 years younger and be vital in the same ways you used to be, then what can you do? You can use your 40-odd years of experience to introduce things that you think are relevant and interesting to people who might also find them relevant and interesting, who are at the beginning of their careers.”
RS: I’m curious to understand a little more about why innovation is important.
MG: It’s not necessarily what’s important, but it’s what interests me. It’s like doing things differently. It’s not always coming up with predictable answers to new questions. That’s what interests me. What’s new? What’s fresh? What’s exciting? What’s challenging? That’s me.
RS: That’s great.
MG: That’s what interests me. And I guess the word “innovation” is a nice catch-all word because, by definition, innovation has yet to be done. You can’t define “this is what we’re looking for.” What we’re looking for is something we haven’t seen before.
RS: There was one other question I wanted to get to. For me, your role in defining the ’80s, through the work you did with Culture Club and Simple Minds and Duran Duran and many other bands… defined that era along with obviously the music and so on.
How did that impact you? What was it like working with three mega-successful bands simultaneously?
“Quite late on in my dad’s life, in an intimate moment, he did say, ‘I still don’t know what it is you do, Malcolm, but I know if I was your age, I’d be doing it’.”
MG: It was great fun. It was great fun. The reason I was able to do that is because they each had components or aspects to who they were and how they were working and what music they produced that were quite different from one another. So that appealed to my eclecticism.
I loved, if you like, the clarity and the single-minded direction of Duran Duran. I loved how they had a global vision for where they wanted to take their music and how they were able to do that. Alongside that, I love the eclecticism and the diversity—the literal diversity—of Culture Club and how Boy George—genuinely one of the only stars I’ve had the pleasure of sharing physical space with—occupies the whole room and is supremely down-to-earth.
Then, in complement to that, we’ve got Simple Minds: Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, two of the nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. I’ve never not seen Charlie without a huge grin on his face. Really? And Jim isn’t really a musician, because he doesn’t play anything, doesn’t write any of the music, right? But his words—they’re so evocative. So, it was a real privilege to work alongside them.
Literally, it’s such a privilege, because this is what I set out to do. In many ways, it’s such a privilege to have created or been part of the team that created a visual evocation of music that has that kind of power and potency, because music doesn’t have any physical form—it only exists in your head when you’re listening to it—and our challenge was always “make a bloody cardboard box that contains this thing that is uncontainable.”
And it’s great to think that for some of those things we did, people cite New Gold Dream or Sparkle in the Rain as having that visual evocation of something monumental inside.
RS: Oh yeah, no, I think both of those—well, many covers, but those you mentioned for Simple Minds—100%.
MG: I like saying this. I’m going to repeat it because I like it. But quite late on in my dad’s life, in an intimate moment, he did say, “I still don’t know what it is you do, Malcolm, but I know if I was your age, I’d be doing it.” So, it’s that simultaneous appreciation, and lack of comprehension, to which I’m sure we both find ourselves in that place.
RS: I love it. It’s a great way to end. All right, Malcolm. Thank you.
MG: I’ve now got to go and answer a million emails that have been popping up in my inbox while we’ve been talking for the past two hours. One from my great friend Glenn Gregory. We’re going to do some stuff with Heaven 17 this year. Which we’ll talk about another time.
RS: Brilliant.
MG: Cheers, Richard.
RS: Thank you so much.
MG: Goodbye, listeners.
RS: Thank you. Bye.
MG: Bye.