, was the story of a rock band, then this collection is the story of an idea: a collaborative multimedia art project in which Reid and McLaren, who met at Croydon art school, were at least as significant as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. “They all brought their own unique visions and the Sex Pistols was the pot that everyone threw everything into,” Stolper says. Many of the images, ostensibly created to promote gigs and records, hold up as artworks in their own right.
is vividly expressed in his hand-lettered poster for their final UK concert, on Christmas Day 1977. “This true and dirty tale has BEEN CONTINUING THROUGHOUT 200 years of teenage anarchy,” he wrote beside a George Cruikshank illustration of Dickensian urchins. McLaren and Reid’s shared love of situationism led to the détournement of a poster for the Belgian tourist industry into an advertisement for the caustic single Holidays in the Sun.
Perhaps the funniest item in the collection is the press kit put together by Warner Bros Records for the US release of Never Mind the Bollocks, with its inside-out T-shirt and comic-strip retelling of the band’s story. Its corporate travesty of the Sex Pistols’ underdog aesthetic foreshadowed all the subsequent ersatz appropriations of punk signifiers, from advertising to boutique hotel rooms. “The imagery is rehashed constantly,” Stolper says.
Stolper and Wilson considered their work done by 2004, after they acquired the original lyrics to Holidays in the Sun, No Feelings and Submission. That year they held two more exhibitions, at the Hospital gallery in Covent Garden and Urbis in Manchester. In the spirit of punk, they felt that it was becoming too big and commercial, so they never did another. “The audience at the Eagle was an art audience and the audience at the Hospital was everybody,” Wilson says.
This, then, is their last chance to see the collection in full and reflect on the story it tells about the Sex Pistols, and about their own lives. “When I was a kid the music seemed really important,” Wilson says. “Now I find it quite hard to listen to some of the music. But” – he sweeps a hand around the room – “I still find endlessly fascinating and enriching. It’s more than just the music. And it’s more than just the imagery. It’s total art.
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