Let's stick together

No artist caught the spirit of punk like Linder. Asa London show opens, she discusses the trauma that shapes her startling collages

- Alex Needham

In 1977, the punk band Buzzcocks released a single called Orgasm Addict, with a record sleeve as jolting as the song's title.

It depicted a lean and muscular, oiled-up naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling, lipsticked mouths for nipples. The collage was scary, sexy and shocking - especially since it was mass produced, seen in record shops and on the streets, rather than confined to a gallery.

"Buzzcocks had just signed to United Artists, so there was quite a large publicity budget," Linder Sterling, the creator of the collage, remembers.

"So that poster was in cities everywhere. It was unmissable. There was no social media, so the effect was hard to track, but years later people say to me 'I saw that poster in Glasgow, or in a back street in Birmingham, and it changed my life.""

The poster is in the collection of MOMA (Malcolm Garrett did the graphic design). The iron-headed woman is still Linder's most recognisable image, and a version of it advertises her new exhibition, Danger Came Smiling. Like her other collages, it was made from found imagery - often pornography. So what was the woman's real face like? "When I die, I'll tell my son that he can finally show the world the source image," she promises. "Because once you see it, you can't get it out of your head."

Linder was born Linda Mulvey, in Liverpool; at 21 she decided to go by a Germanic version of her first name only. Danger Came Smiling is named after the second album by her band Ludus; she originally took the title from one of her grandmother's romance novels. "If you're looking at pornography, those workers are vulnerable and they often have to smile," Linder notes. "And think of Trump, that horrible turning."