Who is the man behind the iconic Rolling Stones logo?

With a last pencil stroke, bent over the table in the conservatory of his home in the suburbs of Surrey, England, John Pasche finalizes another print of the logo on the tongue and lips of Rolling Stones.

“I’ve been producing these prints for the last few years and it’s really my main source of income,” says the 78-year-old, who sells the prints for around £2,500 via his website.

Pasche is the designer behind the most famous logo in world music – certainly rock – although it has been almost 40 years since he sold the copyright to the Rolling Stones for £26,000, on the advice of his lawyer. The band gave him permission to make the prints a few years ago and some of them were featured in their store RS No. 9 at Carnaby Street – a three-year-old store where the logo appears as an acrylic sculpture, neon sign and on everything from sweatshirts, toiletry bags and insulated water bottles.

But Pasche is not rock and roll and, although the logo is commonly (and wrongly) attributed to Andy Warhol, he has no pop art influences in his home. “Everything I have is pretty neutral, pretty classic,” he says.

54 years ago, the Royal College of Art recommended Pasche, then just 25, to Mick Jagger after the singer approached the College – the only graduate design college at the time – to create a poster for the Rolling Stones’ 1970 European tour.

“I was broke at the time,” says Pasche. “Imagine I was a student for nine years and needed money…but during that time, I was doing little art work for album covers and doing that on the weekends.”

His poster – a reference to travel posters from the 1920s and 1930s – impressed the band so much that he was contacted later that year. Pasche recalls that they asked him if he could meet with Jagger, who was just two years older than him, to talk about creating a logo for the band.

“We had a meeting and Jagger wanted something that could stand out as an image, without using any images of the band,” he explains. “Mick cited the example of the Shell symbol… that was a strong part of the briefing.

“Then he showed me a picture of Kali, the Hindu goddess that he had ripped out of a magazine at the corner grocery store, and said, ‘I really like that.’ I think that was the trigger for the concept because she had a pointy tongue. I’m not sure if he meant that it was the Indian theme as a whole that he liked – that was quite popular at the time – but to me I just saw the mouth and the tongue and I immediately thought of the way he stuck his tongue out of his mouth. people, their sexual connotations, and that stuck in my mind when I left the meeting.”

“I said I was going to draw something and then I spent about a week or two creating these drawings. It was about three different versions of it, from different angles.”

“Then I had a second meeting with him, and he said, ‘Oh yes, I really like this’ – which was what I preferred. It was all very simple, really.”

Pasche was paid £50 for the initial work, “although to be fair to them, a year or two later, when it started to be used more, they paid me a further £250 just to say ‘we should have paid you a bit more, really’ ” he laughs. They also offered a percentage of sales.

“Initially, the logo wasn’t a huge thing — it was going to be for their letterheads, the new label they were starting, and small uses, really,” he says. “It ended up growing much bigger than that.”

Hackney Diamondsthe Stones’ first new album in 18 years, includes a modern update to the lips Pasche designed all those years ago.

The Pasche-designed logo is also not the exact version we see on t-shirts in Carnaby St or that was used in the album’s promotion, from adverts to team uniforms, as part of Spotify’s sponsorship.

“The record company wanted to get things out as quickly as possible,” he explains. “The original art that I did was faxed to the United States… so it had to be redrawn and it wasn’t redrawn exactly the way I had produced the art.”

The “more aggressive” changes made by designer Craig Braun include extra tongue highlighting and a bolder black outline.

“Unfortunately, this is the prevailing design,” he says. “People might look at it and not be able to tell the difference; it meant a lot to me, but that’s water under the bridge, really. Unfortunate things happen, it’s a shame there wasn’t another way to get the art to them right away.”

However, Pasche retained ownership of the logo and a percentage of sales, until it reached a point in 1984 when the Stones wanted to buy the copyright.

“It was a difficult situation because back then there was this weird thing called usage rights, where if a company used a logo or symbol for a certain period of time, they were entitled to it,” he says. “I had a really good lawyer at the time and he said it was a gray area and I could lose in this by going against the Stones. I think I was a little intimidated by the situation.”

Pasche accepted a payment of £26,000 for the logo – about £80,000 in today’s money.

“At the time I was quite happy with it – it was enough to buy my little flat in Muswell Hill, which got me into the property market,” he explains. “Obviously, I kind of regret it, but there was a good reason for it. That was the situation at the time. When they actually got the copyright and took me out of the picture, they really threw themselves into the merchandise. Obviously, it made millions for them over the years.”

“But I was happy with the situation and I’m not one to look back and stress about it.”

Arguably, Pasche’s iconic design for the Stones solidified his reputation as a talented young designer. A reputation that attracted commissions from bands such as The Stranglers and opened doors for future design work – including a creative director position at the record label Chrysalis Records and the opportunity to set up your own design agency.

The original artwork was auctioned in 2008 and purchased for just over £50,000 by the V&A MuseumIn London.

Before his retirement Pasche still served as creative director at the Southbank Centre, “mainly doing things for classical music and ballet”, he says. “It was a refreshing change. I was still doing covers and stuff like that, but for completely different subjects, so I liked that.”

Report originally published in Rolling Stone UK, check out the original text in English here.