As Britain’s leading rock’n’roll cartoonist, Ray Lowry’s stylish and witty illustrations, satirical drawings and strips enlivened New Musical Express for much of the 1970s and 1980s. But he will also be remembered as a graphic designer, creating the unforgettable artwork for the Clash’s seminal 1979 album London Calling. He also worked regularly for non-music publications, including Private Eye and Punch and his drawings appeared in national newspapers.

He continued to work prolifically until his death but in later years he preferred to paint in oils. Last month he attended an exhibition of his work in Lancashire. Many of the exhibited works were urban landscapes of northwest Britain, prompting him to declare “I am the other Lowry”, although he was not related to his famous regional artistic namesake.

Born in Cadishead, Salford, and brought up by his widowed father, he passed his 11-plus and attended a grammar school, where he admitted he showed little artistic promise but fell in love with what he described as “the holy rock and roll thunder”.

After school he worked in ad agencies in Manchester and London and began to experiment with abstract painting. He also began to create cartoons and found an outlet for his talent in the counter-culture of the late-1960s, when his work began to appear in such underground publications as Oz and International Times.

His association with the music press began in the 1970s, most notably with the NME for which he produced pocket cartoons, strips and a wide variety of illustrations. A true rock’n’roll fan, he met the Clash at a concert at the Electric Circus in late 1976 when they were supporting the Sex Pistols on their infamous Anarchy in the UK tour. A friendship began, and he was invited to accompany the Clash on their 1979 US tour, during which Joe Strummer dubbed him the band’s “official war artist”.

He sent regular drawings or “visual reports” back to the NME and at the end of the tour was invited to design the sleeve for the band’s third album, London Calling. Lowry’s concept involved borrowing the pink-and-green lettering from Elvis Presley’s debut album — partly in tribute, partly as pastiche — and superimposing the album’s title on a photograph of Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on stage during a concert at the Palladium in New York on their 1979 tour.

Lowry had to persuade the photographer Pennie Smith to let him use the picture which, she felt, was out of focus. In 2002 Q magazine voted Smith’s image “the best rock’n’roll photograph of all time”, and Lowry’s sleeve came ninth in a poll by the same magazine of the greatest-ever album covers.

Lowry also contributed record reviews to NME, which led to a two-year spell as a columnist on The Face, launched in 1980 by former NME editor, Nick Logan. Yet his heart was in drawing and painting rather than writing, and away from the music press he worked regularly for Private Eye and Punch and contributed as a freelance to several national newspapers.

He published three collections of his drawings — Only Rock and Roll (1980), This Space to Let (1986), Ray Lowry — Ink (1998) — and illustrated several books, including A Riot of Our Own, an account of the Clash’s career by the band’s road manager, Johnny Green. In 2006 he produced The Clash, Up-Close and Personal, a DVD-and-book set commemorating his days on the road with the band during their 1979 US tour.

In later years he lived far removed from the hurly-burly of the music industry in the village of Waterfoot in the Lancashire Rossendale valley, where he preferred to concentrate on his painting, although there was still a regular flow of drawings and cartoons. Among his most recent works, shown for the first time in an exhibition at the See Gallery in Crawshawbooth, Lancashire, in September, were a series of paintings inspired by a 1960 tour of Britain by the US rockers Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, which ended with the road crash in which Cochran was killed.

Lowry was found dead at his home after apparently suffering a haemorrhage. He is survived by a son.

Ray Lowry, cartoonist and artist, was born in 1944. He died on October 14, 2008, aged 64