Jamie Reid, who has just died at the age of 76, was as important to London as Big Ben or Guy Fawkes. As influential as Martin Amis or John Betjeman. His work was as iconic as any London portrait by Monet, Pissarro or Canaletto. This Croydon-born boy was a colossal London figure, whose brief period of notoriety helped define the reverberating explosion of post-war pop culture.
Reid designed all the posters and artwork for the Sex Pistols, which were once so ubiquitous in London that it felt as though the city was rising up in generational defiance. Which, in 1977, it was. Along with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, Reid created the iconography of punk, using a dramatic and aggressive cultural lexicon that genuinely reinvented the music industry’s visual language, and which in the process became art in its own right.
