OBITUARY

Jamie Reid obituary

Artist and anarchist whose décollage aesthetic became the house style of the Sex Pistols at the vanguard of the punk insurrection
The Times
Reid began to learn the distinctive style that became his trademark while at Croydon Art School with Malcolm McLaren, later the Sex Pistols’ manager, in the late 1960s
Reid began to learn the distinctive style that became his trademark while at Croydon Art School with Malcolm McLaren, later the Sex Pistols’ manager, in the late 1960s
JACK O’BRIEN
The Times

Jamie Reid was in the Outer Hebrides when he first learnt about the punk insurrection that was soon to burst messily over the 1970s like an angry rash.

News of the gathering storm came in a telegram from Malcolm McLaren, asking Reid to return to London because he needed a visual artist whose iconoclasm could match the seditious clamour and rabble-rousing noise of the band he was about to launch on an unsuspecting world. The band were called the Sex Pistols.

Reid and McLaren were old friends who had met as students at Croydon College of Art in late 1968 and shared an interest in anarchy and dissent. However, while McLaren opened his famous shop, Sex, with Vivienne Westwood on Chelsea’s Kings Road, Reid’s subversion