Iconic style: the world's first licensed album art wallpaper by rock greats including the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones

Staffed by veterans in the music business, Rock Roll, a new wallcoverings brand in Camden, has wheedled a licence out of the Rolling Stones to reproduce the “Jagger” lips-and-tongue logo.

Designed by an RCA student in 1970, with the artwork now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, you can buy it as a repeat pattern for £70 a roll, with murals from £250.

Those large lips have been appropriated often over the years — notably last month during Milan Design Week, when a huge version was painted by Dutch artist Studio Job to mark a party venue.

Rock Roll is billed as the world’s first officially licensed producer of wallpaper and large-scale murals of album artwork by top recording artists including The Who, Sex Pistols, Queen and the Ramones.

Directors Ian and Sarah Hopkins, with a third partner, spent their youth “trawling through record stores — we saw the creativity not just of the music but of the artwork.”

GETTING THE LICENCES ISN'T EASY

Many bands don’t have an agency and perhaps are no longer together, but permission is needed from each individual member “and if someone is on tour, you just have to wait”.

However, they’ve nailed the controversial artwork from American hard rockers Guns N’ Roses for their notorious debut album Appetite for Destruction, which has sold three million copies since its launch in 1987.

A first version by subversive US artist Robert Williams, rejected as obscene, was modified into a purple Celtic cross with skulls of the five musicians, sporting caps on their luxuriant long hair. This has become a mural and there’s also a wallpaper with the cross as a repeating motif.

Also writing on the wall is the iconoclastic God Save the Queen record sleeve by artist Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols.

Released shortly before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, this image with the royal head — based on a photo by Cecil Beaton — collaged like a ransom note, was banned amid outrage and has been deemed “the defining image of punk”.

Other murals come from Joy Division and New Order, and Rock Roll is negotiating with another 50 bands.

The visuals of rock, pop and punk, including the flamboyant personae, outré costumes, louche logos, posters, record sleeves and guitars, have long permeated art, fashion and design, fostering rebellion and shock.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

Meet Shyguy, for example. Actually, it’s a girl, Naomi Wallens, whose pretty smile and long, blonde tresses conceal the steely nerve of an emerging street artist, with two works in Whitecross Street in Shoreditch.

Her home in a converted pub in Clerkenwell is a gallery for her own line of lights. They are pure punk and borderline shocking, their slogan-adorned bases like buttocks, cast Antony Gormley-style, she says, from her own body.

“Punk is a subculture for a certain generation,” says Wallens. “Soon we’ll be channelling rap and hip-hop.”

She has also upcycled furniture, with raunchy slogans on a gold-sprayed bar rescued from a nightclub, and a 17th-century Spanish confession box. All pieces are for sale at Shyguy.

The posh W8 address of a shop in Kensington Church Street belies the punchy punk on furniture and lights inside, hand-painted in the basement by Jimmie Karlsson, who with partner Martin Nihlmar, trades as Jimmie Martin.

Tagged “baroque and roll”, the design duo repurpose artefacts, decorating them with images and slogans from art, fashion, rock, pop and punk. Chairs become pop portraits while mannequins are lights.

“The result is very London,” says Karlsson. “Our pieces couldn’t really come from anywhere else and visitors from abroad recognise that” — including Madonna, perhaps their most famous celeb client. Flying out at the moment are Karlsson’s punk painted cherubs.

Gods Own Junkyard — a neon wonderland in Walthamstow — has a café bar called Rolling Scones. The music business has permeated deep into the Bracey family business, with their hoard of vintage signs and archived pieces from film, fashion and rock’n’roll.

The late founder Chris Bracey designed for Lady Gaga, Elton John and Jay-Z. “Sex and drugs and bacon rolls” is one of his puns up in lights.