Sid Vicious

• 1. Introduction

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  Sid Vicious died on the 2nd of February 1979, at the age of 21, in a Manhattan apartment. He had been born John Simon Ritchie, and he left behind very little music that anyone could call truly his own. A friend once said he embodied "everything in punk that was dark, decadent and nihilistic". Yet he became the most recognisable face of the Sex Pistols, a band whose only studio album changed British music. So where did the name Sid Vicious come from? How much of that famous album did he actually play? And what happened in a New York hotel room that turned a punk sideshow into a murder case? The answers begin with a lonely childhood and a circle of friends who were nearly all called John.

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• 2. The Four Johns

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  John Simon Ritchie was born in Lewisham, in south-east London. His mother, Anne McDonald, had dropped out of school to join the British Army, and there she met his father. The father was a guardsman at Buckingham Palace who also played trombone semi-professionally on the London jazz scene.

  Shortly after the birth, Anne took her baby to Ibiza, expecting his father to follow. He never came, and the money he had promised never arrived. Anne reportedly sold marijuana to get by.

  With help from the British Embassy in Spain, Anne returned to England. In 1965 she married Christopher Beverley, who died of kidney failure only six months later. From 1965 to 1971 mother and son lived in Tunbridge Wells, in Kent, where the boy attended Sandown Court School. In 1971 they moved to Stoke Newington, in East London, and he began calling himself John Beverley.

  By 1973, heroin had consumed Anne so completely that, according to his friend John Wardle in a 2009 interview, she did not know her son was enrolled at Kingsway College of Further Education. At Kingsway he told a counsellor he was contemplating suicide. When he turned 16 that year, Anne threw him out. Recalling the moment in a 1988 interview, she said she had told him it was him or her, and that she did not care where he went.

  At Kingsway in 1973, he met a fellow student named John Lydon. Lydon introduced him to two more friends, John Grey and John Wardle, and locally the four became known as The Four Johns. They quit school and began squatting in a series of grim places. Nicknames followed. Lydon's pet hamster, called Sid after Syd Barrett, bit Ritchie, and Lydon promptly dubbed him Sid Vicious. Lydon himself was dubbed Johnny Rotten by the guitarist Steve Jones, and Ritchie in turn nicknamed Wardle Jah Wobble.

  The friends drifted to the King's Road in Chelsea, a centre for music and fashion. Their favourite spot was Sex, the clothing store run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. There Vicious met the American expatriate Chrissie Hynde, long before she formed the Pretenders. In her 2015 autobiography Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, Hynde says she paid him £2 to join her in a sham marriage so she could get a work permit. Lydon had already refused. The plan collapsed when the register office was closed on the day the pair turned up.

  According to Lydon, the two also busked, with Lydon singing and sometimes playing violin while Vicious shook a tambourine or strummed an acoustic guitar. They played Alice Cooper covers, and passers-by paid them to stop. In 1975 Lydon, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook formed the Sex Pistols, with McLaren as manager. A year later Vicious was photographed at the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington, watching the band attack its own audience.

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• 3. The Bassist Who Couldn't Play

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  In 1976, Vicious co-founded a group called the Flowers of Romance, taking the roles of vocalist and saxophone player. His partners included Keith Levene, a co-founder of the Clash, and Viv Albertine, later a guitarist with the Slits. The first drummer, Palmolive, was kicked out after rejecting his advances. Kenny Morris, who would later drum for Siouxsie and the Banshees, replaced her. The band never performed live and never recorded a note.

  Hynde later told the documentary Punk Attitude how Vicious learned bass. She said he stayed awake for three nights on speed, playing along to the first Ramones album. He fixated on the up-tempo bump-and-grind pattern of the song "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement". He then applied that one pattern to nearly everything he played afterwards.

  The Damned noticed him anyway. He was considered alongside Dave Vanian for the job of lead singer, but he never turned up to the audition. On the 20th of September 1976, he sat behind a drum kit for the first set by Siouxsie and the Banshees, at the 100 Club Punk Special in London's Oxford Street.

  In February 1977, McLaren announced that Glen Matlock had been "thrown out of the band" because "he liked the Beatles". Matlock's autobiography, I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, tells it differently. He says he left because he was sick of the nonsense around him. The 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury agrees that Matlock and Rotten clashed, though Matlock insists McLaren stoked the conflict. McLaren wanted chaos as a creative engine and as a way to build the band's image. His pitch for the replacement was blunt: "if Johnny Rotten is the voice of punk, then Vicious is the attitude".

  By then Vicious was the band's uber-fan, never missing a show, and he was encouraged to be drunk and disorderly. Jah Wobble put it this way: "Sid was offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the people around the Pistols." He added that Vicious was a kamikaze pilot whom everyone was happy to strap in and send off.

  Vicious played his first show with the band on the 3rd of April 1977, at The Screen on the Green. Don Letts filmed it, and the footage appears in Punk Rock Movie. But Vicious had no real bass experience and could not play well. Steve Jones therefore played bass on the debut album. Vicious was allowed one track, "Bodies", and Jones later overdubbed even that. He also missed most rehearsals and recording sessions because he was in hospital with hepatitis, probably caused by injecting drugs.

  The band recorded at Wessex Sound Studios while Queen worked in the same building. Vicious walked into Queen's control room and mockingly asked, "Oi, Freddie! Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?" He was echoing an NME interview in which Freddie Mercury had compared ballet and rock. Mercury replied, "Ah, Simon Ferocious!" and then, "We're trying dear, we're trying." He then grabbed Vicious by the lapels and threw him out.

  Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols appeared on the 28th of October 1977. Its notoriety, especially the song "God Save the Queen", helped it debut at number one in the UK despite sales bans at major retailers. It went gold on the 17th of November and spent 48 weeks in the top 75. It is frequently listed as the most influential punk album of all time.

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• 4. Chains, Glass and Bottles

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  In June 1976, at a Sex Pistols concert at the 100 Club, Vicious saw that the critic Nick Kent was blocking his view. Kent had once played guitar with the Sex Pistols, then left music to write for the NME. He was also Hynde's boyfriend. Vicious, high on speed, lashed Kent across the head with a rusted motorcycle chain. According to Hynde, he carried it everywhere. The papers reported it, but no charges were laid.

  The day after his drumming turn with the Banshees, Vicious watched the Damned play. Drunk and high on amphetamines, he hurled a glass at the stage, aiming at Dave Vanian. He missed, and the glass shattered against a pillar and blinded a woman in one eye. Vicious was arrested and held at Ashford Remand Centre. Westwood and Albertine visited him, and Albertine brought a copy of the book Helter Skelter.

  In March 1977, the Sex Pistols signed to A&M Records and celebrated by trashing the company's offices. They moved on to a private party at the Speakeasy, a club popular with established figures of the London music scene. There they cornered the BBC DJ Bob Harris, presenter of the television show Old Grey Whistle Test, and demanded to know when they would appear. A bar fight followed, and Vicious jammed a broken bottle into the face of the BBC recording engineer George Nicholson. Procol Harum's road crew rescued Harris. The police had cordoned off the block outside, but nobody in the band was arrested. A&M dropped them the next day, and Capital Radio banned all their music.

  On Christmas Day 1977, the band played two shows at Ivanhoe's in Huddersfield, one a matinee for the children of firefighters during the national Fire Brigades Strike. The night before, they had played Cromer. Lydon later claimed Vicious had to be warned not to play the hardcore, tough rocker in front of the children. When Lydon left the stage to pose as Father Christmas, Vicious sang the Johnny Thunders song "Born to Lose". That recording later appeared on Sid Sings. These were the band's last British shows until the original members reunited for the Filthy Lucre Tour in 1996.

  The two-week American tour began in January 1978 amid rising tension. Rotten was barely speaking to anyone. Warner Bros., which organised the tour, insisted that Vicious clean up his heroin habit, so he was put on methadone and lived in a constant state of semi-withdrawal. He was also furious that the band would not let Nancy Spungen come along. McLaren kept him on rations of $14.00 a week, yet he still found drugs. McLaren also booked the band into bars in Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas rather than the clubs of New York, knowing journalists would be watching the chaos.

  In San Antonio on the 8th of January, Vicious felt antagonised by an audience member and struck him on the head with his bass. Before the show at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas on the 10th, he carved the words "gimme a fix" into his chest with a razor. He greeted the crowd with a slur, and someone answered by hitting him on the head with a full can of beer. The next night he punched a hole in the wall of the green room at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa. On the 14th of January at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, he did not bother to plug in his bass at all. At the end of that show Rotten asked the crowd, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" The Sex Pistols were finished.

  Five days later, on the 19th of January, Vicious boarded a flight from San Francisco to New York. By the time the plane reached JFK Airport, a mix of diazepam, methadone and alcohol had put him in a coma. In a Queens hospital, as he later told the photographer Roberta Bayley, a doctor warned him that he would be dead in six months if he kept drinking.

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• 5. Nancy

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  Nancy Spungen was an American groupie living in London in 1977, with a lifelong history of unstable mental behaviour and a heroin habit of her own. She had first set her sights on Rotten. She supported herself by alternating between dealing drugs and working as a topless dancer, and she made herself useful on the King's Road scene by procuring drugs for musicians.

  With Vicious she became inseparable, and the band disliked her. McLaren admitted he had planned to have her abducted and forced onto a plane back to the United States. Beginning in July, with Spungen in tow, the band toured Scandinavia, then the Netherlands and the UK.

  The relationship was volatile. Vicious played nursemaid when she was sick. He was shy and polite with her mother, who reported watching Spungen cut up his meat for him. Spungen, though, was known to be verbally abusive and physically aggressive. According to Rotten's wife Nora Forster, Vicious often hit Spungen. In her last conversation with her mother, Spungen admitted that beatings she had blamed on strangers actually came from him. The couple also shared an infatuation with knives.

  After his release from the New York hospital, Vicious reunited with Spungen. In April 1978 they went to Paris to film the Sex Pistols mockumentary The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. They spent most of their time in the hotel room, taking drugs. Director Julien Temple coaxed Vicious onto the set long enough to record three cover songs: "C'mon Everybody", "Something Else" and "My Way". Returning to the hotel, Vicious found that Spungen, angry at being left alone, had superficially cut her wrists.

  By August the couple needed to return to the United States but had no money. Vicious ran into Glen Matlock, who by then had founded the band Rich Kids, and suggested they play a gig together. They recruited Steve New from Rich Kids and Rat Scabies, drummer of the Damned, and called themselves Vicious White Kids. They played once, at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town on the 15th of August 1978. Vicious sang instead of playing bass. Spungen joined in on backing vocals, though Matlock made sure her microphone was not plugged in.

  Back in New York, the couple settled into Room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea, after starting a fire in their first room. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Ritchie. Spungen became his manager. She assembled a band of Steve Dior, Jerry Nolan and Arthur Kane, and booked him into Max's Kansas City. Mick Jones and Johnny Thunders sometimes joined them on stage. He drew large crowds, though some shows were hellish, with the audience booing his imitation of Rotten and Vicious insulting them back. Examples survive between the tracks on Sid Sings and on Live at Max's Kansas City, NY 1978.

  Steve Dior recalled in the documentary Who Killed Nancy? that Vicious got good money for those shows. Even so, Spungen often had to phone her parents for cash. In one of those calls she told her mother she was having kidney problems, and she asked her to look into a detox programme for both of them.

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• 6. Murder Charge

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  On the night of the 11th of October 1978, Vicious and Spungen hosted a party in their hotel room. He swallowed about 30 Tuinal tablets and was comatose for the rest of the night while many people came and went. At about 11 a.m. the next day, hotel staff found Spungen dead on the bathroom floor with a knife wound to her abdomen. Vicious was wandering the hallway. Two guests at the party said she was still alive at 5 a.m. The weapon was a Jaguar K-11 hunting knife, which Spungen had bought for Vicious a few days earlier.

  Vicious was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. His account kept changing. He first claimed to have killed her, then said he remembered nothing. At one point he told police, "I stabbed her, but I never meant to kill her". He also said she had fallen onto the knife. The arresting officer, Sgt. Thomas Kilroy of the Third Homicide Unit, said Vicious admitted killing Spungen during a dispute.

  A lawyer named Michael Berger handled the matter first. Then McLaren and Anne Beverley went shopping for a better one, interviewing Melvin Belli, Gerald B. Lefcourt and William Kunstler before choosing F. Lee Bailey. Bailey never appeared in court himself. His colleague Jim Merberg arranged bail of $50,000, on conditions that Vicious stay in New York and sign in daily at the Third Homicide Unit and at the Lafayette Street Methadone Center. Virgin Records paid every legal cost.

  McLaren firmly believed Vicious was innocent. He pointed out that the knife had been left in plain view and that the couple kept their cash in a drawer. In his theory, Spungen caught a guest stealing money and was stabbed for it. With so many people passing through the room, Bailey had an investigator look into the possibility of a third party.

  Bailey also hired a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Teich. In their first conversation, Vicious was preoccupied with the "working class in Berlin" and stayed fixated on the television. Teich told Beverley that her son must not be left alone. Hours later she called to say Vicious had slashed his arms with a smashed light bulb. Teich called an ambulance. When the paramedics and police arrived, Vicious headed for the window, but Teich blocked him. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital and then to a behavioural health centre in White Plains, New York, and he was released on the 26th of November.

  Two days later, the Irish journalist Bernard Clarke interviewed him. Vicious said Spungen's death was "meant to happen" and that "Nancy always said she'd die before she was 21". He said he just wanted to have fun. Asked where he would like to be, he answered, "Under the ground". Rotten tried to reach him around this time, but Beverley and McLaren barred his calls. McLaren meanwhile announced that the Sex Pistols would reunite for a Christmas album to benefit Vicious's defence, and he sold T-shirts reading "She's Dead, I'm Alive, I'm Yours."

  Several people have named other suspects. In his 2007 book Pretty Vacant: A History of Punk, the director Phil Strongman said he was convinced the actor Rockets Redglare killed Spungen. Redglare knew about the cash in the bedside table and had brought the Tuinal to the party. Redglare, who died in 2001, denied it publicly but reportedly confessed to friends. Howie Pyro insisted that Redglare simply liked telling stories for attention. Strongman also pointed at Redglare's friend, the punk Neon Leon, who lived down the hall and was found with many of Vicious's belongings, including his leather jacket. Leon said Vicious had given them to him for safe-keeping, and he later surrendered them to police. The writer Lester Bangs told The Village Voice that when he phoned Leon's room after the killing, an unidentified man answered and said he knew who the murderer was but would not name them.

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• 7. Rikers and Bank Street

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  On the 5th of December 1978, Vicious went to the Hurrah nightclub with his friend Danielle Boothe, the photographers David Still and Peter Gravelle, and Redglare, who had appointed himself his bodyguard. The band Skafish was playing, and their drum roadie, Tarrah, was the girlfriend of Todd Smith, the brother of Patti Smith. Vicious flirted with Tarrah, was rebuffed, and pinched her. Smith told him to back off, and Vicious smashed a beer bottle and jammed it into Smith's face. Smith needed seven stitches. Redglare told police that Smith had provoked Vicious and that the bottle broke in Vicious's hand. He produced glass shards as proof.

  Vicious was arrested on the 7th of December and charged with assault. The judge ruled that he had broken his bail terms and sent him to Rikers Island, where he went through opiate detoxification. By then he had been seeing Judy Nylon, Connie Gripp and an aspiring actress named Michelle Robinson. While he was in Rikers, his mother brought Robinson to visit him.

  On the 18th of January, Vicious appeared in court with Jim Merberg. To everyone's surprise, Judge James Leff released him on $10,000 bail and eased his earlier conditions. He now had to report to the Homicide Unit only three days a week and no longer had to attend the methadone centre. Leff set one condition: no night clubs. It was widely reported, even by Rotten, that Mick Jagger paid the bail. That was untrue, and Virgin Records kept paying the legal fees. Anne Beverley, in court with Robinson, told reporters, "Now the public will know he is a good boy."

  On the morning of the 1st of February 1979, Vicious was released from Rikers after finishing his detox programme. In Manhattan he happened to meet Peter Gravelle and asked him to find heroin. Gravelle came back with $200 worth and took it to Robinson's apartment at 63 Bank Street. Vicious, Robinson, Beverley, Jerry Only of the Misfits, Eileen Polk, Jerry Nolan of the Heartbreakers, Esther Herskovits and Howie Pyro were all there. Gravelle said they sat around taking drugs, and he left at 3:00 a.m.

  Jerry Only remembered it differently. He said he and Beverley cooked dinner, and that he, Polk and Pyro left early once the heroin began. Vicious was already nodding off. Around 11:00 p.m., Only said, he picked him up and slapped him around. Beverley then covered him with a blanket and told Only he would be fine. Gravelle added that Robinson had given Vicious four Tuinal, a barbiturate he favoured, to help him sleep. He died overnight of a drug overdose, and Robinson and Beverley found his body the next morning.

  Afterwards Beverley claimed the two lovers had made a suicide pact. She produced a handwritten note, which she said she found in the pocket of his leather jacket: "We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots. Goodbye." Deborah Spungen said Vicious had written her a letter from hospital saying much the same. "We always knew that we would go to the same place when we died," he wrote.

  Nancy Spungen was Jewish and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Pennsylvania. An inter-faith burial was not possible, so Vicious was cremated at Garden State Crematory in New Jersey. Polk said Beverley asked Deborah Spungen for permission to scatter the ashes over Nancy's grave and was refused. Polk added that Jerry Only nonetheless drove Beverley, her sister and two of Vicious's friends to the grave, where she scattered them anyway.

  By then the couple were internationally notorious. His death made the front pages of most New York papers for days, and reporters thronged Robinson's building. She would soon change her name. The first of many posthumous albums came out in 1980 on Innocent Records, an EMI sub-label. Its cover shows the photograph of his body being carried out of 63 Bank Street.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  The 1986 film Sid and Nancy, directed by Alex Cox, follows Vicious from his joining the Sex Pistols to the end of his life. Gary Oldman plays Vicious and Chloe Webb plays Spungen. Uncut praised Oldman's performance as a hugely sympathetic reading of a lost and bewildered manchild. Oldman himself detested the film and punk music in general. That same year, an American play called Vicious premiered in Los Angeles and gave George Clooney his theatre debut, as a male prostitute and drug dealer.

  The portrayals kept coming. In 1993, Ade Edmondson played Vicious in The Comic Strip Presents: Demonella, which sends him to Hell to live alongside Oscar Wilde, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan and Marie Antoinette. The Foo Fighters' 1997 video for "Everlong" casts Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins as Vicious and Spungen, with Vicious defending her against party demons. The Simpsons spoofed the couple in its Valentine's Day episode Love, Springfieldian Style. In September 2009, the play Kurt and Sid opened at the Trafalgar Studios in London's West End, with Danny Dyer as the ghost of Vicious trying to talk Kurt Cobain out of suicide.

  In January 2021, FX announced Pistol, a series directed by Danny Boyle and based on Steve Jones's memoir Lonely Boy, with Louis Partridge as Vicious. Lydon called it the most disrespectful thing he had ever had to endure. He sued to block the use of the band's music and lost.

  Songwriters have kept returning to the couple. In 1979 Helpless Huw released the four-track recording Sid Vicious Was Innocent, and in 1982 the Exploited put a song of the same name on Troops of Tomorrow. Joe Strummer recorded "Love Kills" and "Dum Dum Club" for the Sid and Nancy soundtrack, and the Ramones released "Love Kills" on Animal Boy in 1986. Phoebe Bridgers wrote "Chelsea", on her debut album Stranger in the Alps, first as a poem about the couple's last two months. Machine Gun Kelly's 2022 track "Sid & Nancy" ends with the sound of two gunshots. Ai Yazawa's manga and anime Nana also drew heavily on the band's look and spirit.

  The people who knew or admired him spoke differently from one another. Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong called Vicious a skinny rocker with a ton of attitude, "sort of an Elvis, James Dean kind of guy". Steven Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees remembered him as one of the funniest guys, with a brilliant, goofy, sweet sense of humour, at least before he got deeply into drugs. In 2009, Lydon told The Independent: "I'm sorry, God, for the day I brought Sid into the band." He said Vicious felt isolated, and that his humour vanished the day he joined the Pistols.

  The objects have a market of their own. In 1996 Anne Beverley sold his white Fender Precision Bass, with a black pickguard and a strap etched with the name Sid, to Steve Jones for £2,000. In 2011 one of his suits fetched £11,000 at Christie's. Online sources claim his estate still earns about $400,000 a year in royalties, but that is unverified, and Jones writes that the estate passed to maternal cousins. The Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and the surviving members declined to attend.

  On the 20th of January 2009, BBC Radio 4 aired In Search of Sid, a 30-minute documentary recorded by his old friend Jah Wobble. Recordings that feature Vicious are still being reissued. His singles "My Way" and "It's Shit" were last released by Cleopatra Records in 2021, the same year its sub-label Anarchy Records put out the album Love Kills.

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