Sid Vicious

John Simon Ritchie was born on 10 May 1957 in London, the only product of an unhappy two-year relationship between his mother, Anne Beverley, and a father – also called John Ritchie – who moved his family to Ibiza and abandoned them.

Anne was a druggy hedonist who scraped a living by, among other things, rolling joints for people. When she and her son returned to London, Anne was a regular target of street-level abuse.

It was a nomadic, lonely childhood eked out with his mum along society’s margins. John (his mum called him Simon, but his friends called him John) changed schools with bewildering regularity, yet he was bright, articulate and riddled with a stubborn anti-authority streak.

He had never made any binding friendships and so was glad to chance upon John Lydon in 1972.

The sharp-witted David Bowie fan who Lydon first befriended at Hackney Technical College bore little resemblance to the goonish Sid vicious of later years.

Lydon decided to call him “Sid” after his hamster and “Vicious” after the Lou Reed song. “Sid was the least vicious and least screwed-up person that I’d ever met,” Lydon explained, “hence ‘Vicious'”.

Johnny “Rotten” and Sid started squatting together, as well as hanging out at a radical clothes shop on the King’s Road called ‘Sex’, run by the former manager of The New York Dolls, Malcolm McLaren.

Once he was famous, Sid had no choice but to live up to his surname. Everyone from London teddy boys to the pond life of the New York penal system repeatedly tried to test its validity.

Although he usually lost, he would fight anyone – he attacked a gang of heavy metal hecklers at a Clash show and was beaten to a pulp. He launched an unprovoked assault with a bicycle chain upon NME writer Nick Kent during a Sex Pistols performance at the 100 Club.

At another 100 Club show, he threw a glass at a pillar, blinding a girl in one eye in the process. He was thrown into Ashford Remand Centre for a few weeks.

Touring America, Sid walked onstage in San Antonio in, Texas and declared to the audience, “You cowboys are all fucking faggots!” . . .

Joining The Sex Pistols made Sid punk’s figurehead. Only 20 years old, he would soon be renowned internationally for outrage, violence, and the surname Vicious. There could be only one outcome.

Nancy Spungen is roundly blamed for Sid’s rapid descent into smack, and her rap sheet suggests there’s a case to answer. She’d earned her spurs as a groupie and a junkie on the New York scene, a wealthy dropout who was prone to turning tricks for drugs.

She arrived in London determined to bag a Sex Pistol. Sid was her third choice. Guitarist Steve Jones slept with her but quickly washed his hands of her. Rotten turned her down too.

She and Sid were soon inseparable and within a short time, Sid had a heroin habit to match that of his new girlfriend.

By 1978, the glare of the British press was too fierce for Sid Vicious, and he fled to New York.

His agonising nosedive began on 12 October 1978 when he awoke from drugged dreams in Room 100 of New York’s Chelsea Hotel and discovered Nancy lying dead in a pool of blood under the bathroom sink. Sid’s hunting knife was sticking out of her abdomen.

Sid couldn’t remember anything, but the NYPD charged him with second-degree murder and hauled him to Rikers Island prison to await trial.

On 1 February 1979, the day before his trial, he was released into the care of his mother, Anne Beverley. His time inside the high-security prison had been brutal, but it had forced him to clean up. He was free from heroin for the first time in two years.

The four friends who were with his mother were not, however, and as soon as they got to a Greenwich Village apartment, they called a dealer. Anne figured a little just-got-outta-jail smack wasn’t unreasonable and cooked them spaghetti bolognese while they waited.

The dealer arrived with the caveat that his heroin was unusually pure, but Sid was unconcerned. After he had jacked up, Anne noticed that he seemed radiant. “I said, Jesus, son, that must have been a good hit,” she told Jon Savage in his punk history England’s Dreaming.

A few minutes later, Sid collapsed. His mother and friends rolled him on his side, hoping that he’d come to. Five minutes later, he did, and they agreed that since he had to appear in court in the morning, it would be best if he stayed in bed.

That night, Sid awoke, crept past his mother asleep on the sofa and took the rest of the heroin from her purse. He then shot the lot up, stumbled back to bed and died in his sleep.

Later, Anne Beverley found a note wedged in Sid’s passport. It read: “We had a death pact. 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.”

Sid’s ashes were secretly thrown over the grave of Nancy Spungen by Anne, despite Spungen’s family trying to conceal the location of the Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia where she was buried.

What happened on the last night of Spungen’s life remains a matter of conjecture. Some suggest a drug dealer stabbed her while Vicious was zonked out. A large sum of money was missing from their room, lending weight to this theory – though Sid’s note suggests they had a suicide pact which went wrong.

It hardly matters anymore. Both Sid and Nancy regularly promised to die young, and both achieved their aim.