How Many Kids Does Sid Vicious Have?

The Short Answer

Sid Vicious had no children. The Sex Pistols bassist died in 1979 at the age of 21, and no children are documented in his biography.

Sid Vicious: Early Life and Background

John Simon Ritchie (born Simon John Ritchie; 10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979), known professionally as Sid Vicious, was an English musician, best known as the second bassist for the punk rock band Sex Pistols. After his death in 1979 at the age of 21, he remained an icon of the punk subculture; one of his friends noted that he embodied "everything in punk that was dark, decadent and nihilistic".

Early life

Simon John Ritchie was born in Lewisham, southeast London, to John and Anne Ritchie (née McDonald; later named Anne Beverley; 1932–1996). Anne McDonald briefly served in the Women's Royal Air Force and later worked in the London jazz and club scene, where she met Ritchie's father, a guardsman at Buckingham Palace and a semi-professional trombone player on the London jazz circuit. In 1958 Anne moved with baby Simon to Ibiza, where she expected to be joined by John. John claimed he would provide them with financial support until his arrival, but neither John nor any money from him ever arrived. Anne reportedly began selling marijuana to get by.

With the help of the British consulate in Spain, Anne returned in 1961 to the United Kingdom and, in 1965, married Christopher Beverley, who died six months later of kidney failure. Anne and Ritchie settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where they lived from 1965 to 1971, and where Ritchie attended Sandown Court School (later renamed The Skinners' Kent Academy). In 1971, the pair moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney, East London, where Ritchie attended Clissold Park School (later renamed Stoke Newington School). At this time, Ritchie began using the name 'John Beverley'.

Career and Rise to Fame

In 1973, John Beverley, as he was then known, met John Lydon at Hackney College where he had enrolled for a photography course. Subsequently the friends attended Kingsway College. Lydon introduced Beverley to his friends John Gray and John Wardle. The group became known amongst their peers as 'The Four Johns'. Lydon and Ritchie, who both left home at 16, began squatting in a derelict residential building in Hampstead (New Court, Flask Walk) with a group of ageing hippies and stopped bothering to go to college, which was far away from where they were living. Three of the four Johns took nicknames: Lydon nicknamed Ritchie "Sid Vicious" after Ritchie was bitten by Lydon's hamster Sid (named after Syd Barrett); Lydon was dubbed "Johnny Rotten" by his bandmate, guitarist Steve Jones; and Vicious nicknamed Wardle "Jah Wobble".

When Ritchie turned 16, Anne kicked him out of her home. In a 1988 interview, Anne said: "I remember saying to him: 'It's either you or me, and it's not going to be me. I have got to try to preserve myself and you just fuck off.' He said: 'I've not got anywhere to go,' and I said: 'I don't care.'

By the mid-'70s, Anne's life was consumed by her addiction to heroin, to the point where, as friend John Wardle claimed in a 2009 interview, she was unaware that her son was attending Kingsway College of Further Education (later known as Westminster Kingsway College). While at Kingsway, Ritchie told a counsellor that he was contemplating suicide.

The four young men started hanging around the King's Road in Chelsea, London which was a centre for music and fashion. A favourite spot was Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothing store, Sex. There, Vicious met American expatriate Chrissie Hynde, before she formed her group the Pretenders. According to her 2015 autobiography Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, Hynde convinced Vicious — by paying him £2 — to join her in a sham marriage to enable her to get a work permit and remain in the country, after John Lydon had already declined. The plan was thwarted by the register office being closed the day the 'happy couple' turned up. According to Lydon, he and Vicious took up busking, with Lydon singing and occasionally playing the violin and Vicious playing a tambourine or an acoustic guitar.

In 1975, Lydon, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook, with McLaren as their manager, formed the Sex Pistols, the band Vicious would eventually join. Vicious was photographed watching the band attack their audience at the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington in 1976.

Age and Birthday Details

Birth details for Sid Vicious are a matter of public record.

Birthday milestones for public figures like Sid Vicious routinely trend on social media, which is why "how old is" questions generate such consistent search demand.

Personal Life and Family

Vicious then began his own musical career.

The Flowers of Romance and Siouxsie and the Banshees (1976)

In 1976, Vicious co-founded, as vocalist and saxophone player, the Flowers of Romance along with the Clash co-founder guitarist Keith Levene, Viv Albertine and Palmolive (who would both go on to become the guitarist and the first drummer of the Slits respectively), and Kenny Morris (future drummer of Siouxsie and the Banshees) who would replace Palmolive who got kicked out of the band by Vicious after rejecting his advances. In the music documentary, "Punk Attitude", Chrissie Hynde remarked that at this time, he learned to play bass by staying up for 3 nights on speed playing along to the Ramones' first album Ramones, fixating on the up-tempo bump-and-grind pattern of the song "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement", a pattern he would apply to most of his playing from then on.

In June 1976, Vicious went to a Sex Pistols concert at the 100 Club. Nick Kent, who had played guitar with the Sex Pistols early on and had left music to become an NME music critic and champion of punk rock (and who was Hynde's boyfriend), was also there, and was apparently blocking Vicious's view. Vicious, high on speed, lashed Kent's head with a rusted motorcycle chain which, according to Hynde, he carried with him. The incident was reported in the papers but no charges were laid.

Recent Years

Although the songs they wrote would later be performed by other bands, the Flowers of Romance did not perform live, or record any music. But Vicious came to the attention of members of the Damned. He was considered, along with Dave Vanian, for the position of lead singer, but Vicious failed to show up for the audition.

On 20 September 1976, Vicious appeared with Siouxsie and the Banshees, playing drums only at their first set at the 100 Club Punk Special in London's Oxford Street, a two-day festival co-founded by McLaren. The following day, Vicious went to the Damned's performance. Drunk and high on amphetamines, he hurled his glass at the stage, attempting to strike Vanian. He missed, and the glass shattered against a pillar and blinded a woman in one eye. Vicious was arrested and imprisoned at Ashford Remand Centre. Westwood and Albertine visited Vicious in prison, with Albertine bringing the book Helter Skelter as a gift.

In February 1977, Sex Pistols' manager McLaren announced that Glen Matlock had been "thrown out of the band" because "he liked the Beatles", and that he had been replaced by Vicious. In his autobiography I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, Matlock says he quit because he was "sick of all the bullshit". In the 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, the band members agreed that there was tension between Matlock and Rotten, but Matlock says that those tensions were aggravated by McLaren, who wanted to generate chaos in the band as a creative mechanism, and as a way of building the band's image. He wanted Matlock to leave, and to replace him with Vicious, saying "if Johnny Rotten is the voice of punk, then Vicious is the attitude".

By then, Vicious had become the Sex Pistols' uber-fan, never missing a concert. He was encouraged to be drunk and disorderly, with Wobble saying, "Sid was offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the people around the Pistols. None of them would have gone over the top. He was their kamikaze pilot, and they were all too happy to strap him in and send him off."

In March 1977, the Sex Pistols were signed to A&M Records. In celebration, they trashed the company's offices, and then held a private party at the Speakeasy, a club and restaurant frequented by established members of the London music scene. The Sex Pistols members confronted the BBC DJ Bob Harris, who was the presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test, a television show which featured non-chart music. Blocking Harris behind the bar, broken bottles in hand, they demanded to know when they would be on the show. A bar fight ensued. Vicious jammed a broken bottle into the face of BBC recording engineer George Nicholson....

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources