Sid Vicious: Biography

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Sid Vicious.Image via Wikimedia Commons

Who Is Sid Vicious?

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'.

Early Life: Where Is Sid Vicious From?

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.

Sid Vicious's Career and Major Works

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.

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.

Sid Vicious's Personal Life and Relationships

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.

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".

Where Is Sid Vicious Now? Recent Years

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. Harris was rescued by the Procol Harum road crew, who grouped around him and escorted him out of the club, where they found that police had cordoned off the entire block. None of the Sex Pistols were arrested but, the next day, A&M dropped them and Capital Radio banned all Sex Pistols music from its stations.

Vicious played his first show with the Sex Pistols on 3 April 1977, at The Screen on the Green; his debut was filmed by Don Letts and appears in Punk Rock Movie. But he could not play well and had no bass experience, so guitarist Steve Jones played bass on the band's debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Vicious was allowed to play bass on one track, "Bodies", but his contribution was later overdubbed by Jones. He also missed most of the band's rehearsals and recording sessions because he was in hospital with hepatitis, likely caused by intravenous drug use. By this time, Vicious was using heroin, with many believing that his mother was his supplier. Dee Dee Ramone had seen him shooting drugs on more than one occasion, and Rotten's friend John Gray had found Vicious shooting speed while he was still living with his mother; Vicious told him that the drugs were "me mum's".

Also in 1977, Vicious met Nancy Spungen, an American groupie living in London, who had a life-long history of unstable mental behaviour and was also a heroin addict. Spungen, who had initially set her sights on Rotten and who supported herself by alternately dealing drugs and working as a topless dancer, made herself useful on the King's Road scene by procuring drugs for musicians. She and Vicious became inseparable, which caused problems with the band, whose members did not like her; McLaren admitted to planning to have her abducted and forced onto a plane back to the United States. Vicious and Spungen had a volatile relationship; Vicious played nursemaid when she was sick and was shy and polite with her mother, who reported watching Spungen cut his meat for him. On the other hand, Spungen was known to be verbally abusive and physically aggressive. Vicious may have facilitated Spungen's occasional prostitution (and watched). According to Rotten's wife Nora Forster, Vicious often hit Spungen and, in her last conversation with her mother, Spungen admitted that beatings which she had previously said were at the hands of strangers actually came from Vicious. They shared an infatuation with knives.

Sid Vicious's Legacy and Impact

Beginning in July, with Spungen in tow, the band went on a Scandinavian tour, then toured the Netherlands and the UK. On 28 October 1977, their only album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, was released and, due in part to notoriety (particularly of the song "God Save the Queen"), and in spite of sales bans at major retailers, the album debuted at number one on the UK Album Charts and went gold on 17 November. It remained a best-seller for nearly a year, spending 48 weeks in the top 75. It is frequently listed as the most influential punk album of all time.

In 1977, the Sex Pistols were recording in Wessex Sound Studios at the same time as Queen. Vicious entered the control room Queen was working in and mockingly called out to them: "Oi, Freddie! Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?" (This was a reference to an earlier NME interview in which Mercury gave parallels between ballet and rock music). Freddie Mercury responded: "Ah, Simon Ferocious!" and "We're trying dear, we're trying." Mercury then grabbed Vicious by the lapels and threw him out of the room.

On 24 December 1977, the Sex Pistols played The Royal Links Pavilion, Cromer; the next day, the band played two shows at Ivanhoe's in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. It was during the national Fire Brigades Strike and the band performed a matinee for the children of firefighters. In the 2013 documentary Never Mind the Baubles: Xmas '77 with the Sex Pistols, Lydon claimed that Vicious had to be warned not to be the "hardcore, tough rocker bloke" in front of the children. The track of Vicious singing the Johnny Thunders song "Born to Lose", which appears on Sid Sings, was recorded during this performance, as Vicious stepped in when Lydon left the stage to pose as Father Christmas. These were the Sex Pistols' last performances in Britain, until the original members reunited for the Filthy Lucre Tour in 1996.

In January 1978, the Sex Pistols embarked on a two-week USA tour. There was rising tension within the band. Rotten was barely speaking to anyone. Warner Bros., which organized and staffed the tour, insisted that Vicious clean up his heroin habit, so he was using methadone. He was in a constant state of semi-withdrawal and...

Sid Vicious's career continues to be documented by reputable media; the facts above are drawn from Wikipedia's biography and public records.

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