Sid Vicious
Simon John Ritchie 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. Anne McDonald had dropped out of school and joined the British Army, where she met Ritchie's father, a guardsman at Buckingham Palace and a semi-professional trombone player on the London jazz scene. Shortly after Simon's birth, he and his mother moved to Ibiza, where they expected to be joined by his father, who did not appear and provided no financial support—Anne reportedly sold marijuana to get by.With the help of the British Embassy in Spain, Anne returned to England 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. In 1971, the pair moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney, East London, where Ritchie attended Clissold Park School. At this time, Ritchie began using the name 'John Beverley'.
By 1973, Anne's life was consumed by her addiction to heroin, to the point where, as Ritchie's friend John Wardle claimed in a 2009 interview, she was unaware that her son was attending Kingsway College of Further Education. While at Kingsway, which he was likely attending to complete his O levels, Ritchie told a counsellor that he was contemplating suicide. When Ritchie turned 16 that year, 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.'"
In 1973, Ritchie met fellow Kingsway student John Lydon, who introduced him to his friends John Grey and John Wardle. All four, who became known locally as 'The Four Johns', quit school and began squatting in various dingey locations. Three of the four Johns would then take nicknames: Lydon nicknamed Ritchie "Sid Vicious" after Ritchie was bitten by Lydon's hamster Sid ; Lydon was dubbed "Johnny Rotten" by his bandmate, guitarist Steve Jones; and Ritchie nicknamed Wardle "Jah Wobble".
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. They would play Alice Cooper covers, and people gave them money to stop.
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, and Kenny Morris 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, 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.
Sex Pistols (1977–1978)
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".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 had to cordon 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. 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.
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, 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.
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 furious that the band had blocked Spungen from accompanying them on the tour. McLaren had long been keeping Vicious on rations of $14.00 a week but he still managed to find drugs. To make matters worse, McLaren, ever eager for more chaos and careful that journalists were on-scene, booked the band, not into the clubs of New York, but into bars in Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. In San Antonio on 8 January, Vicious felt antagonised by an audience member and struck him on the head with his bass. Before the Sex Pistols took the stage of the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas on 10 January, Vicious carved the words "gimme a fix" into his chest with a razor. He greeted the audience by calling them "redneck cowboy faggots"; in return, he was struck by a full can of beer to the head. The next night, 11 January, he punched a hole in the Green Room wall after the band's show at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa. It was long rumoured that at their 14 January show at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, Vicious did not bother to plug in his bass at all, although video from the show makes it clear when Jones's guitar cuts out during "Bodies" that Vicious was both playing bass and the right notes. There is also a pre-show soundcheck audio recording where Rotten says to turn Vicious down because his bass was too loud. At the end of the show, Johnny Rotten uttered the famous quote "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?", marking the end of the Sex Pistols.