Sid Vicious

IT WAS the last day in November when the whole ugly mess finally exploded. Sid Vicious, the bass player of The Sex Pistols, had once more traipsed down to his band's rehearsal room for a much-needed repertoire brush-up, merely to encounter yet again the irksome absence of the other three members of the band.

This wasn't the first time that week that Vicious had turned out as instructed for what were believed to be a series of rehearsals for a three-month long Sex Pistols 'Tour Of The World', a highly secretive project that Malcolm McLaren was organising under clandestine and particularly unorthodox (as far as rock tours go, anyway) terms, to find that he was the only one who had turned up at what he'd understood was the time set.

As far as the World Tour was concerned, time was running out, and Vicious in particular was more than a little hacked off.

Various clubs in Europe had already been booked, and the tour was also mooted to be taking in a period of gigging in both the Americas and Britain - though the McLaren strategy was apparently one of deliberately avoiding not only advance publicity but also all venues in any of rock's most widely accepted centres. Cities like New York and London had been ruled out (a management decision apparently seconded by John Rotten).

The tour itself, however unorthodox and stupid it seemed in part, particularly to Vicious, at least presented a respite from all the confusion and indolence that had come in the wake of McLaren's other recent obsession, The Sex Pistols' film. This project was recently shelved after months and months of stop-go non-activity, leaving the band - who, so it is said, were reluctant participants - either more frustrated or more slumped in limbo than ever.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm just the bassist for the greatest rock band ever - in this whole universe," Vicious would state to this reporter. "Touring and playing is what we should have always been about. All that film crap of Malcolm's was just stupid shit that could have blown it for us."

Vicious was speaking from his hotel room somewhere (he didn't claim to know exactly where) in Belgium after a day of being driven round cities to private doctors by a Pistols' roadie for some kind of temporary cure to his constant bad-health problem (to little avail).

IT WAS past 2 a.m in the morning when he phoned during yet another sleepless night - his fifth, he reckoned - yet one thing had occurred the night before that made this whole painful exile worthwhile.

The previous night, in Rotterdam, Vicious claimed, The Sex Pistols had played the best rock'n'roll gig ever. The old feeling was there after months of unabated frustration - and for Vicious that meant a light at the end of the tunnel for all his problems, principally those involving his continued allegiance with the band and the mutual respect thing which seemed all too absent until that gig.

But last night wasn't last week, and six days back things had never looked blacker. The last non-rehearsal farce, Vicious felt, was the final straw.

He'd spent the subsequent hours of the evening getting hideously drunk and morose before returning to his room at Bayswater's Ambassador Hotel. He then phoned guitarist Steve Jones and, after trying to extract some kind of explanation for the non-appearance of the rest of the band earlier that evening, broke into a hail of verbal abuse pitched against what he saw as the band's apparently slothful lack of commitment.

After the phone call, Vicious continued to get more depressed and, at one point, attempted to throw himself out of the third-storey window - an attempt at suicide that would have succeeded had not his girl-friend Nancy Spungen been able to grab Sid's belt as he was hanging by his finger-tips from the ledge and drag him back inside.

Once inside, Vicious, in yet another fit, grabbed Spungen's blonde hair and drove her head against the wall relentlessly again and again until he finally stopped just as she was about to lose consciousness, blood from her scalp running down the wall.

At this point he broke down in tears and, after a period in hysterics, was finally calmed down. The pair finally collapsed into bed at 5a.m in the morning.

Some two hours later, they were awakened by the hotel receptionist, who chose to make an entrance after the screams from the earlier hysteria had long since died down, and who, seeing blood on the wall and the room in some disarray, promptly called the police.

The police arrived, and, according to Nancy Spungen, questioned them about a stolen ring. They took away what Ms Spungen says was legally-prescribed medicine belonging to her, and it was this that was used for the "certain substances" scam that consequently appeared in the news reports.

After a period in the cells and the usual questioning, the police, having discovered that the medication was legal and that the ring charge could no way "stick", let the couple off with no charges pending, although a previous unpaid fine of Ms. Spungen's was dragged up. The sum of £35 was quickly paid by the Pistols' Glitterbest organisation and that appeared to be that.

However, when the dailies grabbed the whole sordid, trivial episode and threw it all over their tabloids, the shit well and truly hit the fan.

McLaren and the Glitterbest flunkies hit the roof, and Sid's version of events is that Messrs Jones, Cook and Rotten declared in adamant unity that Vicious was to be ousted immediately. Then, however, McLaren apparently had a change of heart and decided to defend the bassist from this three-pronged attack. Or so the rumours claimed.

"Yeah, that's right," Vicious consequently verified when he called from Belgium. "Malcolm did come to my defence all of a sudden. He just realised that my side of things had a point. That what I was doing was just living out the original idea of the band as four complete nutters going out and doing anything and everything. Just having fun, which I always reckoned was the whole thing about the Pistols from the very beginning. It just got so fuckin' wet, so serious. That was what he said anyway.

Vicious said he would to a requisite extent, but what he didn't know was that as the five talked it out, Nancy, whom it had been decided was the "ruination of simple Sid", was being "persuaded" by two of the Pistols organisation to take the next flight to New York.

"They were saying to me, 'Oh come on Nancy, let's go for a drive while Sid goes to the dentist.' I realised pretty quickly what they were up to."

Ms. Spungen claims she only escaped by remonstrating in the strongest terms with the female half of her escort team, who had apparently been put in full command of the manoeuvre.

"That was so-o disgusting," Vicious claims now. "them using Nancy as the scapegoat for 'my problems'. Ha! I've been doing every-fuckin'-thing they reckon she turned me onto two years before I met 'er."

ALL THE aforestated version of events so far has come from the accounts of Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious after the former phoned me at NME to offer her side of what at that point just looked like a fuzzy culmination of ugly rumours and scandal that both the dailies and various nosey outside sources had been spouting second-hand.

At present Nancy and Sid are separated - that appears to be the main crunch of the reconciliation 'conditions' -maybe for three months, with a few days off in between. Neither is sure.

After months and months of literally dossing around on various accommodating folks' floors/couches/spare rooms, with the odd respite (provided by Glitterbest) of spending brusque periods of time ensconced in various London hotels that would tolerate a 'Sex Pistol', just last week the pair finally found a flat in a particularly secluded alley-way on the fringes of London W9.

But before embarking further on the contemporary trials of Sid, perhaps a few highly interesting shots of hindsight might be in order here.

Sid in '76 - Ray Stephenson (CD Collection)

WHEN I FIRST encountered our subject, he was known purely as "Sid". Ironically enough, it was in front of the Earls Court Olympia on the last night of The Rolling Stones' summer season there a year and a half ago. I was wandering around with all four members of The Damned, while stray figures who'd later be identified as members of the Pistols and The Clash were there also.

Even then, mind you, "Sid" stood out in the crowd. The awesomely lanky physique topped off with an unhealthy-looking jet black head of spiked hair and unearthly grey visage made him look like an extremely mean-looking chimney brush obviously well acquainted with the full meaning of the initials "G.B.H".

The Damned members talked to him briefly and later revealed that they'd once approached him to be their lead singer. We were not actually introduced at that time.

Sid, however, was himself to provide that introduction in his own inimitable style the next time I saw him, at a Sex Pistols' gig at the 100 Club. That night he looked positively scarey, as if he'd partaken in a gargantuan quantity of amphetamines just prior to his arrival and bearing all possible signs that said-intake was scouring his brain-plate like 2,000 Vim cleansers locked in I tandem overdrive. His blood was definitely... uh, how j you say... "up"... and I soon became uncomfortably aware that he had picked me as the intended victim on which to vent his spleen, so to speak.

After sauntering around the club's perimeters relentlessly, often flanking John Rotten, who, I figured, might have been using him as his paid-flunkey and added muscle to back up his already extravagant mouth-offs (he later was revealed to be Rotten's best mate), he settled his sights firmly on yours truly, waiting until the band had traipsed onstage to move up right in front of me, completely blocking my view of the gig.

Asking him to move aside is what did it. A couple of insults, and before I had time to think, he'd whipped out this ugly-looking rusty bike chain and was brandishing it, bouncing up and down, his teeth gritted and eyes almost literally bursting out of their sockets.

A friend of mine seated next to me lurched forward but was kept back by the chain which first nicked his ear and then the top of his head, while all of a sudden, I was confronted by a colleague of Sid's, who'd pulled out an open switchblade and was brandishing it about four inches from my face. I was still seated, by the way -and unable to move a muscle.

Then, as suddenly as he'd appeared, this grim knife-wielding apparition disappeared (possibly on Sid's say-so), but not before the latter had made one final lunge scoring a bull's-eye dead across my scalp.

By then a couple of bouncers had grabbed him, wrestling him to the ground, while my colleague and I swiftly got the hell out of the club.

While the blood poured down from my head all over my chest (it looked a lot worse than it actually felt mind, and didn't fortunately warrant any stitching up), Vivien Westwood, McLaren's wife, ran behind apologising profusely and remonstrating -"That guy who attacked you was just a nutter... a psychopath. We've told the band not to have him around." Blah, blah!

Thenceforth he was a walking celebrity - the guy whose claim to fame was that he had chain-chipped Nick Kent at the 100 Club.

First there was McLaren's press-handout a week later, published only in Sounds (who printed the piece without bothering to check the other side of the story), which not only publicly exonerated the Pistols from either planning or taking part in the incident, but also introduced the name 'S. Vicious' to the national media. A few weeks later Sounds'" John Ingham was quoting Vicious, "The Sudden Star", extensively in a six-page 'Punk Rock Break-Out' spread.

Great quotes some of them were, too. "I've only ever fallen in love twice - once with a beer-bottle and once with a mirror" was the best.

However, just before Christmas, I was hanging around briefly with The Heartbreakers, and, at an after-gig party, spent an hour or two chatting pleasantly with Paul Cook and Steve Jones who'd just come off the road after the whole depressing 'Anarchy' tour foul-up.

"Oh don't worry about 'im," retorted Cook immediately. "Listen, believe me, Sid Vicious is a complete 'nothing'. He doesn't mean a thing and we're in no way associated with him."

A month later, the rumour became a press-statement."Bassist Glen Matlock has left The Sex Pistols to be replaced by Sid Vicious." To make things just that much more gorgeously ironic, in his first press conference Vicious boasted that he'd been chosen purely for that redundant incident at the 100 Club all those yonks back, while John Rotten referred to me as "the greatest hypocrite on earth". Laugh, I never thought the strap on my bondage strides would ever dry!

Then McLaren sent a telegram to all the music press stating yet again that Vicious had been chosen because he'd given Nick Kent "just what he deserved". That really iced it.


	Never mind the Sex Pistols, here comes the Wrath of Sid! As J.R. and the boys clean up pollwise, NICK KENT opens the Sid Vicious file and discovers an ironic can of worms. (NME December 17th 1977) IT WAS the last day in November when the whole ugly mess finally exploded. Sid Vicious, the bass player of The Sex Pistols, had once more traipsed down to his band's rehearsal room for a much-needed repertoire brush-up, merely to encounter yet again the irksome absence of the other three members of the band. This wasn't the first time that week that Vicious had turned out as instructed for what were believed to be a series of rehearsals for a three-month long Sex Pistols 'Tour Of The World', a highly secretive project that Malcolm McLaren was organising under clandestine and particularly unorthodox (as far as rock tours go, anyway) terms, to find that he was the only one who had turned up at what he'd understood was the time set. As far as the World Tour was concerned, time was running out, and Vicious in particular was more than a little hacked off. Various clubs in Europe had already been booked, and the tour was also mooted to be taking in a period of gigging in both the Americas and Britain - though the McLaren strategy was apparently one of deliberately avoiding not only advance publicity but also all venues in any of rock's most widely accepted centres. Cities like New York and London had been ruled out (a management decision apparently seconded by John Rotten). The tour itself, however unorthodox and stupid it seemed in part, particularly to Vicious, at least presented a respite from all the confusion and indolence that had come in the wake of McLaren's other recent obsession, The Sex Pistols' film. This project was recently shelved after months and months of stop-go non-activity, leaving the band - who, so it is said, were reluctant participants - either more frustrated or more slumped in limbo than ever. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm just the bassist for the greatest rock band ever - in this whole universe," Vicious would state to this reporter. "Touring and playing is what we should have always been about. All that film crap of Malcolm's was just stupid shit that could have blown it for us." Vicious was speaking from his hotel room somewhere (he didn't claim to know exactly where) in Belgium after a day of being driven round cities to private doctors by a Pistols' roadie for some kind of temporary cure to his constant bad-health problem (to little avail). IT WAS past 2 a.m in the morning when he phoned during yet another sleepless night - his fifth, he reckoned - yet one thing had occurred the night before that made this whole painful exile worthwhile. The previous night, in Rotterdam, Vicious claimed, The Sex Pistols had played the best rock'n'roll gig ever. The old feeling was there after months of unabated frustration - and for Vicious that meant a light at the end of the tunnel for all his problems, principally those involving his continued allegiance with the band and the mutual respect thing which seemed all too absent until that gig. But last night wasn't last week, and six days back things had never looked blacker. The last non-rehearsal farce, Vicious felt, was the final straw. He'd spent the subsequent hours of the evening getting hideously drunk and morose before returning to his room at Bayswater's Ambassador Hotel. He then phoned guitarist Steve Jones and, after trying to extract some kind of explanation for the non-appearance of the rest of the band earlier that evening, broke into a hail of verbal abuse pitched against what he saw as the band's apparently slothful lack of commitment. After the phone call, Vicious continued to get more depressed and, at one point, attempted to throw himself out of the third-storey window - an attempt at suicide that would have succeeded had not his girl-friend Nancy Spungen been able to grab Sid's belt as he was hanging by his finger-tips from the ledge and drag him back inside. Once inside, Vicious, in yet another fit, grabbed Spungen's blonde hair and drove her head against the wall relentlessly again and again until he finally stopped just as she was about to lose consciousness, blood from her scalp running down the wall. At this point he broke down in tears and, after a period in hysterics, was finally calmed down. The pair finally collapsed into bed at 5a.m in the morning. "What I was doing was just living out the original idea of the band as four complete nutters..." Some two hours later, they were awakened by the hotel receptionist, who chose to make an entrance after the screams from the earlier hysteria had long since died down, and who, seeing blood on the wall and the room in some disarray, promptly called the police. The police arrived, and, according to Nancy Spungen, questioned them about a stolen ring. They took away what Ms Spungen says was legally-prescribed medicine belonging to her, and it was this that was used for the "certain substances" scam that consequently appeared in the news reports. After a period in the cells and the usual questioning, the police, having discovered that the medication was legal and that the ring charge could no way "stick", let the couple off with no charges pending, although a previous unpaid fine of Ms. Spungen's was dragged up. The sum of £35 was quickly paid by the Pistols' Glitterbest organisation and that appeared to be that. However, when the dailies grabbed the whole sordid, trivial episode and threw it all over their tabloids, the shit well and truly hit the fan. McLaren and the Glitterbest flunkies hit the roof, and Sid's version of events is that Messrs Jones, Cook and Rotten declared in adamant unity that Vicious was to be ousted immediately. Then, however, McLaren apparently had a change of heart and decided to defend the bassist from this three-pronged attack. Or so the rumours claimed. "Yeah, that's right," Vicious consequently verified when he called from Belgium. "Malcolm did come to my defence all of a sudden. He just realised that my side of things had a point. That what I was doing was just living out the original idea of the band as four complete nutters going out and doing anything and everything. Just having fun, which I always reckoned was the whole thing about the Pistols from the very beginning. It just got so fuckin' wet, so serious. That was what he said anyway. "But of course, there had to be 'conditions'. They took me back on the premise that I ... uh, 'straightened up'." Vicious said he would to a requisite extent, but what he didn't know was that as the five talked it out, Nancy, whom it had been decided was the "ruination of simple Sid", was being "persuaded" by two of the Pistols organisation to take the next flight to New York. "They were saying to me, 'Oh come on Nancy, let's go for a drive while Sid goes to the dentist.' I realised pretty quickly what they were up to." Ms. Spungen claims she only escaped by remonstrating in the strongest terms with the female half of her escort team, who had apparently been put in full command of the manoeuvre. "That was so-o disgusting," Vicious claims now. "them using Nancy as the scapegoat for 'my problems'. Ha! I've been doing every-fuckin'-thing they reckon she turned me onto two years before I met 'er." ALL THE aforestated version of events so far has come from the accounts of Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious after the former phoned me at NME to offer her side of what at that point just looked like a fuzzy culmination of ugly rumours and scandal that both the dailies and various nosey outside sources had been spouting second-hand. At present Nancy and Sid are separated - that appears to be the main crunch of the reconciliation 'conditions' -maybe for three months, with a few days off in between. Neither is sure. After months and months of literally dossing around on various accommodating folks' floors/couches/spare rooms, with the odd respite (provided by Glitterbest) of spending brusque periods of time ensconced in various London hotels that would tolerate a 'Sex Pistol', just last week the pair finally found a flat in a particularly secluded alley-way on the fringes of London W9. But before embarking further on the contemporary trials of Sid, perhaps a few highly interesting shots of hindsight might be in order here. WHEN I FIRST encountered our subject, he was known purely as "Sid". Ironically enough, it was in front of the Earls Court Olympia on the last night of The Rolling Stones' summer season there a year and a half ago. I was wandering around with all four members of The Damned, while stray figures who'd later be identified as members of the Pistols and The Clash were there also. We all had one thing in common that evening. We couldn't get into the gig. Even then, mind you, "Sid" stood out in the crowd. The awesomely lanky physique topped off with an unhealthy-looking jet black head of spiked hair and unearthly grey visage made him look like an extremely mean-looking chimney brush obviously well acquainted with the full meaning of the initials "G.B.H". The Damned members talked to him briefly and later revealed that they'd once approached him to be their lead singer. We were not actually introduced at that time. Sid, however, was himself to provide that introduction in his own inimitable style the next time I saw him, at a Sex Pistols' gig at the 100 Club. That night he looked positively scarey, as if he'd partaken in a gargantuan quantity of amphetamines just prior to his arrival and bearing all possible signs that said-intake was scouring his brain-plate like 2,000 Vim cleansers locked in I tandem overdrive. His blood was definitely... uh, how j you say... "up"... and I soon became uncomfortably aware that he had picked me as the intended victim on which to vent his spleen, so to speak. After sauntering around the club's perimeters relentlessly, often flanking John Rotten, who, I figured, might have been using him as his paid-flunkey and added muscle to back up his already extravagant mouth-offs (he later was revealed to be Rotten's best mate), he settled his sights firmly on yours truly, waiting until the band had traipsed onstage to move up right in front of me, completely blocking my view of the gig. Asking him to move aside is what did it. A couple of insults, and before I had time to think, he'd whipped out this ugly-looking rusty bike chain and was brandishing it, bouncing up and down, his teeth gritted and eyes almost literally bursting out of their sockets. A friend of mine seated next to me lurched forward but was kept back by the chain which first nicked his ear and then the top of his head, while all of a sudden, I was confronted by a colleague of Sid's, who'd pulled out an open switchblade and was brandishing it about four inches from my face. I was still seated, by the way -and unable to move a muscle. Then, as suddenly as he'd appeared, this grim knife-wielding apparition disappeared (possibly on Sid's say-so), but not before the latter had made one final lunge scoring a bull's-eye dead across my scalp. By then a couple of bouncers had grabbed him, wrestling him to the ground, while my colleague and I swiftly got the hell out of the club. While the blood poured down from my head all over my chest (it looked a lot worse than it actually felt mind, and didn't fortunately warrant any stitching up), Vivien Westwood, McLaren's wife, ran behind apologising profusely and remonstrating -"That guy who attacked you was just a nutter... a psychopath. We've told the band not to have him around." Blah, blah! From that night on, "Sid", or John Beverly as he was christened, was given a surname. In honour of my scalp contusion, John Rotten affectionately named him "Sid Vicious". Thenceforth he was a walking celebrity - the guy whose claim to fame was that he had chain-chipped Nick Kent at the 100 Club. First there was McLaren's press-handout a week later, published only in Sounds (who printed the piece without bothering to check the other side of the story), which not only publicly exonerated the Pistols from either planning or taking part in the incident, but also introduced the name 'S. Vicious' to the national media. A few weeks later Sounds'" John Ingham was quoting Vicious, "The Sudden Star", extensively in a six-page 'Punk Rock Break-Out' spread. Great quotes some of them were, too. "I've only ever fallen in love twice - once with a beer-bottle and once with a mirror" was the best. Me, I was too disgusted and depressed by the whole scam even to think about presenting some public backlash. I decided to retire from rock'n'roll-playing and writing altogether, and I spent a miserable six months broke. However, just before Christmas, I was hanging around briefly with The Heartbreakers, and, at an after-gig party, spent an hour or two chatting pleasantly with Paul Cook and Steve Jones who'd just come off the road after the whole depressing 'Anarchy' tour foul-up. During an amazingly amiable conversation, I happened to mention Sid Vicious' name. "Oh don't worry about 'im," retorted Cook immediately. "Listen, believe me, Sid Vicious is a complete 'nothing'. He doesn't mean a thing and we're in no way associated with him." A month later, the rumour became a press-statement."Bassist Glen Matlock has left The Sex Pistols to be replaced by Sid Vicious." To make things just that much more gorgeously ironic, in his first press conference Vicious boasted that he'd been chosen purely for that redundant incident at the 100 Club all those yonks back, while John Rotten referred to me as "the greatest hypocrite on earth". Laugh, I never thought the strap on my bondage strides would ever dry! Then McLaren sent a telegram to all the music press stating yet again that Vicious had been chosen because he'd given Nick Kent "just what he deserved". That really iced it. SID VICIOUS INTERVIEW PART 2