Hollywood & Crime: The Deaths of Sid and Nancy
The first couple of punk died before their lives had truly begun.
We don’t live in particularly punk times. Certainly, in terms of pop culture, we’re in a period of playing it safe. We feel overdue for some great punk energy, that youthful fury of handmade art and noise designed to be as unsuitable as possible. Can we even make that happen in an era of media monopolies, AI, and everyone scrambling to sell out and get their bag? Besides, as we’ve seen time and time again, being anti-establishment eventually evolves into establishment norms if you don’t watch your step. It happened when punk first emerged as a necessary voice of the disenfranchised in the 1970s, although, admittedly, there were other issues hindering the movement. For many, the legacy of punk is forever mired in one of the darkest so-called love stories of the decade: Sid and Nancy.
John Simon Ritchie was a London boy raised by a young single mother, Anne McDonald, who sold pot to help pay the bills after his father refused to offer financial support. Anne struggled with heroin addiction, to the point where she became disconnected from her son's life. She kicked John out of the house when he turned 16.
He quit school and spent most of his time with John Lydon, a fellow student from his high school, and some of his friends. They squatted in many rundown flats and out-of-bounds locales, and started hanging around the King's Road in Chelsea, where the music and fashion scenes were in a period of flux. In 1975, Malcolm McLaren, who co-ran the clothing store Sex with his partner Vivienne Westwood, wanted to form a band. Lydon, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook got together and formed the Sex Pistols. They gained an early following through performances at colleges and student unions throughout London, and they garnered the attention of the press. McLaren was happy to let the lads, barely out of their teens, run amok and say controversial things, which only made them seem cooler and more honest in their anti-establishment ethos.
John Ritchie, meanwhile, was going by his new name, Sid Vicious, and was performing in another band, The Flowers of Romance, alongside the Clash co-founder guitarist Keith Levene, and Viv Albertine and Palmolive, who would later found the legendary all-female The Slits. In September 1976, Vicious got drunk and high on speed, and he hurled his glass at the stage while The Damned were playing. He was attempting to strike one of the band members. He missed and ended up blinding a woman in one eye. He was arrested.
In February 1977, McLaren kicked Glen Matlock out of the Sex Pistols, although Matlock would later write that he quit because he was sick of "all the bullshit" between himself and Lyndon, now named Johnny Rotten. McLaren thought Vicious would be the ideal replacement. Not necessarily because he was a great musical talent. He certainly wasn't. But he had the attitude McLaren thought was crucial to the band. They needed to prove that they 100% did not give a fuck. Vicious, who loved the band, signed up, and a month later, the Sex Pistols were signed to A&M Records.
By this point in time, Vicious was struggling with drug use. He had already begun using heroin, with many of his friends believing he got access to it from his mother. He wasn’t a competent musician when he was sober, and the band basically kept him out of the studio whenever possible, but on-stage, while high, he was dangerous. That almost became the attraction, a trainwreck with guitars. Jah Wobble, the bassist for PiL and long-time friend of Sid's, said Vicious was encouraged to be drunk and messy during these gigs. "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." It was during this time that Sid met Nancy.
Nancy Laura Spungen was a Philadelphia girl from a middle-class Jewish family. As a child, she was difficult and often violent towards her sister. After allegedly threatening to kill her babysitter when she was 11, she was expelled from public school for no-shows. She attempted suicide at least once in her teens. At 16, she was arrested for attempting to purchase marijuana from an undercover cop, then arrested again for storing stolen property in her dorm room at the University of Colorado Boulder (she was quickly expelled from there.)
