January 1978, Sticksville, USA, through whose big old heart a big old bus travels bearing the fabulous Sex Pistols on a tour that will conclude with the group’s self-detonation. A deluxe vehicle, its inhabitants comprise the four Pistols, one Malcolm McLaren, some roadies, a Warner Bros, exec and two photographers. Anyway, Sid Vicious is staring out the window – the obligatory beer can in one paw, a sandwich in the other, a blowjob on his mind and dreams of a syringe in his arm – when he turns and those scrawny eyes alight on a wondrous vision. Motorcycle boots, to be precise, but not just any old motorcycle boots: these, like, unbelievably heavy-duty storm-trooping creations of leather and steel. They were, however, being worn by one of the photographers; some fuckin’ Yank called Bob that McLaren was matey with or something. Sid didn’t dislike this bloke, mind. Didn’t much like him either. He meant fuck all to Sid really; he was just like, there. But the boots were espied and Sid was smitten. He got well intimate then. Nothing extravagant of course. Just yer basic, ‘All right then, mate? Uh, bet you got some fucking good snaps eh?’ Then with nary a pause, Vicious asked the fellow to flog him his boots ’cos, like, he really fancied ’em.
Unfortunately, there was a problem here which Sid would have instantly recognized as ‘insurmountable’ were he, the mighty Sid Vicious, capable of comprehending the concept, never mind understanding the word. Bob wasn’t some biker fop: it was just that, so spacious were the boots that a whole camera, simply dismantled, would fit snugly inside the lining. They had become a necessary appendage to his vocation. Sid took this in. It’s debatable whether he folly grasped the reasons, but he understood a guy saying ‘no’. Still, Bob stemmed the tide of pleading he sensed fast approaching by allowing Sid to wear his boots onstage that night at whatever redneck club the group were scheduled to trash.
Once Sid got his feet in Bob’s boots he felt himself undergoing a considerable transformation. The truth be known, lately he hadn’t been feeling his old self, but on the stage that night Sid felt his whole stance increased. The fact that he was performing the wrong bass parts for most of the set was inconsequential. Lydon was acting like a stuck-up wanker, a bloody ponced-up pop star who wasn’t like, even involved in the spirit of the thing; in those boots, those precious boots, Sid felt himself invincible. Still, they weren’t his.
Bob again allowed Vicious to wear them the next night that the Pistols performed, and again, the fact was made resolutely manifest: Sid and these boots were made for each other. He struggled to find the right solution. Bob wasn’t budging – this was clear. The boots were back on Bob’s feet so stealing them was not feasible. The answer struck home: in order to get those boots, Sid would have to kill him.
It was approaching three a.m. and virtually every passenger on this downbound bus was sprawled in positions appropriate to some condition of sleep. Providential indeed, then, that one of the party should awake just in time to look upon a chilling spectacle. Bob was sound asleep in a vaguely upright position, his backbone curved against the slight dip in the posture-sprung seating. Directly behind his prone form stood Sid Vicious, his right hand brandishing a Bowie knife.
Amassing what strength he could muster, our interloper managed to tackle Vicious from behind, jerking both arms up behind his (’Vicious’) head and removing the weapon almost at once. Vicious didn’t scream or attempt to unfasten his gangling limbs from the hammerlock. Amazingly, the action itself roused not a soul, not even Bob. The interloper, a longstanding colleague of McLaren, had encountered Sid on various occasions, though never remotely in such circumstances. He was stunned. Vicious was also stunned: the interloper’s shocked stare bore down on him. The first person to break the silence was Sid. Shamefaced, he pleaded with an earnestness that undermined any possibility of it being a humorous remark.
‘I would have woken him up before I slit his throat,’ he kept repeating.
That is my favourite Sid Vicious story, not simply because it packs that good hearty thwack of sensationalism, but more because it is a perfect example of the psychological bomb-site upon which John Simon Ritchie invented his own Action Man in the persona of Sid Vicious.
Ritchie was born in May 1958, a suitably turbulent year that witnessed the lascivious rise and fall of Jerry Lee Lewis, infamy’s most indomitable living practitioner, the slayings of young Nebraskan Charlie Starkweather, and the celluloid vision of Elvis Presley, a young God, explaining his physical predilections to some corn-fed belle thus: ‘That ain’t tactics, baby, that’s the beast in me.’ In a way, the stage was set.
He grew up in and around the outskirts of London – principally the East End – the only child of a single parent, and in those crucial seven years of life – well, one can surmise. Imagine claustrophobic estate blocks, spurious influences and the presence of something inexplicably disturbing, impersonal and sickly scented: some stranger lying comatose against a bean-bag. Children around junkies are given few options in life. Our little prince was given two: he could stare at the wall, or he could throw himself against it. He chose the latter, time and time again.
Most rock stars of the rebellious mould use their parents’ values as the source point of their desire for reinvention. John Simon Ritchie used the world as a whole, but, lacking vision and the potential to apply himself, his alter ego was fashioned more by a colleague, John Lydon. He, Lydon and others were a gang, sneering and puerile, with Lydon the brains and the rest the brawn, and banter. Because virtually all this mob were called John, making it hard to know whose round it was, nicknames were compulsory. Lydon rechristened our lad Sid – a name he loathed but duly lived with.
Sid initially adored Lydon, with his higher intellect and a clear cutting edge to his loathing. When the latter was asked to join the Sex Pistols, Sid and the others became a leering gestapo for Lydon’s Top Cat persona. Fuelled on sulphate and acid, they were the big noise now. They knew the truth and anyone threatening that autonomy was needful of a lesson in intimidation.
In June 1976, Sid was dispatched to give such a lesson to a journalist at a Pistols gig taking place in the 100 Club. Assisted by another psychopath accomplice, who held a knife some two inches, no more, from this music writer’s face, Sid aimed five good scalp-lacerating hits with his rusty bike chain. Only once did he hit his mark, causing much bloodletting but little damage. The blow, however, warranted an ebullient Lydon to grant Sid a new surname: ‘Vicious’.
Infamy was now calling the shots: Sid was quoted at length in punk exposés: he abhorred ‘sex’, ‘uniforms’, ‘hypocritical bastards’, ‘hippies’, ‘poseurs’, prescribing ‘a good kicking for all and sundry’. An exact century earlier another young hellion had struck fear into the hearts of the law-abiding. Billy the Kid, like Sid (Ritchie or Beverley), boasted two surnames: Bonney or Harrigan. Also, like Sid, he first killed at age fourteen. Bill’s victim was a drink-sodden hombre, one Belisano Villagran, a gun-fighter of local renown around the tumbleweed-strewn badlands of New Mexico. Sid’s victim was a cat: swinging it by its tail repeatedly, he beat the feline’s brains to mush against a brick wall. Both also died aged twenty or twenty-one. Billy the Kid, however, had coldblooded guile and a devastatingly quick left hand to back up his reputation as the fastest gun in the West. Twenty-one victims were notched on his holster (’not counting Mexicans’). Sid Vicious, however, only managed to foul up everything he got involved in. No stamina, no gumption. As one quarter of the Sex Pistols – at their best the musical equivalent of a car wreck – he displayed all the dexterity of a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest. As a hellion, he was feeble. Whereas the desperado or snake-eyed boy let his weapon do the talking, Vicious would solemnly intone, ‘Well, I think that I’m not, like, really, really vicious, y’know . . .’ He’d pause, lost in half-baked exegesis, ‘but I’m pretty wild!’
He was just another dirty fighter. He couldn’t throw a punch and lacked the bearing, the stance, of a good scrapper. A good scrapper works from his heels, uses his wits, develops a technique for felling the opponent. Vicious just bottled in, all gangly limbs and mock sneer. He was only dangerous because pain – physical pain – wasn’t a concern he seemed remotely aware of. Instead he would wantonly gouge his torso with broken glass, razor blades, knife cuts. He would do this when he was ‘bored’. Boredom was intolerable, as the great George Sanders pointed out in his suicide note.
Love, for Sid, was another wretched contrivance, be it ‘universal harmony’ or the more intimate variant. By the autumn of ’76, as an oft-quoted celebrity in the vanguard of punk’s disaffected youth, he boasted that he was the most sexless creature in the world. Then, some four months on, he encountered Nancy Spungen and duly revised his opinion.
Vicious first tried heroin not in the company of Spungen but in the company of Heartbreakers Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. The former would wave a syringe in the face of some uninitiated, impressionable shill. ‘Are you a boy or a man?’ he would tease, turning the issue into a matter of puerile machismo. Vicious, of course, tried it – twice, in fact, while in their company. He threw up a lot and found the experience less than awe-inspiring. However, when Spungen, a maladjusted harridan who’d flown to London in the vain hope of recommencing her fleeting affair with drummer Nolan, found herself in Vicious’s company, she sensed the malleable nature of Vicious’s hedonistic potential and steered him into the murky precincts of filtered cottons; and that same acrid stench he must have recalled offending his senses as a child. For a short while there was a sexual rapport that Vicious had never believed could exist: the archetypal mixed-up restless little boy and maladjusted, self-fixated little girl looking for that golden-armed handshake from a white-knuckled world. Some would call it ‘love’ – but I prefer to concur with Lou Reed in ‘Street Hassle’: ‘It’s called bad luck’.
Infamy is a flint-hearted vocation to live with, requiring lightning reflexes and an abundance of quick-wittedness. Vicious and Spungen had neither. Two months of enchantment curdled overnight into a year of entrapment. Romeo and Juliet they weren’t: their relationship was closer to a hopelessly juvenile version of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses. On 12 October 1978, ten months after the Pistols’ detonation, during which time Vicious had alienated everyone he’d ever known but his soul-mate, the affair came to a predictably gore-spattered conclusion. At 10.50 a.m. a barely coherent English accent phoned the Chelsea Hotel switchboard, asking someone to check room 100 because ‘someone is seriously injured’. The Manhattan police arrived to find Vicious stunned, seated on the bed, while in the bathroom the dead body of Nancy Spungen lay under the sink, a trail of blood running from the bed to her final resting-place. When probed, Vicious stated that the fatality had occurred because he was ‘a dog, a dirty dog’. A moment later, suddenly acquainted with the enormity of his circumstances, he said, ‘You can’t arrest me. I’m a rock’n’roll star.’
Ten days later Sid was free on bail. Old acquaintances had sprung to his aid. His mother had flown over; Malcolm McLaren (who, weeks earlier, had refused to take a phone call from his former client) was in town, determined to free ‘his boy’ even if it meant employing the services of F. Lee Bailery, America’s most prestigious defence lawyer. Conspiracy theories were being tossed around: Spungen had been the victim of a drug syndicate hit; a mugger had attacked her while Vicious slept. Optimism reigned, or so it seemed, but Vicious was far from jubilant. His metabolism had been through hell while he was ensconced at Ryker’s Island jail. Also his conscience was riddled with a gnawing remorse.
That evening he locked the door to the bathroom and, finding only a Bic razor and a broken lightbulb, he slashed away at every vein in his arms and legs. His mother respected her son’s wish to die and sat by him as the blood seeped from his body. By the time McLaren and Joe Stevens, Vicious’s unofficial minder, arrived they were confronted with a scene of extraordinary hideousness. Vicious was so far gone he could no longer control his bladder and urine kept spurting over the blood-soaked sheets.
Mrs Beverley immediately rounded on a dazed McLaren, informing him that this was a suicide pact and not to interfere. Sid meanwhile, still conscious, begged his manager to go out and score some downers so as to stop the pain. McLaren walked to the door not knowing what to do. Stevens knelt next to Vicious and with a small cassette recorder in his hand pressed ‘record’. The first words are his. ‘So, Sid, on that night, what really happened?’
The tape lasted half an hour. Lapses occurred, the voice receded, yet the clarity of recollection was consistent.
They’d been waiting to score, having received a wad of dollar bills – over $1,000 in cash – for an upcoming gig. However, no narcotics could be found. Their dealer, a guy nick-named ‘Rockets’, gave them Tuinol, a heavy barbiturate which, mixed with alcohol, caused Vicious’s withdrawal symptoms to worsen. At one point he left the room and began knocking on all the doors of the Chelsea Hotel, screaming for drugs.
This alerted a suitably imposing black custodian, who, having verbally warned Vicious – only to be called ‘a fuckin’ nigger’ – began striking the puny twerp, in the process breaking his nose. Vicious crawled back to the room to be confronted by Spungen equally enraged. She slapped his face, striking the broken nose and causing the brutish pain to intensify. Vicious, standing by the table on which a seven-inch knife was placed, reciprocated: one clean lunge at the stomach of his beloved. It was hopeless, stupid and typical of their relationship. Minutes later they were embracing, reconciled. Unfortunately, Spungen removed the blade and omitted to cover the wound with a bandage of any sort. She lay down on the bed, while Vicious, similarly negligent in matters of basic hygiene, dashed off to keep an appointment at the methadone clinic. When he returned, his beloved Nancy was deceased. She was not yet twenty-one.
As Vicious finished the halting recitation, McLaren returned not with a handful of downers but with an ambulance. Two weeks in Bellevue Hospital had Vicious patched up. His morale also changed: guilt and remorse were no longer concerns worthy of a wild and crazy desperado like Sid Vicious. Like all hopelessly self-absorbed rock stars he detoured away from moral considerations and believed what he and his fans wanted. He wasn’t guilty and the realization that he was once more a big noise – possibly capable of literally getting away with murder – excited him. He had a new girlfriend, who, like Spungen, was a well-known hardcore groupie, and that cocky psychopathic attitude – ‘I’m a rock’n’roll star. You can’t arrest me’ – was suddenly back to the forefront.
It ended in the second week of December 1978. Vicious, back to his initial kamikaze oafishness, had lewdly propositioned the girlfriend of Todd Smith, brother of Patti. Smith had verbally reprimanded him only to have Vicious smash a broken bottle into his face, almost blinding him. Smith pressed charges and Vicious was back in Ryker’s Island alongside the ‘niggers’ who beat him bloody, the ‘spicks’ who spat at him, the hardcore bad-arse élite who took no truck from some fucked-up limey pop star whose choices and options they never had. In Ryker’s Island punks weren’t spiky-haired rebels with guitars and wild, crazy attitudes. They were the broken spirits, the losers who could only survive via homosexual liaisons that would offer them protection.
Vicious was released almost two months later, on 2 February. He boasted to Jerry Nolan that he’d got on well with his cohabitants; that these desperadoes could see that he, Vicious, was cut from the same leathery fabric as themselves. In reality he had been treated like scum. Arriving at a celebratory bash, clean and in good spirits, he injected some heroin his mother had bought for him, fearing that he’d try scoring himself, thus jeopardizing his bail again. He immediately blacked out, his complexion tinged with the blue signs of overdose – but after a short exercise he came to and continued, in good spirits, to muse about the future.
Yes, he could still fantasize. But then reality would impinge and he’d realize that no matter which defence lawyer was involved, no matter how much he could kid himself he was innocent, it was over. No, Ryker’s Island was not going to see him languishing with the other lifers, perverts and losers. While Robinson slept, he found another packet of the deadly powder. This time there was no one conscious to wake him from the abyss. He heated the spoon, filtered the cotton and – his life revolving around him – turned to dust. The scum that also rises sank into an unmarked grave.
But then, when you break it down, decomposing was their greatest achievement. A mere seven hours after expiring Nancy Spungen was already smelling of death. It takes up to forty-eight hours before the putrefying odour commences in the corpses of the old. At the age of twenty both had wasted themselves beyond belief. Let them rot.