Heartless Music

Sid Vicious

The late Simon John Beverley aka Sid Vicious, was the second bass player for the seminal punk band the Sex Pistols. He was the personification of the term rebel. He grew up in London and was a shy child that was prone to occasional fits of violence. His closest art school friend John Lydon renamed him Sid after a bite from his pet hamster.

At 17, Sid ended up homeless, living in squats and working as a rent-boy. He discovered a shop that sold fetish gear which was eventually and aptly named Sex. One of the shop’s weekend employees Glen Matlock, played bass and formed a band with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook. The group originally was named the Swankers, but once they convinced the store’s manager Malcolm McClaren to become their band manager they were renamed The Sex Pistols.  The manager’s partner (the now iconic fashion designer)Vivienne Westwood had seen Sid in the store and thought he could well be the front man, but his friend John Lydon got in there first, and so John became Johnny Rotten. The Sex Pistols had their first gig in 1975 and took off in both popularity and notoriety. Glen and John didn’t get along and when Glen left in 1977, Sid was asked to join the band even though his musical skills were almost nonexistent. Because the world is at our fingertips these days, you can easily obtain a music download of even the earliest albums put out, like Spunk and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, both from that early time in 1977.

The  Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren once said that Sid didn’t represent musical talent, he represented attitude. Sid could never play bass well, by the time he died he still hadn’t managed to learn the basics. Sid went against the idea that a musician requires skill to play in a band, and believed that all he needed was the ability to look and play the part.  That’s what he did, from his on-stage antics like spitting at the audience, cutting himself and bleeding on stage… Yuck. That’s why punk audiences spit at bands to show appreciation today; but I’m pretty sure he was doing it to take the attention away from the fact that he couldn’t play his instrument.

Other rebellious things he did were attacking TV presenters, wearing offensive clothing that he had no real belief in like wearing Swastikas on his shirts. He wanted to provoke and cause outrage. It’s been alleged that he once threw a glass and blinded a women. Johnny Rotten said he was a poser, had a innocence about him, and the ability to laugh at everything. I think he just didn’t care about anything until Nancy.

Nancy Spungen

Nancy Spungen was a Sex Pistols groupie, who was a hand me down lay from a couple of the boys in the band, but for some reason Sid fell for her a couple of months after joining the band. Things went down hill from there. She was a junkie from New York, they shared a love of the Ramones and then he started using heroin too. The story goes that after a night of heavy use together, Sid wakes up and finds Nancy dead, stabbed with his knife. Because he was high, he couldn’t remember and didn’t know if he did it or if someone came in to their room and killed her while they were off their heads. He went to jail for for assault on someone else, getting clean while in there. When he got out his mum organized a delivery of heroin for him for getting bail on the murder charge. He overdosed that night. That was February 1, 1979.

He had a short life, but a produced a lasting impact on punk today. He wasn’t talented, but he had a charisma and he just didn’t give a damn. He rebelled from everything and everyone, and I’m pretty sure his band-mates disliked him – but for some reason he captured public imagination. In this way, he lives on as the archetype of punk. I’m going to leave you with this classic video of Sid which demonstrates how he did things his way: