Sid Vicious

John Simon Ritchie (10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979), better known by his stage name Sid Vicious, was an English musician, best known as the bassist for the punk rock band Sex Pistols. Despite dying in 1979 at age 21, he remains 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

John Simon Ritchie was born on 10 May 1957 in Lewisham to John and Anne Ritchie nee McDonald (1933–1996). Anne 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 Ritchie'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 settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where she enrolled her son known as John in Sandown Court School (now The Skinners' Kent Academy).

In 1965, Anne married Christopher Beverley, who died six months later of kidney failure. Anne and John lived briefly in Bristol and Clevedon, Somerset, where John attended Clevedon School. In 1971, the pair moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney, east London, where John attended Clissold Park School (now Stoke Newington School). At this time, he began using the name 'John Beverley'.

By 1973, Anne's life was consumed by her addiction to heroin and opiates, to the point where she was unaware that her son was attending Westminster Kingsway College, then known as Kingsway College of Further Education and as a community and vocational school for students with difficulties. While at Kingsway—which he was likely attending to complete his 'O Levels' (GCE Ordinary Level), John indicated to a counsellor that he was contemplating suicide; there were also claims that he was torturing and killing cats. When John turned 16 that year, Anne kicked him out of her home.

In 1973, Beverley 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 dismal locations. Three of the four Johns would then take nicknames: Lydon nicknamed Beverley "Sid Vicious" after Beverley was bitten by Lydon's hamster Sid (named after Syd Barrett). Lydon's bandmate, guitarist Steve Jones gave him the name Johnny Rotten, and Sid nicknamed Wardle Jah Wobble.

The four young men started hanging around the King's Road in Chelsea, London which, at the time, was the epicentre of 'Swinging London', when music and fashion were burgeoning. 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, who reportedly tried (and failed) to convince Vicious to join her in a sham marriage so she could get a work permit. 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 joined Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook in the formation of the band the Sex Pistols, managed by McLaren—Vicious was photographed watching the band attack their audience at the Nashville Rooms in Kensington in 1976. Vicious then began his 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 Keith Levene and Viv Albertine, who would go on to become the guitarist of The Slits. During this time, he learned to play bass by listening to the first Ramones 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 (and who was Hynde's boyfriend), was also there, and was apparently blocking Vicious' 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 for the audition. Vicious contended that Vanian and his associates had intentionally withheld information about the audition to ensure that Vicious missed the audition.

On 20 September 1976, Vicious appeared with Siouxsie and the Banshees, playing drums at their first gig 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, 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, 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
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