Sid Didn't Kill Nancy

Richard Mann / Retna UK Thirty years after the death of Sex Pistols front man Sid Vicious, a new documentary, Who Killed Nancy?, argues that Sid was not responsible for death of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Legendary Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren says the idea was bollocks in the first place.

Sid Vicious was born John Simon Ritchie in 1957, and grew up as John Beverly. When he lived with his friend, John Lydon, they couldn’t both go by “John” so he took on their pet hamster’s name, “Sid” when the punk scene exploded and the name just stuck.

Early on, I met Sid when I was desperately searching for a singer to front the new band I had named “The Sex Pistols.” My erstwhile girlfriend tipped me off about someone named John. I looked out for him, but as fate would have it, I met the wrong John: John Lydon, John Simon Ritchie’s friend, as it so happened, who had heard about the audition and immediately jumped the queue before Ritchie.

“Who cares about love?” Sid once said to me. “Love is for people preparing to die.”

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John Simon Ritchie arrived too late, but opportunity knocked when the bass player's mother threw a fit and Glenn Matlock promptly left the group. I used Sid to replace him. It was then we started calling him “Sid Vicious.” John Lydon had already been christened “Johnny Rotten.”

Sid soon took on the mantle of the most controversial icon of his generation. I often wondered if he stood up to James Dean in terms of style and sexual attitude. He wished to be called “the Eddie Cochran of Punk Rock.” Sid was everything everyone else was not, both good and bad. He impressed us all and embarrassed us all. He never saw a red light, only green. He should have been buried next to Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery. I was determined for this to happen, but his mother thwarted my efforts and had him burnt to cinders in the US instead.

So many people have cursed me, accused me, of murdering Sid, including John Lydon. That’s not true. Sid’s mother did. Some felt that because I was the manager, the “responsible adult,” I could have prevented Sid’s death. But try managing a junkie—especially if you’ve never been one yourself. I guess that’s show business and the media. The questions never stop, even now, 30 years since his death. “How Vicious was he?” “What went wrong?” Did he kill Nancy? To the last question, I can say, definitely not. But more on that later.

Sid Vicious began the age of participation in which everyone could be the artist. Sid proved that you don’t have to play well to be the star. You can play badly, or not even at all. I endorsed that attitude. If you can’t write songs, no problem—simply steal one and change it to your taste. What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so, you may change the culture and just possibly, for a moment, change life itself.

Punk Rock created a new kind of teenage angst. Sid embodied this in his sound and stance. To watch him was to watch a naïve, vulnerable, sad, beautiful and ugly teenager being loved for doing something different. He lowered the bar of entry and allowed everyone into the creative process. The line between the audience and band was blurred. Sid was once the Pistols fan who invented the Pogo (a dance involving jumping in once place and thrashing about). It created chaos, threw the fan at the feet of the band and suddenly, the fan was the center of attention and the star.

And then, Sid the Fan became the star. At a sound check on the Dutch tour, Johnny Rotten, as usual, refused to work with the rest of the band. This time, Sid gladly replaced Rotten on vocals, singing every song word perfect and in tune. I’ll never forget John’s face drowning in his beer, Steve Jones’s bemused expression, and Sid so natural. He had out-punked them before John could even blow his nose.