Why sid vicious was awesome

It was a peripatetic, poor childhood, as they moved from Tunbridge Wells to Bristol and finally Stoke Newington in north London. When Sid turned 16, she threw him out on the streets. When I interviewed Anne Beverley in , she remembered her son with pride, but her anger came through. I have got to try to preserve myself and you just fuck off. Sid's family life was, according to Wobble, "a big black hole. When I met his mother at that time, she had no interest in his life. She didn't even know he was attending Kingsway.

She was into the hardcore drug thing - heroin and opiates - which was all-embracing, that was her life. As we speak, Wobble recalls, for the first time, a chilling incident. Even before his notoriety, Sid had "a weird, brooding quality.

He would loon about, he was very bright, but he had another side. He was very hurt, I now realise. Even then he made me feel cautious. An hour or two of his company was enough. He had a counsellor at Kingsway: they had obviously identified him as a kid with problems. He'd already said that he was going to kill himself. The counsellor had told him to bring a friend along so we both went one day, for a laugh. The counsellor was a very earnest, Hampstead bloke, and he didn't know what he was dealing with.

His mouth was open. It was supposed to be fun, but as I came out, I thought: 'Oh God. Sid starts to enter the public domain during the spring of He is pictured at the Nashville pub in April, watching the Sex Pistols attack their audience. He is implicated, along with Wobble, in the violence directed at journalist Nick Kent during a Sex Pistols show at the Club. The suggestible teenager was being shaped by malign forces.

The zeitgeist was nihilistic. There were hard drugs around. It was that time and generation: a reaction against the 60s. Sid might have begun, in Albertine's words, as "softer, sheepish and shy" but as punk became a national phenomenon, he started to grow into his role. The next day, during the Damned's set, a glass was thrown and a young woman received severe eye injuries. The two became inseparable. She accompanied him on the Sex Pistols' brief tour of the United States in early The group only played eight concerts together before the band fell apart.

The dissolution of the Sex Pistols was fed, in part, by escalating drug use and personal conflicts, including tension between Spungen and Vicious's bandmates. It has been reported that Rotten encouraged Vicious to break off his relationship to Spungen.

They stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, home to many artists, writers, and musicians over the years. Spungen took over as Vicious's manager and got him a few gigs, but his performances were lackluster as he was strung out on drugs at the time. The two tried to get clean briefly, but they soon spent most of their time feeding their drug habit, which included heroin, barbiturates, and a synthetic form of morphine. Sometime during the early hours of October 12, , the couple's downward spiral reached a tragic end.

Spungen was found dead on the bathroom floor in their room at the Chelsea Hotel. She had been stabbed with a knife she had given Vicious as a present. Vicious was later found in the hallway in a complete drug-induced fog. He alternated between saying that he couldn't remember what happened and confessing that he killed her.

Vicious was charged with second-degree murder. Punk was about wildness, not vulnerability, however, and Sid had this as well.

He attacked the journalist Nick Kent with a bike chain — Kent was a punk cheerleader and almost a member of the Sex Pistols himself. And at the tiny Punk Rock festival of September , Sid threw a glass at the stage that shattered and half-blinded a year-old girl. To Britain at large, still a land of pale ale and cub scouts, Sid was just another juvenile delinquent. In the foreign country of youth culture he was a star. In all other ways, he was perfect.

His hair, which quickly became the prime signifier of punk rock, still copied by Los Angeles teenagers 40 years on, was simply a spike cut unwashed and slept on. Whatever he touched became punk rock. There was also his commitment to the punk cause. From the start he proved himself good for a provocative press quote. Trying to obtain the British equivalent of a green card, Hynde was trying to talk Johnny Rotten into marrying her so she could remain in the country. With Nancy, Sid alternated between playing the gentleman and the brute.

Once, when Spungen was ill, he acted as her nursemaid, feeding her and calling her mother with daily updates on her health. He once told Rotten that he watched her perform oral sex on a stranger in the alley behind their house, a service for which she earned fifteen pounds. Unfortunately, Sid also encountered a number of disturbed American fans and groupies who encouraged his self-destructive behavior, which soon became part of the live show.

After being head-butted by one such fan at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Vicious, never one to be upstaged, put on his own spectacle.

At a truck stop en route to San Francisco, he outdid some rednecks who questioned his toughness — by plunging a steak knife into his hand and calmly proceeding to eat his meal. I like you. After the first show of the tour, in Atlanta, he disappeared to look for heroin. Hoping to film the Sex Pistols for a documentary, Forcade used Vicious as collateral to ensure that Noel Monk would honor his request for access to the band.

With no one willing to rein him in, Vicious was free to destroy himself. The mostly disastrous tour ended in San Francisco on January 14, , with a much-anticipated show at the Winterland. Although Vicious shot some sequences for the film in Paris, he spent most of his time after the Winterland concert doping it up with Spungen in London, then in New York. The freakish twosome garnered a lot of press attention on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing their legend even before their deaths.

When he arrived, he found Sid and Nancy in the kind of desolate state depicted in the movie — in bed, watching cartoons in the dark, surrounded by dirty clothes and garbage, and too strung out to notice his presence. On October 8, Nancy called Deborah Spungen, complaining that she was experiencing problems with her kidneys and asking for money. As was their routine, Mrs. Spungen instructed her daughter to see a doctor and have the bill sent to her parents.

Nancy then asked Deborah Spungen to look into getting the two of them into a detoxification center. Before hanging up, Nancy seemed to be tying up loose ends, asking about her grandmother and sending a message to her father that she loved him.