Page Four
Photo Caption
Born idol: Pop by Gavin Turk at the Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, London.
Page Caption
"Sid was all about image it was all show. He was one of the pioneers
of dumbing down."
Continued from Page Three.
Wobble, in town to play a solo gig, is surprised to learn that Sid spent the most stable
years of his childhood in this very place - Turnbridge Wells, a slightly shabby spa town in
Kent, about an hour of so from London. For four years, he lived in a rented flat in 43 Lime
Hill Road, just behind the main shopping street. A four-storey, red-brick Edwardian
townhouse, long sub-divided into apartments, it doesn't look unlike New Court - looming,
impermanent, neglected.
At that time Sid was known as Simon Beverley, though he had actually been born Simon John
Ritchie in London, on May 10, 1957, to parents Anne and John. His father, a publisher's rep
and former grenadier guard, left the family in the early '60s. Anne was by all accounts
something of a beatnik - hedonistic, flighty, image-conscious - and took Simon to live in
Ibiza for a short time. The boy quickly became accustomed to an unsettled life. Back in
England, Anne married a middle-class Kentish man called Chris Beverley who died soon
afterwards, in 1965, of cancer. According to Alan Parker, before the death of his step-
father Sid was earmarked for a place at a psh boarding school. Instead, in 1968, he ended up
at Sandown Court, a rough secondary modern in Tunbridge Wells.
"When he first arrived, he was very well-behaved and didn't stand out," recalls classmate
Jeremy Colebrooke. "He was bright - certainly deserving of his place in the A-stream - and
quite good at football. I remember him as tall and thin and almost Chinese-looking. He had
jet black hair, a round face and slitted eyes, which were deep brown with a darkness around
them. Hi smother must have been quite arty and bohemian for the time, because Simon always
ponged of garlic, which was highly unusual back then."
It's not uncommon for the onset of adolescence to trigger disturbing behavior in some
children, and this is exactly what seems to have happened with Simon Beverley. When he was
12 or 13 he rebelled. An awareness of his dysfunctional home life may have been one reason.
His search for an identity led him to become an incorrigible attention-seeker and general
nuisance. Something of a loner, he became disruptive in class and lost all interest in
school-work.
"He became a pain in the arse, basically," says Jeremy Colebrooke. "It was funny for the
first lesson every day, but then it quickly got boring. One day, Simon managed to carve his
initials about a quarter-inch deep into an old desk in the science lab. He must have used a
knife. He was quite proud of that. He looked a bit sheepish, because he thought he was going
to get the slipper. But afterwards it was like, 'What an achievement! I've done that, and
the tossers can't do nuffink about it!' He had that attitude."
There were more alarming incidents. In his third and last year at Sandown Court, he got into
a fight with a fellow pupil. A crowd gathered outside the school to watch Sid badly beat up
his opponent. While other kids would be content with meting out a split lip or bloody nose,
Sid kept on and on. A passing motorist was concerned enough to stop and pull the boys apart.
Sid took a swing at him as well.
Colebrooke and his friends were unsettled by Beverley's latent ferocity. He was never a
bully, but he was clearly someone not to be messed with. He had an unpredictable temper. He
was also slightly mysterious. Besides the fact he kept ferrets, and didn't have a dad
around, no one knew much about Sid's life outside of school. Colebrooke and his friends
didn't discover until fairly recently that the chief reason Sid didn't invite them over for
squash and biscuits was that his mother, Anne, was a junkie. Taking heroin since the early
'60s, she was by the early '70s an intravenous user.
One can only imagine what evenings were like at Lime Hill Road. Strange people dropping by
with packages. Bloody needles. Sid petting his stinky ferrets. Mum nodding out. No money.
While researching his book, Sid's Way, in the early '90s, Alan Parker spent eight weeks
staying with Anne (who died in 1996). He got to know her very well. I ask him whether he
thought she was a caring mother. "In her own way, perhaps," he answers. "I asked her on
several occasions about her abiding memory of bringing up Sid. She said, 'He loved my mashed
potatoes and gravy.' That was it. Not an amazing day at the zoo or the time they visited
uncle so and so, but that he liked her mashed potatoes and gravy. It suggested she didn't
really give him a lot.'
Page Caption
Vicious Time!
May 10, 1957: Simon John Ritchie born to parents Anne and John (who never married) in
London. Sid's father, a former grenadier guard, leaves a couple of years later.
February 1965: Anne marries Chris Beverley. Family moves to Kent. Chris Beverley dies six
months later.
1968: Anne and Sid settle in a rented flat in Tunbridge Wells. Sid attends Sandown Court
school.
1971: Mother and son relocate to Hackney. Later, Sid meets John Lydon at Hackney Technical
Collge.
October 1974: Sid hangs out with Lydon and Jah Wobble at Kingsway College. Sid is by now
using drugs intravenously in the company of his mother.
Early 1975: Sid has his hair cut into a spiky, proto-punk look. The 'three Johns' (Sid,
Wobble, Lydon) begin frequenting McLaren's Sex boutique.
August 1975: Lydon joins the Sex Pistols.
Winter 1975/76: Lydon and Vicious share a squat at New Court, Hampstead. Sid takes to
mugging old ladies, self-harming and abusing cats.
April 23, 1976: Sid photographed at the Pistols' gig at the Nashville (see p82). Is invited
to front a fledgling Damned but fails to show for audition.
June 29, 1976: Sid attacks NME journalist Nick Kent with a bike chain at a Pistols gig at
the 100 Club.
Summer 1976: Forms the first incarnation of The Flowers of Romance with future Slits Viv
Albertine and Palmolive.
September 20/21, 1976: Sid plays drums with Siouxsie And The Banshees at the 100 Club punk
festival; the next night he throws a glass tankard which smashes and blinds a girl. A short
stint in Ashford Remand Centre follows.
March 3, 1977: Joins the Sex Pistols on Glen Matlock's departure. Later that month, he
begins his relationship with heroin-addicted New York groupie, Nancy Spungen.
January 1978: Pistols split after rancorous 12-day US tour. Sid continues to work with
McLaren on The Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle but his heroin addiction is worsening.
March 1978: Records My Way.
August 1978: Sid and Nancy leave London for New York.
October 12, 1978: Nancy is stabbed to death in the couple's room at the Chelsea Hotel. Sid
is arrested for her murder and sent to Rikers Island prison.
January 1979: Out on bail, Sid damages Patti Smith's brother's eyesight with a bottle. He is
returned to jail.
February 2, 1979: Celebrating his second release on bail, Sid fatally overdoses on heroin,
allegedly stolen from his mother.
Page Five
Photo Captions
Born to go: Lydon models the Hawkwind look, circa '74.
Two Johns: Lydon and Jah Wobble, September 1, 1977, Winter Gardens, Penzance.
Page Caption
"John was a quiet inward fellow. Sid was the extrovert." Jah Wobble
Continued from Page Four.
When Jah Wobble met Sid in 1974, the Pistols' future bassist was 17 and living with his
mother in a council tower block on Queensbridge Road in Haggerston, east London. They'd
moved back to the capital a couple of years previously, and were constantly being re-housed.
At the time Wobble was attending Kingsway, a further education college in Kings Cross, which
catered for day-release apprentices, wayward kids belatedly sitting their O levels (like
Wobble) and arty A level students. There, Wobble had befriended an acerbic Hawkwind fan from
Finsbury Park called John Lydon and his strange, lanky mate.
Wobble remembers Sid, a year his elder, as good fun and sparky - at least to begin with. He
was now calling himself by his middle-name, John. The three Johns bonded, Wobble says,
because of their lively personalities, lower-class backgrounds, keen intelligence and nose
for trouble. They all loved music and getting drunk. More significantly, perhaps, he
explains that they were outsiders. "We shared a deep dissatisfaction about the world and
most
of the people in it."
Barely old enough to get served in pubs, Wobble was shocked when he visited Sid's council
block. "I remember going round there with Lydon," he says. "Sid and his mum were openly
using needles. Sid was shooting up amphetamines. I was 16 years old - I'd never seen
anything like that before. Shooting up drugs with your mum! It wasn't bohemian. It was
gloomy, a certain sort of gloom you get around heroin and class A drugs." Sid, who used
Vaseline to slick back his hair, slumped backwards after taking his hit and left a greasy
trail on the wallpaper.
The experience had a depressing psycho-spiritual effect on Wobble. These days a scholar of
the occult, he explains that Haggerston is on the fringes of east London's marshlands,
associated in ancient times with pagan rites and, in the 1700s, with the myth of Dick
Turpin; to this day, he says, the area maintains a strange, occultish vibe. His trip to the
Beverley�s' flat spooked him. It also shows just how messed-up the young John Beverley was.
His was exactly the kind of empty, alienated, dysfunctional high-rise existence punk would
soon come to symbolize. It's tempting to think that Sid was already condemned.
Lydon and Beverley had previously been at school together in Hackney. They were both Bowie,
Eno and Roxy freaks, and by all accounts looked extraordinary - John with his long, dyed-red
hair and Sid dressed from head to toe in black. In The Art of Dying Young, Mark Paytress
suggests that the connection between them became so intense in 1974 that they began adopting
each other's characteristics. Lydon himself has admitted that Sid, who outwardly took
nothing seriously, taught him to lighten up. "He certainly brought humour into John's life,"
confirms Wobble. "John was a quiet fellow, very inward looking. And Sid was extrovert and a
real character."
Though Sid was yet to enroll at Kingsway, he latched onto its social scene. His new friends
found him unusual and entertaining. He hung out in the common room, smoking joints and
goofing around. Simone Stenfors, later a punk scenester, met him at a Hallowe'en party in
October 1974. looked completely different to everyone else," she recalls. "He wore black
and looked like Johnny Depp in Cry Baby. I fancied him immediately. He was very shy. Now I
realize that I probably petrified him. He didn't have a girlfriend. He never had a
girlfriend."
"Sid always knew how to look good," adds Mike Baess, who studied at Kingsway. "His role
models must have been leather-era Elvis and James Dean. He was the sort of bloke everyone
looked at when he came in the room. I think he knew he had that power and deliberately
cultivated it. I got the impression Sid always wanted to be somebody. He was a genuinely
unique person. He gained our respect by being so different."
Mike Baess and John Beverley - soon to be known as 'Spikey John' after adopting a proto-punk
crop in early 1975 - started hanging out together. They shared a passion for underground
music: Roxy, Pink Fairies, John Cale, Eno and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Every Saturday,
they'd meet with other friends in Portobello Road under the Westway and go shopping for
bootlegs (Sid would steal his), then meet up on Sunday afternoon at The Roundhouse. It
appears Sid also had a soft spot for jazz-rock: he loved to get stoned with a pal called
Mandy Pete and listen to Weather Report and Stanley Clark LPs.
Mike Baess's description of Sid at this time is quite charming: he seems to have been the
slightly dopey, loveable oaf you glimpse in some Sex Pistols footage. He was out of control,
but still basically harmless. Mike stresses that he �never paid for anything, he just
blagged
his way through life. He didn't give a fuck, which was fantastic. He would always nick his
dinners from the canteen - if the dinner lady shouted out, 'O! Come back and pay!' he'd
shout, 'Fuck off!', then run away. But he always got away with it. He was anti-social but
almost to a comical degree.
"Sid was actually very bright. There was an intellect at play there that never really
surfaced. It never had a chance to. But he wasn't a stupid character. You couldn't pull the
wool over his eyes or spin him a yarn. He was wise. Sometimes you'd look into those brown
eyes, and see someone who knew no fear. It could send a shiver down your spine."
Towards the end of 1975, Mike Baess noticed a dramatic change in 'Spikey John'. The date,
interestingly, coincides with his best-mate John Lydon's induction into the Sex Pistols.
Page Six
Photo Caption
"He wore black and looked like Johnny Depp in Cry Baby." Simon John Ritchie, Kingsway
College, autumn 1975.
Continue to Part Three of the Article! --->>>
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