Page Captions
Boy to man: (above) as little Simon Ritchie with his mother Anne in Ibiza, 1960; Sid (far
right) with Michelle Robinson (right), he would be dead within 24 hours.
Being There
Jon Savage: I remember this interview as one of the most exhausting and haunting of all the
ones that I did for England's Dreaming. Anne Beverley lived in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, at
the time with her friend Charlie, in a small but comfortable house. I arrived at 11pm, began
the interview at midnight, and we did not finish until 4am. Once the floodgates opened, Anne
could not stop talking about her only son. She was frankly emotional and still wished to see
the best of Sid. I liked her and found her more human and complex than the junkie mum of
legend: her own adolescence had been disastrous and she had been one of the first generation
of Ibiza pleasure seekers in the late '50s, early'60s. As far as hard drugs were concerned
in 1988, I didn�t see any and did not get the feeling that there were any around.
"Nothing Can Hurt Him Anymore."
Sid's mother Anne Beverley died of a heroin overdose in 1996, but not before sharing her
side of Sid's story. As told to Jon Savage.
"He was a natural musician almost from the day he was born. When he was eight months old,
the thing he liked to hold was his dad's trombone mouthpiece. At tow years old he was out in
the garden singing, 'That old black magic has me in its spell!' with all the inflections,
the lot. He'd drum away for hours, with a saucepan and two sticks. He was lovely as a kid.
He never cried for anything. He was so funny, perceptive, a good mimic. He could pick up the
funny parts of a personality. He had a go at people's pretensions, but that was later, when
he realised how pretentious people could be. That was when he started to dress up. He
started talking about clothes when he was 13, it used to really get on my nerves. It got
boring.
"He left home for a while when he was 15. He lived in some squat in Bethnal Green, but after
a couple of months he came back. Then when he was about 17, again, we had a row. I'd been
suffering since '65 with a duodenal ulcer, and was in terrible pain most of the time. I was
under great stress.
"I remember saying to him, Simon, it's either you or me, and it's not going to be me. I have
got to preserve myself, and you can just fuck off. 'But I've got nowhere to sleep,' he said,
and I said, I don't care if you have to sleep on a fucking park bench, just pack your bags
and fucking go. It was one of those, you know what I mean?
"He subsequently moved into an empty flat, and then John [Lydon] moved in, so that was where
they were together. Then I think John went back home, and then Simon had a collection of
really weird ladies, and the one that moved in with him was something of a witch, into
witchcraft. Daubing each other with syrup, stuff like that. She was weird.
"He got a job in [vegetarian cafee] Canks, the one in Heal's in Tottenham Court Road. And he
came home with this lettuce-green dye, and he wanted me to dye his hair. In a way, he was a
punk before Malcolm ever came on the scene. Right from '75 when he first dyed his hair. He
was punk. He arried it all the way through.
"Simon came home one Saturday and he looked really down. 'I think that's a bit much,' he
said, 'after I took [Lydon] down there in the first place. He would never have gone there if
I hadn't forced him to go down the King's Road.' In other words, John had gone down there on his own and was in Malcolm McLaren's shop, and Malcolm McLaren said, 'Can you sing? Right, so you're a singer in a group.' Now that should have been Simon, he was really pipped at that, really put out. That should have been him.
"Then the group took off and they got their first songs together, and Simon thought they were the dog's bleedin' dinner. 'Aw, mum,' he said, 'I've been to listen to them, and they're fucking brilliant!' He was big enough for that. He wasn't a mean-minded, petty person at all.
"I thought that [Nancy] was dreadful, I couldn't stand her. The first time I met her, she sat on the sofa next to me and tried to tell me her life story in two seconds flat. Like she was vomiting. It was all about how badly she'd been treated, how rich her father was, how much better her brother and sister had been treated than her, she'd been this and done that, so full of herself. It set my teeth on edge straight away. Like any mother, I would have liked a better person for him than her.
"I really do think that Nancy stabbed herself, I really do believe that. She wasn't a well person, she was always getting bladder infections, I think she had kidney trouble, and in pain quite a lot. If you're intent on doing something like that, it's quite easy to do. If she told me once, she told me 50 times that she would die before she was 21. It was a fixation with her. If there was two people in the whole goddamn world who should never meet, it was those two. People liken them to Romeo and Juliet. It was an absolute tragedy, but they did, and meeting meant self-destruction.
"I'm glad he died, in view of what happened. Nothing can hurt him anymore. And where could he have gone, from where he was at? He couldn't have backed down and done something different, like John Lydon has. There was no way he could have reverted, and been a pop singer. He was in a corner. The rug was pulled out from under his feet, and he would have never have survived in an English jail, let alone an American one.
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