Chris Sullivan on his many encounters with the ultimate rebel

“I first encountered Sid Vicious in the summer of 1976. Dressed in winkle picker shoes and drain-pipe trousers, my friends and me had been followed into Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop in Chelsea by a photographer shooting for Honey magazine.

“‘Hey mate!’ shouted a tall skinny fellow with a see-through T-shirt whom we presumed to be the shop assistant. ‘Why you taking photos of that bunch of sheep s*******?’ One of our number — a classically trained Welsh pugilist — walked up, delivered a head to his nose, and the poor misguided gentleman hit the deck. Dragged by his spiked dog collar to the door, he screamed to the punk icon who fronted the shop: ‘Jordan! Get the old Bill! Quick! Now!’

“A few months later we attended the 100 Club Punk Festival and were amazed to see the same chap banging drums along to an infernal cacophony of noise supplied by the fledgeling Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was then that we discovered his name — Sid Vicious — a moniker that provided us with in-car entertainment all the way home.

“Just a few weeks later, the Sex Pistols let loose a fusillade of expletives live on the Bill Grundy show, and everything changed. As punk gathered momentum, so did Sid’s reputation for excess in all areas. As the scene was so small, our paths crossed continually: at clubs, concerts and house parties. I saw the myth swell and Frankenstein’s monster grow. And then he joined the Sex Pistols.

“Free drugs and drink are a given for most bands — their acolytes more than ready to exchange them for slivers of reflected glory— but this was the Sex Pistols, he was Sid Vicious, and disaster loomed. In 1977, a fresh wave of New York City punks came to London, and with them came heroin. Sid, as was his wont, loved it. Add Nancy Spungen to the mix and the equation was complete.

“When I heard the news of Spungen’s death and Sid’s arrest for the crime in October 1978, I was surprised. Vicious was many things but he was not a murderer and, even though Spungen could have driven a nun to homicide, that was not his style. Lee Black Childers, the manager of the Heartbreakers, was the last to see Sid in the Chelsea Hotel that evening and told me that Nancy’s murderer was in fact a Puerto Rican heroin dealer — a fact that most of New York’s hipsters were well acquainted with. But it mattered not: Vicious always was an accident waiting to happen. It happened in 1979 when he died after overdosing on heroin at a party to celebrate his release on bail. He would have been 48 this year, and he would have hated that.”

Chris Sullivan is the author of, Punk: A Life Apart, published by Cassell