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MUSIC
The tragic suicide note Sid
Vicious left behind

Tom Taylor
TUE 10TH MAY 2022 11.15 BST

On February 15th, 1977, Sid Vicious joined the

Sex Pistols as the bassist. That day he ran
home to his landlord Lemmy Kilmister of
Motörhead and excitedly announced the
news. “One day he came rushing into the "at,”
Lemmy once recalled, “all excited saying.
‘Lemmy, I got the job with the Sex Pistols’ and
I said ‘Great, as part of the road crew’ and I
laughed ‘You can’t even play the bass, you’re
hopeless’.” Less than two years later, Sid
Vicious would be found dead. 

In the interim, he helped to de#ne punk in his

own hair-raising manner, but it is a huge
oversight in the narrative that has followed to
think of his demise as a tragic inevitability
symptomatic of the genre. Along the way,
there were many worrying portents. He even
once alarmingly said, “I’ll die before I’m 25,
and when I do, I’ll have lived the way I wanted
to.” If these behaviours had been "agged, and
appropriate action was taken, then two young
lives may well have been saved. 

In January 1978, the Sex Pistols embarked on

their #rst ever US tour. The opening date in
Pittsburgh was cancelled due to the band
travelling with criminal records. Thus, the only
dates they could ful#l were in more lenient
states, mostly away from their core US
fanbase, in the Deep South. Only a matter of
days into the tour it all came to end on
January 14th. Rotten opened the Sex Pistols
#nal saying: “You’ll get one number and one
number only ’cause I’m a lazy bastard.” 

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They then played

a cover of the
Stooges proto-
punk classic ‘No
Fun’ and Rotten
#nished the
show shouting:
From Link Wray
to New York “This is no fun.
Dolls: Who No fun. This is
really invented no fun—at all.
punk?
No fun.” After
Read More the last show in
San Francisco
the band split up. The Pistols as we know
them are over for good. 

In the aftermath, Sid Vicious ended up holed

up in the renowned bohemian hotspot of the
Chelsea Hotel, New York City with his
girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The pair were
entirely reliant on each other and had a
growing addiction to heroin. Their
relationship was plagued by domestic
violence and abuse. On October 12th, 1978,
Spungen was found under the sink of their
Chelsea Hotel room with a single fatal stab
wound to the abdomen. She was only 20
years old. 

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In the aftermath, Vicious was immediately

charged with second-degree murder. The Sex
Pistols man pleaded not guilty but a week
after his arrest he slashed his wrist in an
apparent failed suicide attempt. He was later
quoted as saying: “I want to join Nancy and
keep up my end of the pact.”

He was subsequently sent to Bellevue

Hospital psychiatric ward before being
released on November 6th. Virgin Records
posted his $50,000 bail release and he was
free while awaiting trial. During this period, he
was living with his mother, Ms Ann Beverley,
at a Manhattan hotel. However, he would
later be arrested once more for assaulting
Patti Smith’s brother, Todd, in a bar with a
broken bottle. 

He served seven weeks of detention at detox

at Riker’s Island jail. He was released on
February 1st, 1979, and that same day, after
meeting his friend ‘Gravelle’ by chance, he
injected himself with large amounts of 80%
pure heroin at a party. He died of an overdose
in the early hours of the morning. The next
day, Vicious would be discovered dead of an
overdose by his mother and the apartment
owner Michele Robinson. He was only 21
years old.

His mother deemed the death to be suicide as

per the note she found in the pocket of his
leather jacket which read: “We had a death
pact. I have to keep my half of the bargain.
Please bury me PTO [Please Turn Over] next
to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket,
jeans and motor cycle boots. Goodbye.”

The sense of inevitability surrounding his

death has been a very damaging one in the
interim years. As Steven Severin of Siouxsie
and the Banshees said of the late punk
rocker: “Before he got deeply into drugs, he
was one of the funniest guys. He had a
brilliant sense of humour, goofy, sweet and
very cute.”

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And his bandmate John Lydon told The

Independent in 2009: “I’m sorry, God, for the
day I brought Sid into the band. He felt so
isolated, poor old Sid, because he wasn’t the
sharpest knife on the block. The best aspect
of his character, which was his humour, just
vanished the day he joined the Pistols.”

While many portents, corroborations and

deductions have been derived from the tragic
deaths of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, the
one that requires the least judicious analysis
is that we all must be more mindful of those
most vulnerable around us and how best to
help one another. 

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Letters of Note
@LettersOfNote · Follow

Sid Vicious died on this day in '79, months after

allegedly killing Nancy. His mum later found a
note in his pocket:

11:05 AM · Feb 2, 2013

766 Reply Share

Read 45 replies

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MUSIC
The Beatles song that made
Ozzy Osbourne want to be a
rock star

Sam Kemp
MON 9TH MAY 2022 22.00 BST

When it comes to rock ‘n’ roll debauchery,

Ozzy Osbourne is something of an expert. The
vocalist rose to fame in the 1970s as the fang-
toothed frontman of the legendary heavy
metal out#t Black Sabbath. During his time
with the group, the self-proclaimed Prince of
Darkness developed a reputation for – to put
it bluntly – lunacy. Eventually, his anarchic
persona and penchant for cocaine began
interferringwith his musical obligations,
leading to his dismissal from Black Sabbath in
April 1979. Considering Osbourne and
company spent an estimated $75,000 on
cocaine during the production of Vol. 4, it
comes as a surprise that Osbourne’s musical
upbringing was so quaint. Indeed, he once
cited one of The Beatles’ teenybopper hits as
the song that made him want to be a rockstar.

The Beatles were always far more than their

music. Despite their notoriety, the ‘Fab Four’
maintained a sense of relatability. They
weren’t strangely tanned or obnoxiously
coi$eured; they looked and sounded
(depending on where you lived) a lot like their
fans, and their fans responded to that.
Instead of symbolising an unachievable
dream, The Beatles implied that even the
most ordinary people living in the most
ordinary of places could make a better, more
thrilling life for themselves. For youngsters
growing up in drab industrial centres, the
sheer existence of a band like The Beatles was
a reason for optimism.

Opening up about The Beatles’ impact in a

2016 interview, Osbourne explained that the
group’s 1964 hit ‘She Loves You’ completely
changed the game: “I come from the
backstreets of Aston in Birmingham and it
wasn’t a very cool place when I was growing
up,” the singer began. “I used to sit on my
doorstep and think, ‘How the hell am I going
to get out of here?’ And then one day ‘She
Loves You’ came on the radio.”

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Unless you were actually there, it’s hard to

imagine just how explosive the Beatles’ sound
was in the early ’60s. The group’s blend of
radio-friendly rock ‘n’ roll had been bubbling
under the surface for a while. With traces of
music hall, ski%e, and blues, tracks like ‘She
Loves You’ heralded the arrival of a new era.
“That song turned my head around,”
Osbourne continued. “My son always says to
me, ‘What was it like when The Beatles
happened?’ All I can really say to him to is:
‘Imagine going to bed in one world, and then
waking up in another that’s so di$erent and
exciting that it makes you feel glad to be
alive.”

With their shimmering pop, Lennon,

McCartney, Harrison and Starr severed the
nation from the post-war years, replacing a
monochrome world with one soaked in
technicolour. Their sound was, in a sense, a
re"ection of the burgeoning sense that things
could only get better, and for Osbourne, it
was the beginning of everything.

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