Simon John Ritchie[a] (10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979), better known by his stage name Sid Vicious, was an English musician, best known as the second bassist for the punk rock band Sex Pistols.

[5][1] Anne had dropped out of school and joined the British Army, where she met Ritchie's father, a guardsman at Buckingham Palace and a semi-professional trombone player on the London jazz scene.

Shortly after Ritchie's birth, he and his mother moved to Ibiza, where they expected to be joined by his father, who did not appear and provided no financial support—Anne reportedly sold marijuana to get by.

Hynde convinced Vicious — by paying him £2 — to join her in a sham marriage to enable her to get a work permit and remain in the country, after John Lydon had already declined.

In 1975, Lydon, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook, with McLaren as their manager, formed the Sex Pistols, the band Vicious would eventually join.

In 1976, Vicious co-founded, as vocalist and saxophone player,[15] the Flowers of Romance along with the Clash co-founder guitarist Keith Levene, Viv Albertine and Palmolive (who would both go on to become the guitarist and the first drummer of the Slits respectively), and Kenny Morris (future drummer of Siouxsie and the Banshees) who would replace Palmolive who got kicked out of the band by Vicious after rejecting his advances.

[21] On 20 September 1976, Vicious appeared with Siouxsie and the Banshees, playing drums only at their first gig at the 100 Club Punk Special in London's Oxford Street,[22] a two-day festival co-founded by McLaren.

[22][24] In February 1977, Sex Pistols' manager McLaren announced that Glen Matlock had been "thrown out of the band" because "he liked the Beatles", and that he had been replaced by Vicious.

In celebration, they trashed the company's offices, and then held a private party at the Speakeasy, a club and restaurant frequented by established members of the London music scene.

The Sex Pistols members confronted the BBC DJ Bob Harris, who was the presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test, a television show which featured non-chart music.

Harris was rescued by the Procol Harum road crew, who grouped around him and escorted him out of the club, where they found that police had had to cordon off the entire block.

[28] Vicious played his first gig with the Sex Pistols on 3 April 1977, at The Screen on the Green;[29] his debut was filmed by Don Letts and appears in Punk Rock Movie.

[6] Also in 1977, Vicious met Nancy Spungen, an American groupie living in London, who had a life-long history of unstable mental behavior and was also a heroin addict.

She and Vicious became inseparable, which caused problems with the band, whose members did not like her; McLaren admitted to planning to have her abducted and forced onto a plane back to the United States.

[40] In the 2013 documentary Never Mind the Baubles: Xmas '77 with the Sex Pistols, Lydon claimed that Vicious had to be warned not to be the "hardcore, tough rocker bloke" in front of the children.

[42] To make matters worse, McLaren, ever eager for more chaos and careful that journalists were on-scene, booked the band, not into the clubs of New York, but into bars in Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas.

In April, the two travelled to Paris to film the Sex Pistols mockumentary The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, where they spent most of their time in their hotel room, doing drugs.

[50] Spungen acted as his manager, putting together the band of Steve Dior, Jerry Nolan and Arthur Kane and booking him into the New York club Max's Kansas City.

They interviewed several high-profile lawyers, including Melvin Belli, Gerald B. Lefcourt and William Kunstler before settling on F. Lee Bailey.

Bailey never appeared in court, but another lawyer from his firm, Jim Merberg, arranged for Vicious to be released on $50,000 bail, with the conditions that he not leave New York and that he sign in daily at the Third Homicide Unit offices, and at the Lafayette Street Methadone Center.

Noting that the knife was left in plain view and that the couple kept their cash in a drawer, he believed that Spungen caught one of the party guests stealing money and was stabbed by that person.

[60] In the meantime, McLaren announced that the Sex Pistols would reunite to record a Christmas album to benefit Vicious's defence, and sold T-shirts with the slogan, "She's Dead, I'm Alive, I'm Yours.

[64] While it was widely reported, including by Rotten, that Mick Jagger paid Vicious' bail, that was untrue; Virgin Records continued to pay his legal fees.

She produced a handwritten note, which she said she found in the pocket of Vicious's leather jacket,[74] reading "We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain.

[80][81] Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said of Vicious: "[He] was everything that's cool about punk rock: a skinny rocker who had a ton of attitude, sort of an Elvis, James Dean kind of guy".

[31] On 20 January 2009, In Search of Sid, a 30-minute documentary about Vicious recorded by his close friend Jah Wobble was aired on the BBC Radio 4.

In 2017, Foster the People released "Loyal Like Sid & Nancy", which references Vicious and Spungen's relationship, as the second single from their album Sacred Hearts Club.

[95] In 2017, Industrial Metal band Powerman 5000 released a single called "Sid Vicious in a Dress," which is about a female punk rocker who exhibits similar chaos and violent nature of the former Sex Pistols bassist.

In his 2022 album Mainstream Sellout, artist Machine Gun Kelly released a track titled "Sid & Nancy", about a couple who was deeply in love but shared some dark ideas.

[citation needed] In the film, which was directed by Paul Bartel, Vicious resides in Hell with Oscar Wilde, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan and Marie Antoinette.