Sid Sings was recently added to Spotify, an awful collection of Sid signatures like “Belsen Is A Gas” and “My Way”, along with Heartbreakers songs, Eddie Cochran covers and “Stepping Stone” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” –you know, the usual suspects. Recorded mostly live at Max’s Kansas City” in 1979 with a couple of Pistols, a Heartbreakers on drums and reportedly a Clash on bass.
I’d also heard Sid Sings when it was first released and thought it was a disgraceful last nail type dea in punk and it cemented my opinion that Sid was a bewildering talentless self-destructive fool. Johnny Rotten once disputed that assessment with me over tea in a hotel lobby. In Johnny’s opinion, Sid was a modern Candide destroyed by the music business.
Whatever you considered him, as Rotten’s “replacement lead singer” in the Sex Pistol, nothing Sid did really mattered as music and in the end, out on bail after being arrested for the murder of the only woman he ever loved, he OD’d on heroine supplied by his Mom, and was dead before he saw 22 years of age.
I’d leave it there, just thinking that, really, dredging it up all over again is almost disrespectful, it is like, to name a latter day lousy Pistols album, Flogging A Dead Horse.
But I’ve been reading the Slits as well as lead guitarist for Sid’s aborted first band The Flowers Of Romance,Viv Albertine’s autobiography and t here is something that doesn’t fit into the Vicious story as I know it (A nobody gets lucky because he is Rotten’s friend ). For one thing, neither Rotten nor McLaren would hire a bassist who can’t play bass for the most important band on earth without a damn good reason and if the reason isn’t musical then it must be conceptual. Vicious was like a work of art, his strength was in being him. Self-centered to the place where he might have been autistic, he spent his life, his career, trying to be what he was and so far away it is hard to see it, but between inventing the pogo, inventing the zips on clothes (him, as well as Richard Hell, Hell did it as a fashion statement, Vicious was more utilitarian -to hold up his pants), his influence on 70s London, and indeed youth culture of the time, was exothermic. . Hanging out at Sex, bopping and weaving through London like a nuclear bomb on Carnaby Street, forming the Flowers Of Romance, a band where nobody could actually play music, and almost turning down the offer to join the Pistols in 1977 because he saw bigger things for himself. Working class dirt poor Vicious, yet ambitious and plotting and moving.
Vicious in 1976 was more than the face of punk on a street level although he was that (Rotten the star, Vicious the man on the street), he was the face of face, the face of the UK, of England Dreaming: when you think about the limits of punk UK, you get to the image of Sid Vicious. Poor, scavenger, squatters, one part Richard Avedon (ok, Vivienne Westwood) one part Oliver Twist. It was a music scene but Sid wasn’t a music guy as such, not quite, he might have grown into the role, he might have grown up, but none of what he left behind musically has any value.
But there are other values to Sid, somewhere in his back story he emerges as a form of pop superstar: famous for being famous, also famous for being famous for a reason, an affront to common decency and a living work of art, a beautiful, smart, cool, contemptuous man unwilling to compromise but doomed and for no real reason. His doom was not necessary.
Musically, who cares? But before death made him the greatest punk rock star of all, Sid made himself the potential superstar of the 1970s. He had something else…
Sid Sings – D+
