Drug-addled final moments of a doomed punk legend

Less than 24 hours after leaving prison - there for breaching bail on a murder charge - Sid Vicious was dead. Speaking to friends of the Sex Pistols bassist, Mark Beaumont explores that night 45 years ago and the music industry's culpability

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When Sid Vicious stepped out of Rikers Island, New York, on 1 February 1979, oblivion was the first thing on his mind. During the 54 days he spent in the notorious Bronx prison - there for breaching the conditions of his $50,000 bail from charges of murdering his girlfriend Nancy Spungen three months earlier – he’d undergone enforced cold turkey to rid him of the heroin habit that had blighted his days as Sex Pistols’ second bassist and punk’s definitive wildman. Staying clean, though, was never going to be part of the Vicious script.

Having made his way to Manhattan, Vicious ran into a photographer friend and drug buddy Peter Gravelle. Vicious – born Simon John Ritchie – asked Gravelle to bring $200 worth of heroin to a small gathering taking place that night to celebrate his release. The address was Bank Street, at the apartment of aspiring actor Michelle Robinson, one of several women Vicious had been seeing since Spungen’s death – for which he’d never stand trial, because by tomorrow morning, 45 years ago, Vicious would also be dead aged just 21.

In the months that followed his death, much evidence would be presented to suggest that Vicious was of a self-destructive mindset that night. His mother Anne Beverley, herself a longterm heroin addict, produced a hand-written letter she claimed to have found in his leather jacket, referring to Spungen. It read: “We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans, and motorcycle boots. Goodbye.”