Upon meeting with the psychiatrist, the shrink spoke to the pair of young rascals together in an effort to help Sid overcome his suicidal thoughts. In north London the bloke had a clinic, I think attached to his house, where he saw clients.” He continued, explaining that Sid had approached him following a session with the psychiatrist: “He said ‘my shrink wants to meet you’, I said ‘why’s that?’ and he said ‘I’ve been thinking of topping myself, and he thinks that if he meets you, because you’re my mate, and he thinks that you’re like me (…) he thinks that you can help talk me out of suicide.’ So we both saw the opportunity for a bit of fun”. He was seeing a psychiatrist, this was around 1975-ish sort of time in the summer. He replied: “Oh very simple this … right, this is terrible really because I did a Suicide Prevention Course just this week, so this is terrible now looking back. When I asked Wardle for the funniest memory of his days as Sid’s friend, he explained that the anecdote he was about to tell was somewhat bittersweet.
Indeed it would seem that the scruffy clothed aesthetic would follow the group on into the early days of punk and seemed to symbolise the anarchist movement the Sex Pistols would later spearhead as one of the most historically significant bands in history.Īs well as being good-humoured and mischievous, due to his “very dysfunctional childhood”, as Wardle put it, Sid had some very serious psychological damage and suffered from depression. In the interview with Far Out, Wardle described a time in the early ‘70s when Sid and their friend Vince had attended a gig together: “There’s a picture knocking about of Vince and Sid at a Roxy Music concert, and I think Cosmo Magazine interviewed them and said – these two amazing looking young guys before punk! – ‘What do you do?’ And Sid said he was an art student and Vince said ‘I do nothing!’”. Vicious’ fashion sense was always particularly loud and seemed to foreshadow elements of what was to come with the dawn of punk when the Sex Pistols began. Vicious was into his fashion and music he and Lydon would often busk for money playing Alice Cooper covers with Sid bashing away on a tambourine – people would regularly pay them to stop playing. Of course, Sid Vicious always had a penchant for clothing as a means of standing out from the crowd.
It was around this time that Vicious would spend time sleeping rough and hung around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothing store, SEX. As Wardle recalls: “She kicked Sid out, she’d had enough of him and said ‘sling your hook!’ He said ‘Where shall I go mum?’ She said ‘I don’t care, just sleep on a park bench for all I care!’ … well he actually ended up round my mate Terry’s for a few days so he could sort himself out,” Wardle explained, before adding: “By the time I met him, he had a social worker, and he was homeless”. Shortly after moving back to London, Sid was kicked out of the house by his mother. Wardle continued: “So when he came back to London, he had this Bristolian accent and he fell in with some people that I’m friends with”. After spending some time in Ibiza, they came back and he lived with his mother in Tonbridge Wells, and then Bristol for a while, before returning to London. “And a lot of people on heroin apparently went to Ibiza at that time,” he added. In a recent interview with Far Out, John Wardle, the artist more commonly recognised as Jah Wobble of Public Image Ltd, described Sid Vicious’ early days in London: “ he lived in the old Covent Garden, he went to school in Piccadilly Circus, and then him and his mum went off to Ibiza … she was on drugs,” he said after a pause.