Attention: Nancy Spungen's dead photo could impact your sensitivity
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.
“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.”
“I promised my baby that I would kill myself if anything ever happened to her and she promised me the same,” Vicious wrote. “This is my final commitment to my love.” In the weeks following Spungen’s death, back in the Chelsea Hotel on bail, he’d been admitted to hospital for slashing his arms with a smashed light bulb. During one of his final interviews, when asked where he wanted to be, Vicious replied “under the ground”.
Gravelle arrived at 63 Bank Street that night, joining Vicious, Robinson, Beverley and five other close friends, he found Vicious in a defiant, future-facing mood.
“The last feeling I got from them was sort of positive,” Gravelle tells me now. “He basically talked about how he was going to get himself off the [murder] charge and go upstate New York to record this album, which was gonna pay for all his legal fees and everything.
On the list of songs was ‘I Fought the Law’, which The Clash did later on and I remember ‘YMCA’ was on there too. He was into that.”
Gravelle stayed and witnessed first-hand how the narcotics wreaked havoc on Vicious’s recently detoxed system. “He took a bunch of heroin and he started to turn blue,” he recalls. “We brought him round and I stayed with him for about another three or four hours, until about two in the morning or even later. When I left, he was fine. He was up, he was drinking tea, a bit weak and everything but he was okay. He hadn’t died from that hit of heroin, put it that way.” The next day, Gravelle received a call from a friend imparting the news: “I went out and it was already in the evening newspapers: ‘Sid Vicious Dead’, I couldn’t believe it.”
Read the full article on the Independent