How a former Kent schoolboy became an icon
As Danny Boyle’s new TV mini series Pistol is poised to burst onto our screens, John Nurden finds out what turned shy Tunbridge Wells’ schoolboy Simon John Ritchie into the obnoxious Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious
According to reports from former classmates, Sid Vicious, the drug-fuelled bass-player of punk pioneers the Sex Pistols’, was a pussycat at school. So what happened?
In those days Simon Ritchie, as he was then known, was mild-mannered and shy.
Lin Cousins, then Linda Nicholls, recalled: “Simon was in one of my classes sitting in front of me and I poked him in the back of his neck with my ruler. I always blamed myself for the way he turned out! He was a quiet boy.”
This was back in the late 1960s when the pre-Pistol attended Sandown Court Secondary Modern School in Royal Tunbridge Wells.
At first thought, one would be surprised to learn that Britain’s number one rock rebel would have spent time in a town always considered to be somewhat posh.
But Sandown Court was what educationalists like to call a “challenge”.
It was opened in 1960 and looked a little space-age with its coloured doors, trendy teachers wearing polo-necked sweaters, and impressive glass and concrete design standing on a large campus in Blackhurst Lane off Pembury Road.
Over the years, it was rebranded as Tunbridge Wells High School and in 2009, after an extensive makeover, it reopened its doors as Skinners’ Kent Academy, perhaps in a bid to shake off its infamous claim to fame as creating Sid Vicious.
Margaret Willingham remembered: “My late brother used to tell me about Sid being in his class. He said he was very quiet at school. What happened I don’t know!”
Andy Bush added: “He was in my brother’s year at Sandown Court, where I also went. I don’t think he was there for all five years.
“His academic achievements and behaviour were not unremarkable for the secondary
modern school whose reputation was somewhat frowned upon by the Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells element.
“I now live and work on Sheppey. Tunbridge Wells seems a million miles away now.”
Not all encounters took place in school.
Mike Sawyer tells me: “I saw
him sitting on the stairs outside a flat in Lime Hill Road where he cadged a cigarette off me.
“He accused me of being too young to smoke and told me I should give them all to him. But I compromised and just gave him one.
“I was 13 at the time. I remember he was a bit scruffy back then but he wasn’t yet looking like a punk.”
Peter Bathurst confirmed: “He lived in Lime Hill Road. Simon and I had a fight after school once. But he did have a few. We got on OK.”
Simon John Ritchie, also known as John Beverley but more widely remembered as Sid Vicious, was born in Lewisham to John and Anne Ritchie on May 10, 1957.
Despite dying in 1979 at the age of 21 he remains an icon of the punk subculture.
His mum Anne had dropped out of school and joined the British Army where she met Ritchie’s father, a guardsman
at Buckingham Palace and semi-professional trombone player on the London jazz scene.
Shortly after Ritchie’s birth, he and his mother moved t Ibiza where they expected to be joined by his father.
But Ritchie Senior never appeared and, it is reported, never provided any financial support either.
To make ends meet, Anne reportedly sold marijuana.
With the help of the British High Commission in Spain, she returned to England and settled in Tunbridge Wells where she enrolled her son, still known as Simon, at Sandown Court School.
Its houses were named after planets like Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Mercury and it even boasted its own ‘zoo’.
Former pupils recall having their exercise books eaten by the resident goats, being dared to touch the electric fence around the pig pen or putting on beekeeper outfits to help at the hives.
Others say they were scared to visit the Tower Lodge ‘sin bin’ because it was said to be haunted.
Older lads were allowed to play ska in the hall at lunchtime and even learned to ‘clock’ and ‘hardwire’ cars in engineering classes.
Popular subjects included sports, food tech, drama and photography. Punch-ups were scheduled at 4pm at the swing gates.
In 1965, Anne married Christopher Beverley, who died six months later of kidney failure. She then took her son to Bristol and Clevedon, Somerset, where he attended Clevedon School.
In 1971, the pair moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney, east London, where John attended Clissold Park School (now Stoke Newington School). At this time, he began using the name John Beverley.
By 1973 he joined Westminster Kingsway College, then known as Kingsway College of Further
ccused me of being too young to smoke and told me I should give them all to him. But I compromised and just gave him one’
Education, a community and vocational school for “students with difficulties”.
It was there he met fellow student John Lydon, later to become Johnny Rotten, who introduced him to friends John Grey and John Wardle.
The four, who were known locally as The Four Johns, quit school and began squatting in dismal locations where they ended up giving each other nicknames.
Legend has it that Lydon christened his mate ‘Sid Vicious’ after he was bitten by his pet hamster Sid.
The newly-named Vicious nicknamed Wardle,
Jah Wobble.
It was guitarist Steve Jones who turned Lydon into Johnny Rotten.
The group started hanging around the King’s Road in Chelsea where they discovered the weird clothing store SEX run by music entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.
According to Lydon, he and Vicious took up busking, with Vicious on tambourine. They would play Alice Cooper covers until people gave them money to stop.
In 1975, Lydon joined Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook to form the Sex Pistols.
In February 1977 McLaren announced Matlock had been “thrown out of the band” because “he liked the Beatles” and had him replaced by Vicious who had since learned to play bass and had also spent time in Ashford Remand Centre after
blinding a woman in one eye with a broken beer glass during a performance of The Damned.
The following month, the Sex Pistols were signed to A&M Records and in celebration, trashed the company’s offices and went on to a private party where Vicious jammed a broken bottle into the face of a BBC recording engineer.
A&M dropped them the following day. Virgin stepped into the breach.
Vicious, now mainlining on heroin, played his first gig with the Pistols on April 3, 1977 at The Screen On The Green. In the same year, he met American groupie Nancy Spungen, also an addict. The pair became inseparable. It was the beginning of the end.
The band released their only album Never Mind The B ******* , Here’s The Sex Pistols on October 28, 1977 featuring the controversial and banned song God Save The Queen. It went straight into the charts at number one and the following month went gold, eventually spending 48
weeks in the top 75.
But within months and after a string of tours the band was imploding.
In October 1978, Vicious and Spungen booked into room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea in New York under the names of Mr and Mrs John Ritchie and held a party.
The morning after, Spungen was found dead on the bathroom floor with a knife wound to her abdomen and Vicious was wandering about in the hall. He died the following January from a drugs overdose.
The new Pistol TV mini-series is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by guitarist Steve Jones and has been shot in parts of Kent, including Deal.
It stars Louis Partridge as Vicious, Anson Boon as Lydon, Toby Wallace as Jones, Jacob Slater as Paul Cook, Christian
Lees as Glen Matlock, Emma Appleton as Nancy Spungen, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as McLaren, Talulah Riley as Dame Vivienne Westwood, Sydney Chandler as Chrissie Hynde and Maisie Williams as punk icon Jordan.
Filming went ahead despite Lydon refusing to help. He even went to court to try to get the use of Sex Pistols songs banned.
Director Danny Boyle said: “This is the moment that British society and culture changed forever.
“It is the detonation point for British street culture where ordinary young people had the stage and vented their fury and their fashion and everyone had to watch and listen. Everyone feared them or followed them.”
Pistol launches on Disney+ from Tuesday, May 31.