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A London exhibition celebrates one of punk’s most enduring sex icons, writes Barry Lowe.
Anyone who thinks punk is dead may have to think again. The lads and ladettes who would lounge on street corners sporting torn jeans, safety pins and the ubiquitous spiky Mohawk to cadge payment from tourists for a photograph have moved, in fewer numbers, to exhibit in all their peacock glory, to Camden – the main thoroughfare awash with retro gear of not only the punk era but also those fabulous fluorescent ’70s.
But the modern punk, still replete with multi-coloured Mohawk, is more likely to be adorned with piercings and tattoos than safety pins. This is the price of progress. So the tattoo parlours and one-stop piercing shops share footpath space with vegan restaurants, betting shops and fashionable galleries.
And at The Proud gallery there’s a moving photographic exhibition, playing until August, of one of the sexiest and most tragic of the punk idols: Sid Vicious. This poor kid was gloriously beautiful in a way that deified him along with the likes of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain.
Sid, born John Simon Ritchie in 1957, replaced Glen Matlock as the bass player in the infamous Sex Pistols. He’d been part of the London punk scene and began his musical career in 1976. Over the years he worked with Keith Levene (The Clash) and Siouxsie and the Banshees. He joined the Pistols in 1977 and it became obvious, as Malcolm McLaren, the band’s Svengali, put it, “if [Johnny] Rotten is the voice of punk, then Vicious is the attitude.”
He was the perfect sex icon for the punk generation: dysfunctional, self-obsessed, beautiful, sloppy, sneering in a way that contorted his face and made him even more desirably dangerous, and a card-carrying member of a belief in excess and the creed ‘live fast, die young’. Sid was provocative: he would wear a T-shirt emblazoned with Nazi insignia, purple nail polish, and would cut himself on stage. A number of photographs at The Proud exhibition show Sid on stage stripped to the waist, his torso a mass of healing scars from self-inflicted wounds, and across his chest the still-bleeding cuts spelling out ‘GIMME’.
Nancy Spungen, an American punk groupie and heroin addict, met Sid in November 1977 and the two became embroiled in a co-dependent but often violent relationship. Sid’s child-like dependence unstuck the fragile glue that held the group together and the group’s tour of the US was a nightmare in which the band’s quality deteriorated to the extent that it split up after a concert in San Francisco in 1978.
Thereafter Nancy became Sid’s manager but in November of that year, Nancy was found stabbed on the bathroom floor of their Chelsea Hotel room in New York. She had bled to death. Sid was charged with her murder although he admitted to no recollection of having committed the deed. Many punk historians doubt Sid’s guilt and point the finger at one of the two drug dealers who had been in Sid and Nancy’s room that night. Sid never stood trial and died of a drug overdose in February 1979 after having attempted suicide the year before.
But the Proud photographic exhibition by punk photographers shows Sid at his height as a rock icon. Some of the photos (by Eileen Polk) have never been exhibited before and show Sid lost and drug-fucked, but also capture his riveting stage presence playing bass (badly). But if you want to catch Sid in one of his all-time best performances – check out his initially satiric version of ‘My Way’ on YouTube. Sid rocks!
www.proud.co.uk
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