Mojo - The Music Magazine

Never have a rock couple been more widely execrated than Sid & Nancy: a paradigm of mutually assured destruction with unhealthy resonances in the tale of Kurt & Courtney, Amy & Blake, Pete Doherty and Whoever. But beneath the acne and scurf, the Sex Pistols bassist was a naïf bowled over by his first real girlfriend (he was upset when Spungen introduced a temporarily Vicious-augmented Johnny Thunders gig with her boobs out), and it was shared issues around low self-esteem (she had attempted suicide in high school; he'd been written off since birth) that propelled them into a reliance on each other and on drugs of a harder and harder sort.

They met after Nancy pursued New York Doll Jerry Nolan across the Atlantic; they parted at New York's Chelsea Hotel on the night of October 12, 1978, when Sid awoke from a smack stupor to find his partner in grime stabbed to death. Sid apologists put a third party in the frame, a drug dealer or thief who slipped in and did the dirty; Sid's mum, Anne Beverley, called it suicide till the day of her own death, from a heroin overdose, in 1996. Sid was long gone, of course, OD'd whilst on bail for Nancy's murder, with a fix supplied - he now claims - by photographer Peter Gravelle, but the dénouement always seemed tattooed in the stars. "If there was two people in the whole goddamn world who should never ever meet," Anne Beverley told Jon Savage, sadly, "it was those two." Amy, beware! [DE]