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It's three decades since Sid Vicious, the cartoon überpunk to end all überpunks, died of a heroin overdose following the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. A year earlier, NME's Chris Salewicz had met the couple in an interview used in the punk movie DOA. This was how he set the scene for their "conversation."--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Swaying crazily, Sid Vicious clambers up off the bed. He manages the three or four steps to where, obeying live-in-lover Nancy's instructions, he removes the "God Save The Queen" tablecloth from the top of the colour TV and turns to his visitor. He doesn't appear to notice that he should first have removed the two glasses of fresh orange juice resting on top of the cloth. They tumble down the front of the TV set and onto the carpet.

In another corner of the room Nancy is experiencing her own problems. Almost frantically she opens a wardrobe and tugs at the handles of a chintzy, white, mock-Louis Quinze drawer.

Suddenly Nancy's kneeling there on the carpet, the handles and the front panel of the drawer having come away in her hands.

Looking just a little baffled, she glances up at me from the floor. "I take a lot of brandy," her New York accent shrills. "Pour a small one for Sid and a big one for me. Sid's not supposed to drink. Otherwise he'll die."

I think I know what must have happened. In fact, when Sid got stoned in the afternoon it must have seemed a really great idea to ring up the NME and offer an exclusive Sid-Tells-All interview. After all, it was really good stuff, apparently. Good enough to make you forget you'd only had eight hours sleep in the past four days, and that you were completely strung out on nervous exhaustion following that OD on the flight from San Francisco to New York, and that anyway you'd got such a bad cold as a result of your lung infection that, like some wonderful stroke of McLaren-ite symbolism, your voice really did sound much of the time like a death rattle. So much so, indeed, that there are moments during The Interview [sic] when this reporter has a twinge of bad conscience about his persistent questioning, as though perhaps he's being disrespectful to the dead.

Sid's not going to die, though. You've just heard that. Nancy's going to look after him. Even though they didn't splice the knot like they promised the Home Office they would so Nancy--an American--could stay in this country, she's going to stick around and care for him. Sid's okay so long as Nancy's around, Nancy repeats several times.

Oooooops!!! Sid's just put a caramel in his mouth. He's shut his eyes. His mouth has opened. The caramel has fallen out. Nancy is picking it up off the black sheets on the bed they're both slumped on. With an affectionate "You are a disgusting pig" she jams it back into Sid's still open mouth and pushes his jaw shut.

Actually, before we get on to the expected Pistols line of questioning, maybe we could have a word or two about the Sid 'n' Nancy relationship. After all, this is probably just as valid in explaining The Split as J. Rotten having turned into an unbearable prima donna, which is what will shortly be claimed.

At first Sid 'n' Nancy do seem just like cartoon characters. In fact, seeing Nancy sprawled out on the bed watching TV and nagging away at Sid to stop nodding out and to at least have the decency to answer the guy's questions because you invited him over here, it seems that maybe it's only her black leather and rubber outfit that prevent her from being seen as the clichéd U.S. home-mate she really is. All she needs to complete the picture are a few copies of Modern Screen to add to the box of candies beside her.

After a while, though, the scene becomes clearer. Despite the times Sid has rammed Nancy's head into assorted pieces of masonry they still really love each other. In fact, the public beatings they inflict on each other are just the ultimate Sex Pistolian extension of the relationship enjoyed by couples bound together by their mutual loathing, and in whose company everyone else is embarrassed by their constant bickering whilst the pair themselves really get off on it. You must know a couple like that.

Similarly with Sid's apparent masochism. He denies that his practice of occasionally gouging chunks out of his body is, as has been suggested, at all sexual in origin. Just as the beatings inflicted on Nancy are also probably not of a sexual nature.

In fact, it's closer to post-adolescent angst, like the time you might have come close to biting a hole right through your hand when you couldn't answer any of the questions on your chemistry paper--and, more to the point, you couldn't even figure out why you should be expected to have to answer any of them. So when life as a Pistol, which once again is a real extreme, gets a little too confusing Sid reacts by whipping out a blade and shoving it in his arm.

The cuts on his hands appeared, he says, when he became blood brothers with the Pistols U.S. road crew.

"Everything else is done," he says, "when I get so annoyed over something that I need an enemy--somebody who's done something to me--so that I can take it out on them and beat them to pulp. And I always find I'm sitting in a room with a load of friends and I can't do anything to them, so I just go upstairs and smash a glass and cut myself. And then I feel better."

It seems also that Sid is not, as has been sometimes suggested, lacking in brainpower. On the contrary it appears there is such a torrent of unchanneled mental activity in the Vicious upstairs that he is constantly connecting with new and even more tormenting demons. The drug abuse doesn't help, of course, but then legally prescribed Valium can screw your head up just as much as anything you score in the street.

Read the rest of this interview, and many more Sid Vicious/Sex Pistols articles, at http://www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 13,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.