On the 2nd of February 1979, Sid Vicious died alone in a damp New York bedroom, his pulse halted by a lethal dose of heroin injected into his twenty-one-year-old veins. Less than seven years later, a film chronicling the hazy highs and crushing lows of his fleeting existence was released to a global slack-jawed audience - the darkness and despair of his final years played out against the insolent crunch of popcorn.
The film, simply entitled Sid and Nancy, was almost the scripted equivalent of Sid’s own controversial nature, and caused as much of a media frenzy and communal uproar from those who knew him personally and admired him passionately as, say, his violently haemorrhaging chest.
And just as Sid left a deliberate wake of anarchy in his trail during his short and raven-haired years, the 1986 Technicolor descent into oblivion came under fire for being distastefully premature, riddled with rock and roll clichés, and perhaps most uncomfortably of all, glamorising the desperate world of heroin addiction. A chorus of disapproval rang out from friends, family and ex-bandmates upon the film’s release, raining down on its factual and artistic credibility with as much the same vigour as the wall of spit one might have been confronted with at an early Pistols gig.
Written and directed by Alex Cox, a middle-class Oxbridge graduate who by all available accounts (including his own) was certainly never a fixture of the late 70’s punk rock scene and was never personally associated with Sid, Nancy or indeed any of the metal-studded Pistols entourage. Of course, that notion need not be an obstacle in the face of creating an accurate and sensitive biographical work - I don’t for a minute believe that Richard Attenborough drew on first-hand accounts when creating his widely acclaimed Gandhi biopic. But surely the key to avoiding any sense of exploitation when reenacting the life and times of someone who has already lived that life is to, quite simply, know your shit?
John Lydon, Sid’s former bandmate and partner in anti-everything philosophies, has long been shouting (or sneering, as he is better acquainted) from the rooftops about the film’s shortcomings. Lydon maintains that he was not consulted in any way during the writing or production of the film, and that instead of obtaining his notes from the people that knew Sid personally, Alex Cox “drew his points of reference - of all the people on this earth - from Joe Strummer!” Rotten continues in his autobiography No Irish No Blacks No Dogs, “What the fuck did Strummer know about Sid and Nancy? That was probably all [Cox] could find, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Lydon has also been one of the biggest advocates in damning the film’s glorification of drug addiction, a notion that Alex Cox strongly denies. Lydon insists that to him, Sid and Nancy is “the lowest form of life”, and goes on to stress the following: “I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it in the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky.”
That stupid taxi driving off into the sky which Lydon holds with such contempt is just one of the many points in the film where fantasy has forced itself in place of reality, resulting in the sense that we are viewing a canvas painted by Cox’s own imaginings.
“It was all someone else’s fucking fantasy”, Lydon reiterates. “Some Oxford graduate who missed the punk era. Bastard.”
However, anyone who is by any degree acquainted with the sinister relationship of Sid and Nancy will be well aware of the mystery surrounding their final days. The true nature of their dying moments and the events that preceded them are lost to the shady recesses of rock and roll history, and only the walls of their squalid New York hotel room can really know the truth. The issue at hand does not lye with the not knowing, but with the superior perception that one can rewrite the pages of another person’s life in order to suit the condensed flow of a 90-minute screenplay.
However, the fantastical and romanticised ending of Sid and Nancy is by no means the only instance of reworking - or indeed outright untruth. The film is smattered with skewed takes on reality and misplaced information, the most glaring of which shall be exposed thusly:
Although Sid and Nancy was hailed by critics for the painfully accurate casting of the two main protagonists (“I saw that film the other day and at times I actually forgot that I was watching a movie. It’s so fucking spot on it’s unreal. And Oldman, man, he has got Sid down.” says original Sex Pistols disciple, Don Letts), some of the other characters prove far less persuasive.
During one of the opening scenes, Nancy enters a seedy East End venue to witness the Pistols perform live for the first time in her hedonistic little life. Before they take to the stage, however, and with our attentions fixed firmly on Sid and Nancy’s burgeoning love affair, we are presented momentarily by the presence and melodies of another band. In the background plays Alex Cox’s interpretation of The X-Ray Spex - a wildly important outfit in the punk rock scene. But instead of casting a mixed race, slightly overweight and orthodontically-challenged actress to step into the neon shoes of frontwoman Poly Syrene, a skinny white woman somehow clinched the role. Although this may seem like a slight overlooking on the part of the director, Alex Cox received harsh criticism for deliberately altering the very characteristics that made Poly Styrene stand alone from just about every other female contemporary of her era. Cox also appeared to cast a Jack Osbourne doppelganger in a ginger wig for the part of Pistols drummer Paul Cook, but there aren’t really any feminist undertones involved there. It was just ridiculous.
Another instance of the truth becoming skewed within the questionable script of Sid and Nancy is the inclusion of Wally Nightingale, who played guitar for a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols. Not only is Wally portrayed as a spiky-haired punk rocker (the real Wally was actually more partial to tweed slacks and moth-eaten jumpers), but he is also depicted as a close friend of Sid’s. In fact, the fictional Sid and Nancy spend their first night of drug-fucked passion in Wally’s north London flat while he shreds an electric guitar in the background.
The reality of the situation, however, is that Wally was ejected from the inner clique that surrounded The Pistols as soon as Malcolm McLaren had deemed him “too nice” to become a permanent fixture. Because of the manner in which Wally was brushed under the proverbial carpet, he and Sid certainly never formed a blossoming friendship, and most accounts point to the possibility of their paths never having crossed. “After I left in ‘76, before the Pistols became the Pistols as everyone knows them, Steve [Jones] and the others slagged me off in the music press really badly. I never really knew why; I never did them any harm”, bleated the real Wally Nightingale.
And this is but one instance of many in which snippets of historical certainty have been borrowed and misplaced. Other uneasy examples of fact placement can be found with the Pistol's final gig scene, in which the character of Johnny Rotten utters the infamous, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” line in a completely different context to how it was originally delivered. Another superimposed detail lies with the fight which takes place in the same scene. It was really brick-shithouse built guitarist Steve Jones that swung his fists into the crowd of hecklers, not a crazed and perhaps vilified Sid Vicious, as the film suggests.
While most of these points may seem somewhat trivial on the surface, one must not forget that any decisions to alter an established chain of events can and will be deemed as manipulative. This is precisely why so many individuals have pointed the finger of blame at Cox for using drugs and violence to perpetuate the common misconceptions of what was, in the opinions of those who knew him best, 'a very sweet boy'.
And as for one of the final and most unsettling scenes of the film, in which Sid drives a hunting knife into the pasty abdomen of his beloved, the action can only ever be the director’s own imaginings because the desperate duo were the only souls present at the time of her murder. And because the film was orchestrated so soon after the actual event, Cox did not allow himself the luxury of considering the many other possibilities for Nancy’s demise – many of which were offered up by the people who were closest to the pair during their final days. Sid’s companions have branded him “too nice” and “too in love” to so much as playfully slap the back of her hand, and various New York hangers-on have nominated the couple’s drug dealer as the true killer.
But the infamous ‘taxi in the sky’ ending is perhaps the most wistful of all Cox’s imaginings – not least for its suggestion that drug addiction and murder will win you an automatic place in the heavens. Most glaringly of all it overlooks the fact that the real Sid Vicious got himself a brand new whiney American girlfriend, all before Nancy’s body had grown cold on the mortuary slab.
And so, whilst Cox may have wanted to create a punk rock Romeo and Juliet – two souls bound together in life and in drug-induced death – is there really any need for such a bleak legacy to be embellished upon and romanticised to suit the misty-eyed needs of one director? Sure, Sid and Nancy and its blinding glow of cool may have shone less lucidly had Alex Cox not flinched from certain aspects of truth, but even in pursuit of conveying the perfect punk rock love affair, accuracy should not be an afterthought.
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