The Wild Story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s Tragic Romance

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Every Halloween, you can bet at least one celebrity couple is going to dress up like Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

In 2021, it was Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian, who, in case you didn’t get the memo, are ravenously hot for each other.

“till death do us part,” read Kourtney’s caption, the Poosh founder sporting a platinum-blond wig and mesh top, Travis doing the Vicious squint, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

And last year, Machine Gun Kelly released a song called “Sid & Nancy,” inspired by his devotion to fiancée Megan Fox and containing the lyric, “Once we met, I cannot love someone again/ Cut my chest, gave you my heart and soul.”

The psychology behind Sid and Nancy becoming the poster couple for these very dire sentiments is of course fascinating and probably pretty alarming—but that doesn’t change the fact that their aura has endured for more than 40 years.

In fact, it was just revisited, along with the origin story of the Sex Pistols, in the Hulu series Pistol, co-starring Louis Partridge and Emma Appleton as the doomed duo. (And Maisie Williams, who bonded with Kravis at the 2022 Met Gala over the connection, as punk fashion icon Jordan Mooney.)

Director Alex Cox originally thought Daniel Day-Lewis would be perfect for Sid, but, he told Little White Lies in 2016, once casting director Lucy Boulting put Oldman on his radar, he realized that “Gary came from Bermondsey, where Sid was from, and was genuinely from a working class family, whereas Dan was from an aristocratic family and the son of a poet laureate.”

Oldman lost 30 pounds for the role and met with Sid’s mother, who gifted him her son’s padlock on a chain and a leather spike bracelet that the actor wore in the film.

Though they eventually went with Webb, a seasoned theater actress, a 21-year-old Courtney Love also auditioned for the role of Nancy—and the future Hole singer impressed enough to be cast as the pair’s friend Gretchen. (“She looked like Nancy Spungen,” Kurt Cobain shared, describing his first impressions of future bride Courtney to Come As You Are…The Story of Nirvana author Michael Azerrad. “A classic punk-rock chick.”)

Talking to AnOther in 2016, Cox said he was especially fond of the scene where the couple leave a boat party on the Thames and wander the streets of London, out of their minds and with not a care in the world. “It was done in one continuous, hand-held shot, the camera being operated by [cinematographer] Roger Deakins. It’s one of my favorite moments.

But in the 1994 memoir Rotten, Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) called Sid and Nancy “someone else’s f–king fantasy” (though he thought Oldman was “quite good”)—a take the director came to respect, telling Little White Lies that he would have done a lot differently in hindsight. Especially Sid and Nancy‘s “quasi-happy ending,” featuring the deceased pair heading up to heaven in a taxi (which can’t help but recall the end of Grease a bit).

“If I was to remake it,” Cox said, “I would end it with Sid dying in a pool of his own vomit.”

And as far as capturing the vibe of the fringe scene the couple operated in, “People should remember that the film doesn’t profess to be a history of punk,” Webb told the paper. “It’s the story of an intense relationship between two eccentrics. Even within the punk world, Sid and Nancy were very unconventional. Most punks sneered at the idea of romantic love, but Sid and Nancy went around kissing and holding hands. Naturally, we had to cheat a bit here and there because how could anyone know what went on between them when they were alone together? You just try to get a clear idea of the character and remain true to that spirit.”

That being said, Webb continued, “It was an extremely depressing film to make and, depending on who you talk to, some people would say Gary and I were really pulled under during the shooting. The film was more or less shot in sequence and it was like being on a road trip that grew increasingly oppressive. Sid and Nancy’s world got smaller and smaller, they saw other people less and less and grew increasingly obsessed with each other. Toward the end of the film, it’s as if Gary and I were alone together on a filthy mattress that was like a tiny life raft.”

And, she pressed, “I also hope it’s clear that I found nothing cool about Sid and Nancy. Their lives were completely pathetic. Still, we intended for the audiences to sympathize with them. We certainly did.”

Nancy was born across the pond in Philadelphia, the eldest child of Deborah and Frank Spungen, Ivy League graduates who knew they wanted a family but hadn’t planned to start when Deborah was still finishing up at Penn. But she graduated on time, when Nancy was 4 months old, and she and Frank went on to have another daughter, Suzy, and a son, David.

Through the prism of tragedy and a mother’s sorrow decades later, Deborah remembered Nancy, even as a baby, having “discomfort inside her. She was never content, never relaxed. She had an unbelievable amount of energy, most of which she consumed by crawling…She hated confinement.”

Seeking to distinguish her daughter’s short, tumultuous life from the more sordid groupie junkie narratives in circulation, Deborah wrote in her 1983 book And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder that Nancy “had wanted to die since she was eleven years old.”

She had suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts at an early age, cutting herself with razor blades before descending into heroin addiction as a teen. And Deborah wrote that she “really knew” that Nancy would die young—but she thought drugs would kill her, that a call from the cops would come, but it would be about an overdose. “Nancy would be in a bed in a private room, conscious,” and the family would have a chance to rush to her side to say goodbye. “Nancy’s death was dignified in my fantasy,” she wrote.

“There were only, like, 200 people,” journalist and critic Legs McNeil told New York magazine in 2008. “So you met everyone pretty quickly. It wasn’t a scene that anyone wanted to be a part of.”

“Nancy had one of those passions for rock and roll that very few people have,” he continued. “She knew everything about every album. Groupies in those days were different. They were a part of the scene. Everyone was treated the same. The roadies were treated the same as the rock stars. The groupies were treated the same as the rock stars. It was completely democratic.”

But after two years of hard living in New York, she took off for London, where she met Sid and was glued to his side by the time the Sex Pistols embarked on their first and only U.S. tour in January 1978. Which Nancy was banned from, the majority of the “God Save the Queen” rockers having taken an immediate disliking to her.

In his 1994 book, John Lydon referred to her as “that beast” and a “spoiled cow.” But he wasn’t being “vindictive,” he assured. Rather, “She was a very self-destructive human being who was determined to take as many people down with her as possible. Nancy Spungen was the complete Titanic looking for the iceberg, and she wanted a full load.”

Artist and writer Leee Childers, a tour manager for New York-based punk band The Heartbreakers, told Legs McNeill for his book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk that Nancy “was a very, very, very, very, very, very bad influence on people who were already a mess. She was a troublemaker and a stirrer-upper.”

He told New York in 2008, “I remember talking to Sid on the bus, and he really seemed to care for her. He didn’t have any anger or hatred toward her. Sid very much loved Nancy. They seemed to communicate and connect.”

The Sex Pistols, however, imploded and broke up after two weeks, even returning to the U.K. on separate flights.

Sid and Nancy went to Paris, where he recorded his biggest solo hit—a cover of the Frank Sinatra-crooned standard “My Way”—and then moved back to New York, where they settled into the storied Chelsea Hotel, a magnet for artists and derelicts of all stripes, on Aug. 24, 1978. Nancy wanted to get married, but Sid checking them in as “Mr. and Mrs. John Ritchie” was as far as they’d get.

Sid attempted a solo career, with Nancy calling herself his manager and complementing his violent, drug-addled behavior with her own.

In September 1979, Nancy appeared on a local New York talk show with Sid, and while eloquently extolling the ongoing popularity of punk in the United Kingdom in response to the opinion that the genre was dying, she ended up in what today sounds like your average Twitter exchange come to life. The show took callers, and one woman denounced Sid as “a spoiled brat, and his girlfriend…”

Nancy replied, “What about me, duckie?”

To which the caller said, “You’re an a–hole, ya blonde bitch!” Nancy fired back, “Oh, yeah? Come here and say that.” And the woman repeated, “You’re an a–hole!” Then Sid finally perked up and threw in, “Not as much of an a–hole as you are, you f–king cow!” 

At around 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1978, Nancy was awake, pleading with a fellow addict pal to hook her up with some opioid painkillers. Per Tippins, artist Bernard Childs, who was staying in the room across the hall, heard a faint cry in the night, but didn’t think much of it. Others in the hotel said they heard a woman’s moaning coming from Room 100 at 7:30 a.m.

And at almost 11 a.m., someone from outside the hotel called the front desk and said, “There’s trouble in Room 100.” After a bellman went to go check, another call came from the room, a man telling the desk clerk, “Someone is sick. Need help.” 

When paramedics and police arrived, Nancy was lying on the floor of the bathroom, clad in a black bra and panties, a trail of blood leading from the bed to where she was, partially under the sink. The 20-year-old had been stabbed in the stomach and was dead at the scene.

But though the general takeaway from the Sid and Nancy saga, especially decades later, is that he fatally stabbed her, Anne wasn’t the only one who didn’t think her boy was capable of such a thing. Or at the very least that he couldn’t have possibly wanted or intended to kill her.

He did confess, reportedly telling police he did it “because I’m a dog. A dirty dog.”

But “I think when Sid awoke stoned out of his mind and realized she was dead, he might have assumed he did it,” photographer Eileen Polk, who hung out with Nancy in the mid-’70s, told New York. Musician Howie Pyro, who was out with Sid hours before Nancy died, mused to the magazine that it was possible Nancy stabbed herself for attention, thinking Sid would come to her rescue, but he was too out of it to help her. Several people in Room 100 the night of Oct. 11 recalled seeing Sid take as many as 30 tabs of the barbiturate Tuinal, enough to kill him, let alone keep him comatose for hours.