NEWYORK CITY - This Mother's Day is unique because it also falls on Punk Rocker Sid Vicious's birthday. May 10, 2020, marks the day that he would have been 62 had he lived. Sid grew up in a one-parent family, and his mother, Anne Beverley raised him all by herself. Sid's mum was a heroin addict just like her son. It has been said that his mother started him on this destructive path. It is a cruel irony that both of these days fall on the same date.

Sid Vicious was born John Simons Ritchie and was raised by his mother in Stoke Newington North London. He was tossed out on the street when he was 16. His mother abandoned him and went onto to traffic drugs as well as use. Sid eventually squatted with street kids in abandoned houses and fell into Punk Rock. He would be recruited into one of music's most notorious bands, The Sex Pistols.

The Sex Pistols would shake up the recording industry with their only studio album entitled Never Mind The Bollocks Heres The Sex Pistols in 1977. Sid would escalate into an almost folklore persona and a caution tale for drug abuse. Sid's drug use would escalate with his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

ON FILM

For years it was believed that Sid's mum appeared in The Great Rock And Roll Swindle movie. She was supposed to sit in the audience at the Eddie Barclay show in France during the performance of Frank Sinatra's "My Way". Malcom McLaren, the Sex Pistol's manager, wanted to show a scene where Sid shoots his mother in the audience at the songs completion for shock value. Anne Beverley turned it down and the film used someone else who doesn't bare any physical resemblance to her. The character of Sid's mum can be heard saying, "I can't believe that's my Sid up there." The role was also offered to porn star Rosemary England but she turned it down.

The shock value worked. Sid pulls out a pistol out of a holster at the end of his butchering rendition and fires into the audience. His mother character is the first one he kills and its a shot straight to the chest. In the 1986 Alex Cox film Sid and Nancy, he shoots his girlfriend instead. The shock value takes on a different turn but it is still just as ugly.

The Final Curtain

Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of his Nancy Spungen in October 1978. Her lifeless body was found under a sink in room 100 at the Chelsea Hotel. There wasn't much of an investigation, and the police did a sloppy job. Sid was sent to Rikers Island where he was jailed. While he was incarcerated he was also beaten by his cellmates and raped. It was said that when he was released on bail that he was terrified of going back.

Sid celebrated being out on bail but it was a short lived party in New York City. While he was in jail he had detoxed off of heroin. His mother got him heroin to celebrate but it was said that the grade was too pure. Sid overdosed and died. Now popular biographers and documentaries such as The Last 24 Hours Of Sid Vicious claim that this act was done on purpose. Could Sid's own mother really have given him a lethal dosage of heroin to kill him? Did she want to spare him from a life of pain and torment in prison? The sentence for second degree murder in New York is 15 years to life.

Whatever secrets Anne Beverley had about Sid was taken to her grave. Anne died by her own hand in 1996 from an O.D. Prior to her suicide Anne was in a punk band called Road Rage which did Sid's music including My Way to the pub crowd in Derbyshire.