# 62: Groupie Murdered By Her Famous Punk Boyfriend - Sid and Nancy

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 17 Jan 2024, 1 h 36 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5838438528.mp3

The whole world was watching when punk rock star Sid Vicious began a relationship with one of his groupies: Nancy Spungen. When Nancy was found dead, all eyes were on Sid. But this infamous case has never been solved, it remains a total mystery. Trigger Warning: abortions, self harm, suicide attempts, drug abuse and overdosing, mental health issues including schizophrenia, abusive relationships Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] When rock'n'roll super groupie Nancy Spungen was found murdered
[0:04] in a hotel bathroom, all eyes were on her boyfriend, guitarist
[0:08] of the Sex Pistols, the infamous Mr. Sid Vicious.
[0:12] He was found wandering the halls of their hotel, incoherent,
[0:15] while her body lay covered in blood against the bathroom sink.
[0:19] But was Sid actually to blame? There's a lot of different
[0:23] theories in this case as to what or who could have happened to
[0:27] Nancy Spungen that night. So today we're covering one of
[0:30] Rock'n'roll's most notorious murder cases of Sid and Nancy.
[0:37] Now quickly before we get into the actual case, I just want to
[0:40] give my usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:43] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:45] Everything that I'm about to say is publicly available
[0:47] information that myself and my team have found online and
[0:51] compiled into one big video. This video will cover a lot of
[0:54] sensitive topics including but not limited to abortions, self
[0:59] harm, suicide, side attempts, drug abuse and overdose,
[1:02] domestic abuse, and severe mental health issues including
[1:05] schizophrenia and self harming. If you feel like any of those
[1:08] topics might be triggering or too intense for you, then I
[1:11] would recommend clicking out of this video now.
[1:14] Hopefully I'll get to see you again at some other point with a
[1:16] different case, but until then, look after yourself.
[1:19] While we make every effort to Fact Check our sources and make
[1:22] sure that all of our information is correct, no action should be
[1:26] taken in reliance upon the information in this video.
[1:29] And I want to take this up opportunity to remind you all
[1:31] that these are real people that we're talking about.
[1:34] Even if they are celebrities, they are real people with real
[1:36] families. And this was a real tragedy that
[1:38] happened. So please do keep everything
[1:41] respectful and kind in the comments.
[1:43] I know you already will. I don't even need to ask, but
[1:46] just a reminder, all opinions stated in this video are mine
[1:49] and mine alone. And with all that being said,
[1:51] let's talk about Sid and Nancy. So today's case actually takes
[1:55] place in New York City in the 1970s, but it starts way before
[2:00] that in London, England, right at the start of the punk rock
[2:04] movement. The 1970s were a generally
[2:06] miserable time for the British public.
[2:08] Unemployment levels were rising, the cost of living was
[2:11] increasing, and regular people were suffering and struggling to
[2:15] make ends meet. Which is bad enough on its own,
[2:17] but this was made even worse when the government started
[2:21] spending all of their money not to help the citizens of our
[2:25] country, but to buy the Queen a brand new golden carriage.
[2:29] Just the essentials. In 1977, it was Queen
[2:33] Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, which meant that she'd been on
[2:35] the throne for 25 years. And every time something like
[2:39] that happens, whenever there's an anniversary, our country
[2:42] feels the need to spend millions.
[2:44] And today, in this day, it is billions.
[2:48] Every time something like that happens.
[2:50] Which is insane to me. It's insane to everyone else
[2:52] that lives here. We all get angry every single
[2:54] time it happens. They spend so much of our
[2:56] taxpayer money on shit that we don't care about.
[2:59] Who cares about the Queen's new golden carriage?
[3:02] People are literally dying in this country, yet a lot of
[3:06] taxpayer money goes on to these stupid, meaningless
[3:09] celebrations. Every year they parade the
[3:12] Royals literally around the streets so that as normal people
[3:16] can see them in their in their gold, in their diamonds, in
[3:19] their robes, while people are literally dying of hunger and
[3:23] exposure on the streets. So in 1977, people were forced
[3:28] to watch all of their tax pay of money gets spent on this big
[3:31] party for this lady that they'd never even met.
[3:34] While they were struggling, everyone was struggling to make
[3:37] ends meet. And people were angry.
[3:39] People were angry that this is how our government is treating
[3:41] us. This is how our government cares
[3:43] for us or doesn't care for us. And people were searching for a
[3:47] new way to let their frustrations out.
[3:50] And they found it in the form of a music style and subculture
[3:55] that made its way to London all the way from New York City.
[3:58] And that was, of course, punk rock.
[4:00] It was taking over in the 1970s, and it would change the
[4:04] landscape of the music industry forever.
[4:07] Punk rock was rebellious. It was chaotic, it was loud.
[4:11] It mirrored the dysfunction of society at that point in time.
[4:16] People were angry. People were trying to fight
[4:18] back. And this is how they did it.
[4:20] People in this subculture didn't care about rules.
[4:23] They didn't care what people thought of them.
[4:25] In fact, they wanted to make a statement.
[4:28] They wanted to break the strict molds of society.
[4:32] The aesthetic of punk kids at the time, and even still now,
[4:36] was bold in every single way. They would dye their hair bright
[4:40] colours, they would spike it up, they would shave it off.
[4:43] And their clothes followed a very similar pattern.
[4:45] There were rips and chains and studs and spikes.
[4:49] It was all very harsh to reflect the anger and resentment that
[4:53] they were feeling at the time. So the punk rock movement had
[4:56] shown up in London thanks to one man in particular, 29 year
[5:00] Malcolm McLaren, who was at the time the manager of one of the
[5:03] biggest punk rock bands over in New York, the New York Dolls.
[5:07] Of course, the New York Dolls and Malcolm were all based in
[5:11] New York and they were thriving over there.
[5:14] The punk rock scene in general was already thriving due to New
[5:17] York's own distrust in their own government.
[5:20] And Malcolm knew that the atmosphere in London at this
[5:23] point in time was very similar to the atmosphere in New York.
[5:27] But London just didn't have this release yet, and he theorized
[5:30] that people would respond very well to the punk rock movement
[5:33] over there. And so he made it his mission to
[5:36] bring punk rock to the UK. Malcolm had moved to London and
[5:40] he owned this shop on Kings Rd. in Chelsea and it was doing all
[5:45] right. It was just like a boutique
[5:46] clothes shop. But he really wanted to level
[5:49] up, especially if he was bringing punk rock over.
[5:52] He wanted his shop to help out with that.
[5:55] So now he decided to join forces with his girlfriend at the time.
[5:59] And you will never get who his girlfriend actually was.
[6:01] It was none other than Vivian Westwood.
[6:04] So Malcolm McLaren and the Vivian Westwood kind of
[6:08] reimagined the shop that he owned at this time.
[6:11] It was called Let It Rock. And it was already a little bit
[6:14] punk rocky, but it wasn't like the volume that they needed it.
[6:19] They wanted to go above and beyond with the shop and make a
[6:22] statement, be the most punk rock shop that London has.
[6:26] They decided that the name Let It Rock wasn't actually punk
[6:30] enough. It was.
[6:31] It was a bit generic. It was a bit too easy.
[6:34] They wanted a new shop name that would reflect everything that
[6:38] they stood for, something that was daring and edgy and non
[6:42] conforming. And that was when they settled
[6:44] on sex. It was simply named Sex in huge
[6:49] big pink letters outside the front of the shop.
[6:52] Sex. It was called sex.
[6:53] You could not ignore this. Like rebrand and sex quickly
[6:58] became the talk of the town and it became a hub for teenagers
[7:02] and young adults in the early 70s.
[7:04] Malcolm and Vivian were very in touch with the punk scene.
[7:08] They had their finger on the pulse of what was new and what
[7:10] was trendy, and they curated their stock very carefully
[7:14] because they knew whatever they put in there would attract a
[7:17] certain type of crowd, and they wanted to attract the right
[7:21] crowd. They were very aware of their
[7:23] unique branding and everything about sex had to match this
[7:28] unique branding. Even the employees that worked
[7:30] there, they had to look the part.
[7:32] They had to be punk rock kids or they couldn't work there.
[7:35] One of the workers of SEX was a 19 year old boy named Glenn
[7:39] Matlock and he actually had a band at the time with a few of
[7:42] his friends. It wasn't doing much, but he had
[7:45] a band and he really looked up to his boss Malcolm.
[7:48] Of course. He had so much success managing
[7:51] the New York Dolls, and Glenn was very eager to make it as a
[7:55] musician. And so he kept pestering Malcolm
[7:58] to go back into music managing and manage him and his band.
[8:02] He knew that his band could do really, really well if Malcolm
[8:06] had anything to do with it. And so he would beg him over and
[8:09] over and eventually Malcolm was like, fine, OK, I will, I will
[8:13] Simon Cowell, your band. But this band needed to make
[8:18] quite a few alterations if they were going to be successful.
[8:22] First of all, they needed to find a lead singer, because I
[8:24] think Glenn was actually their lead singer at the time, but he
[8:27] wasn't very good. He didn't have the stage
[8:30] presence, and even he knew that. He knew that they needed to get
[8:33] someone that had star power. They knew they needed to find
[8:37] someone with character and charisma, someone that
[8:40] completely embodied and personified their punk rock
[8:44] values and attitudes. The only problem was they didn't
[8:48] know anyone like that and they didn't even know where to start
[8:51] to look for someone like that. They planned on maybe
[8:54] advertising in the newspaper or asking around, but it turned out
[8:58] they didn't need to do any of that because one day they were
[9:01] just chilling at sex the shop and they see this guy walking
[9:06] down the road and this fella made a statement with just how
[9:09] he looked. He looked like a character.
[9:13] He had like choppy, dyed bright green hair, and he was wearing
[9:17] this homemade T-shirt dissing Pink Floyd.
[9:21] It was a normal Pink Floyd band T-shirt, but he'd written I hate
[9:26] above the band logo and then cut out all of their eyes.
[9:30] I don't know why this guy hated Pink Floyd so much, but that in
[9:34] itself, just how he chose to present himself, showed that he
[9:38] had everything that they were looking for for this band.
[9:42] He had all the rage, all the attitude, all the edge in him
[9:46] and it was all organic. He wasn't being this way to be
[9:50] in a band. He was just walking down the
[9:52] street like that. It was perfect.
[9:54] So they literally just walked up to him.
[9:56] They approached him and they asked if he fancied himself a
[9:58] singer and the kid said maybe. Never really thought about it.
[10:02] And so they pulled him into the shop and they got him to do a
[10:05] quick on the spot audition, and he was perfect.
[10:09] This boy was named John Lyndon. He was 19 years old, and he
[10:13] would become the front man of this band, and he would remain
[10:18] the front man until the very end.
[10:20] So now they had their lead singer, but there was a lot more
[10:23] rebranding that had to go on before this band were ready to
[10:26] take over the world. First of all, they needed a new
[10:29] name because, well, they'd never actually fully settled on a name
[10:33] that they were happy with. They'd cycled through a few
[10:35] names in the months that they'd been together.
[10:37] At first they were called Strand, which was a reference to
[10:40] their London roots, and then they were called the Swankers,
[10:44] which, you know, whatever. It just wasn't it wasn't it?
[10:48] And I'm not entirely sure who it was that suggested this, but
[10:52] very quickly Sex Pistols were born.
[10:56] Based on the shop that started everything, they were the Sex
[11:01] Pistols. Malcolm even suggested that
[11:03] their new lead singer, John Lyndon, should also have a bit
[11:06] of a name change. He needed a stage name that
[11:09] matched the punk rock aesthetic because John Lyndon sounded a
[11:15] little bit too a little bit too goody. 2 shoes.
[11:17] And so with that, John Lyndon became Johnny Rotten, and he
[11:22] still is to this day. Johnny Rotten a legend.
[11:25] And with that, the Sex Pistols began making and performing
[11:28] music and they became very popular very, very quickly.
[11:32] They were touring gigs around the UK and Paris.
[11:36] Within that same year their smash hit single Anarchy in the
[11:39] UK made the charts and actually got them banned from TV and
[11:44] radio here in the UK out of fears that this band were going
[11:48] to start a revolution. And this only made the Sex
[11:51] Pistols 100 times more popular with their target audience.
[11:56] Kids that wanted to rebel and do the opposite of what society
[12:00] wanted. Listening to banned music was
[12:03] extra taboo. That's exactly what they wanted
[12:05] to do. Oh, the government doesn't want
[12:07] us listening to this particular band and I'm gonna seek them out
[12:10] now. The Sex Pistols were pretty much
[12:13] the first big punk band in the UK.
[12:16] They've actually been quoted saying that every punk band that
[12:18] came after them were just copycat wankers, bands like The
[12:22] Clash, Buzzcocks and Susie and the Banshees.
[12:24] And as great as things seemed for Sex Pistols at this point in
[12:28] time, and as great as things were externally, internally
[12:33] there was a lot of conflict in that band.
[12:35] They would argue amongst themselves a lot.
[12:38] They all had different work ethics and different just
[12:43] attitudes to different parts of life.
[12:45] And usually the manager of a band that's having a lot of
[12:49] conflict would try to quell it and try to make them all get
[12:52] along. But not Malcolm McLaren.
[12:54] He has actually been accused of encouraging this internal
[12:58] conflict and all of these arguments, thinking that the
[13:01] more anger and aggression that built up in these boys, the
[13:05] better they would perform these angry songs on stage.
[13:09] It would do better for their image if they were genuinely,
[13:13] authentically angry all the time.
[13:16] And to a degree, he was kind of right.
[13:19] These boys put on a show different to any other band in
[13:22] London at that time, and there's a reason they were so big.
[13:26] But what Malcolm McLaren didn't account for is what would happen
[13:30] if all of those arguments went too far, and before long, they
[13:34] had their first member leave the band.
[13:36] It was actually their very first OG member, Glenn Matlock, The
[13:40] guy that wanted to start all of this, the guy that wanted to be
[13:44] in a successful band, he was now leaving.
[13:47] He said that he didn't want to be in the Sex Pistols anymore,
[13:49] mainly citing Johnny Rotten's ego as the main reason that he
[13:53] couldn't go on with him. He couldn't work alongside that
[13:56] man. So with that, Sex Pistols
[13:58] desperately needed a new bassist.
[14:00] Now that theirs had walked out. They had chose to play, they had
[14:03] songs to write, and so Johnny Rotten suggested that they
[14:06] should bring in one of his friends from school, a guy named
[14:09] John Ritchie. Ritchie had been a drummer in a
[14:12] couple of bands previously, but he'd never played the bass
[14:15] before. He didn't know how to play the
[14:17] bass, but Johnny Rotten was convinced that they could teach
[14:21] him very quickly and it'd be fine.
[14:23] It'd be fine. And I know it sounds so silly to
[14:26] hire someone that can't play the bass to be your bassist, but the
[14:31] whole band would kind of convinced because John Ritchie
[14:34] looked the exact part that they needed.
[14:37] He dressed the same as the boys. He had the same values and
[14:40] attitudes as the boys. He was so punk rock, he was
[14:44] almost perfect. It was just the actual practical
[14:47] musical ability that was letting him down.
[14:51] But they actually didn't care too much.
[14:52] Glenn Matlock's bass riffs that he'd written for their songs
[14:57] were pretty simple, and all of the boys agreed that if they
[15:01] could teach John Ritchie just how to play the ones that they
[15:05] already had, then they should be fine.
[15:07] And so with that, they just brought this fellow into the
[15:10] band just because he looked the part and they were going to
[15:12] worry about teaching him the actual music part of the music
[15:16] later on. But for now, he looked great.
[15:19] There was just one more thing missing.
[15:21] John Ritchie also needed a stage name, especially because John
[15:25] Ritchie sounds a little bit too similar to Johnny Rotten.
[15:29] Things were going to have to change completely, but that was
[15:31] all right because John Ritchie actually already had a nickname
[15:35] among his school friends, Sid Vicious.
[15:38] He'd always been Sid Vicious. And that actually stems back to
[15:42] one of his friends had a hamster named Sid, and it violently bit
[15:46] him one day. And from that point on, he was
[15:48] known as Sid Vicious. So now Sid Vicious is officially
[15:52] a part of the Sex Pistols. And before I continue with like
[15:56] their career from that point onwards, I kind of want to go
[15:59] back into Sid Vicious's early life and his childhood since a
[16:03] lot of this story does actually revolve around him and his
[16:07] issues that stemmed from his early years.
[16:09] I think it's important to go over all of that.
[16:11] He was born in 1957 as Simon John Ritchie.
[16:15] He was raised by a single mother and after they were abandoned by
[16:19] his father, his mum was a frequent drug user.
[16:22] And I believe a lot of different drugs as well, cocaine, heroin.
[16:26] She would always get high in front of her son and would even
[16:30] sell drugs out of their home regularly to make ends meet, so
[16:35] she would be inviting all sorts of unsavory characters into
[16:39] their home. When Sid was 8 years old, his
[16:41] mother remarried and he absolutely adored his new
[16:46] stepdad. This was the first time he'd
[16:48] ever had a father figure in his life and he loved this man.
[16:52] But sadly, just six months after gaining this new father figure,
[16:57] Sid's stepdad died suddenly and him and his mum were left all on
[17:01] their own once again. The loss affected them both.
[17:05] Tragically, his mother Anne fell even deeper into all of her
[17:09] addictions. She really wasn't there for her
[17:11] son from that point onwards, if she even was before that, I
[17:15] don't know. But certainly after the death of
[17:17] her second partner, she became really, really unwell.
[17:20] And Sid, who was just a child, he started to act out a lot.
[17:25] He was misbehaving in school, his grades dropped, and
[17:29] eventually he began telling his school counselor that he was
[17:33] suicidal. And this is a boy that's not
[17:35] even reached double digits yet. He's like 9 years old.
[17:39] It breaks my heart that such a young child can even get to that
[17:43] point in their brain where they're thinking that that is a
[17:46] solution to their problems. That makes me so sad.
[17:49] And no one ever really took young Sid Vicious seriously.
[17:54] He was always telling people that he was struggling.
[17:56] He actively tried to get help so many times he was going to his
[18:00] counselor. But but no one ever really tried
[18:03] to help him, in fact people would just kept making it worse
[18:06] for him. At the age of 16 his mother
[18:09] kicked him out of the house, which I know is legal in the UK
[18:12] and was a bit more common back in their day.
[18:15] You know kids would leave the house at 1718.
[18:19] But it just seems quite barbaric to me to be quite honest.
[18:24] A 16 year old out in the street having to fend for themselves.
[18:27] He doesn't have a job, he doesn't, he doesn't have much,
[18:30] he doesn't have anything. And I think my concerns are very
[18:33] valid given what happened to Sid next.
[18:35] His life just completely went to shit after he was kicked out.
[18:39] He was homeless, of course he didn't have a job, he didn't
[18:42] have any money for food or accommodation.
[18:45] He started squatting in just this random abandoned house.
[18:48] He dropped out of school, which I don't blame him.
[18:51] How are you supposed to worry about school and your education
[18:55] and getting up every morning and getting there when you are
[18:57] literally homeless and penniless?
[18:59] Sid's mum actually did an interview years and years later
[19:03] where she admitted that she told him she didn't care where he
[19:06] ended up when she kicked him out.
[19:08] She said she knew that he'd probably be sleeping on a park
[19:10] bench somewhere, but she didn't care.
[19:12] She told Sid, it's either you or me and it's not going to be me.
[19:16] I've got to preserve myself and you can just fuck off.
[19:20] So like I said, he started squatting in this random
[19:23] abandoned house with three other boys.
[19:26] And one of those other boys was actually Johnny Rotten.
[19:29] That's how how the two of them became so close.
[19:32] And I think it's one of the reasons that Johnny Rotten
[19:35] suggested John Ritchie, Sid Vicious to join the band because
[19:40] he knew how much of A dire situation his friend was in.
[19:43] His friend needed this career opportunity.
[19:46] So there's Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and two other boys all
[19:49] squatting in this abandoned house.
[19:51] And I don't want to make things confusing for you, but all four
[19:54] of them were called John. They would call themselves the
[19:56] Four Johns and they were all each other had at that point in
[20:01] time. None of them were going to
[20:02] school. They were all stealing food from
[20:06] shops, you know, whatever they needed to survive.
[20:08] But given the horrific circumstances that they were in,
[20:12] they all. Still lived a relatively normal
[20:15] life. They weren't going to let this
[20:16] affect them or hinder them. They were still going out on the
[20:20] weekends, they were going to music venues and watching live
[20:23] bands. And this group of lads became
[20:26] quite known at all of these small music events in London.
[20:31] They were at so many of them that it was kind of expected
[20:33] that you would see the four Johns.
[20:35] And it was Sid Vicious that everyone knew, like, especially
[20:39] more than the other boys, because Sid had a reputation
[20:42] that preceded him, a reputation of being a rowdy, violent,
[20:47] aggressive drunk. Every time without fail at these
[20:52] gigs and small music venues, there would be some sort of Sid
[20:56] Vicious antic that got them all kicked out or that got the
[21:00] police involved or I don't know. This boy was insane.
[21:04] One of the worst instances that I was able to read about online
[21:08] was at one of these gigs. He threw a glass towards the
[21:11] stage, which first of all, what did he expect was going to
[21:15] happen anyway? He threw a glass towards the
[21:18] stage, but it didn't get there. It hit like a barrier on the way
[21:22] there, smashed against this barrier, shattered everywhere,
[21:26] all over the crowd and actually got in one woman's eye and
[21:31] blinded her forever. So of course, this is a very
[21:34] serious incident. At the time, Sid and all of his
[21:37] mates just ran away, got got out of there.
[21:40] But the police got involved, they figured out who it was, and
[21:43] the very next day, Sid Vicious was arrested.
[21:46] He spent some time in jail for that.
[21:47] And it was literally on the day that he was released from jail
[21:51] was when Sid got the call from Malcolm and Johnny Rotten asking
[21:55] him to be a part of the band. And like I said, Sid was
[21:58] definitely not recruited for his musical abilities.
[22:00] He was the personality hire. If anything, he was recruited
[22:05] because of the way that he looked, the way that he acted
[22:08] and genuinely the reputation that he had in London because
[22:13] even though he was a nuisance and he was always causing issues
[22:16] and he was always drunk and rowdy for a punk rock band,
[22:20] that's kind of what people wanted to see.
[22:30] So Sid was brought in and like I said, they thought they could
[22:33] teach him the basics of the songs that they already had, but
[22:36] he wasn't picking it up very quickly.
[22:38] Sid wasn't a very driven, motivated, ambitious person.
[22:43] It wasn't like he was dying to learn how to play the bass and
[22:46] to get out on stage. He was doing drugs most of the
[22:49] time. He was high as hell most of the
[22:52] time he couldn't be asked like learning to play the bass, but
[22:55] they would try and force him. In his very early days with the
[22:58] band. He would just kind of pretend on
[23:01] stage or they would turn the the volume on his bass amp all the
[23:06] way down. Eventually he did kind of manage
[23:09] the basics and a lot of people had tried to teach him how to
[23:13] play the bass properly over the years.
[23:15] He even had one to one training with the bassist of Motörhead,
[23:19] Steve Jones. But still like no one could
[23:23] fucking teach this guy how to play the bass.
[23:24] He wasn't interested. But he did love the Rockstar
[23:27] lifestyle. He didn't love having to play
[23:29] the actual music. That was too much, that was too
[23:31] complicated for him. But he loved being famous and
[23:35] adored, especially by women. We shall get back to that in a
[23:39] second because that is a huge part of Sid Vicious and the
[23:42] whole of Sex Pistols lives were the groupies, the girls, the
[23:46] fans. So anyway, once Sid Vicious
[23:49] joined the band, they only continued to get bigger and
[23:52] bigger and bigger. They were becoming infamous
[23:55] within the music industry, especially within the punk
[23:57] scene. And then in 1977, they would
[24:00] make one of their biggest statements yet.
[24:03] Do you remember I told you about the Queen's Silver Jubilee that
[24:06] the citizens of this country were just so happy about?
[24:10] That is a joke. The citizens of this country
[24:12] were fuming watching our Queen parading around the streets in
[24:16] that fucking solid gold carriage or whatever.
[24:19] I don't think it was solid gold, but whatever.
[24:21] It cost a bomb while people are literally dying of hunger,
[24:25] homelessness, exposure, and the Sex Pistols.
[24:28] Wanted to make a comment on all of this.
[24:30] So as the rest of the country was celebrating the Queen, Sex
[24:35] Pistols released their anti monarchist, anti establishment
[24:38] anthem God Save the Queen. And despite what it sounds like
[24:42] this song was not one bit in favour of the Queen.
[24:46] It has a lot of interesting lyrics.
[24:49] One of my favourites is God Save the Queen.
[24:51] She ain't no human being, there is no future and England is
[24:55] dreaming. And it was this song that
[24:58] secured their status as punk rock icons and one over the
[25:02] hearts of every angry punk rock kid in this country.
[25:06] And the fans of this particular genre of music were die hard.
[25:11] They were especially die hard when it came to live music.
[25:14] They wanted to be at the gigs. They wanted to be crowd surfing.
[25:17] They wanted to be in and amongst it.
[25:20] And so punk rock shows had great turnouts.
[25:23] You know, these young, angry punk rock kids were turning up
[25:26] in their droves to come and see bands like Sex Pistols.
[25:30] A lot of the kids wanted to dress like their favorite stars.
[25:33] They wanted to act like them. They adopted their mannerisms
[25:36] and their attitudes. And then there were the girls,
[25:40] the groupies. And it was kind of around this
[25:42] time in the 1970s that the very first groupies, or kind of
[25:46] groupies as we know them now, became a thing.
[25:50] So the definition of a groupie is a young woman that follows A
[25:54] musician or celebrity around on tours and physical appearances
[25:58] in hopes of meeting them. So basically a very active super
[26:03] fan. This was kind of the definition
[26:04] when groupies first began. They did kind of begin in the
[26:08] 60s, but there were a lot more mellow.
[26:10] You can imagine with the kind of music that was going on in the
[26:13] 60s. It was all just peace and love
[26:15] and these groupies just wanted to see the musicians because
[26:18] they loved the music and they loved the people.
[26:20] The whole groupie culture was a lot more wholesome back in the
[26:24] 60s, but as it got into the 70s and the the music atmosphere
[26:30] started to change and punk rock came in and things became a lot
[26:33] more like gritty and grungy and angry.
[26:37] The fanbase has also started to change and so our definition of
[26:41] a groupie has changed a lot since the 60s.
[26:44] By the time these punk rock bands became the new IT crowd,
[26:48] their groupies were mainly young, attractive girls just
[26:53] looking to do drugs and drink and have sex with the band
[26:57] members that they adored so much.
[26:59] They weren't necessarily there because they loved the music.
[27:02] I mean, a lot of the time they did love the music.
[27:04] I mean, there's a reason that they fancy these boys in the
[27:06] bands. It's because it is their
[27:07] favorite band. But they're not there just to,
[27:11] you know, platonically support them.
[27:13] They're there because they want to get backstage and they want
[27:16] some of their cook and they want to go back to the hotel room,
[27:19] you know? And this groupie culture became
[27:22] such a huge thing during the punk rock movement that even
[27:25] amongst the groupies themselves, there was like a hierarchy of
[27:30] famous fans. There were groupies and then
[27:33] there were super groupies. And these were the ones that
[27:36] were known for being groupies. And these were the girls that
[27:41] always got in with the bands no matter what.
[27:43] They would be invited out travelling with them, they'd be
[27:46] photographed with the band backstage.
[27:49] Like they would go back to the hotel rooms with them, have
[27:51] these crazy parties. They were practically friends
[27:55] with the band in a way, but it was always transactional.
[27:59] These band members never saw these women as even people.
[28:04] But you know, misogyny is a whole other conversation to
[28:06] this. The whole super groupie thing
[28:08] just kind of reminds me of, you know, like on Stan Twitter,
[28:12] there's like the really big Stan accounts that often sometimes
[28:15] have fans of their own for being a fan of someone else.
[28:20] And now they've got fans themselves just because they are
[28:23] an admired fan. I don't know.
[28:25] The 1st super groupies were people like Sable Star who you
[28:29] might have heard of. She had been going to these
[28:31] concerts and sleeping with band members from the heartbreakingly
[28:35] young age of 12. It makes me sick that first of
[28:39] all these men even wanted to have sex with a 12 year old 13
[28:43] year old child, but they would take it one step further than
[28:46] just having sex with her. They would then brag about it
[28:49] and sometimes even write songs about these interactions that
[28:54] they would have with young groupies.
[28:56] Iggy Pop even wrote a song about how he had sex with Sable Star
[29:00] when she was 13 years old and he was 23.
[29:04] A whole decade between you and she is a child.
[29:08] There's quite a lot of celebrities that have engaged in
[29:12] illegal sexual relationships specifically with Sable when she
[29:16] was a child. And I am going to list them all
[29:18] off. I am going to name them all, but
[29:20] I am going to preface this saying that these are
[29:23] allegations, but I'm going to name them anyway.
[29:25] Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, Bob Plant from Led Zeppelin, and
[29:30] none other than David Bowie. Now that one stung to read
[29:35] about, I'm not going to lie, David Bowie.
[29:38] These super groupies were just used for their bodies and they
[29:42] they kind of knew that. They knew that they had one big
[29:46] thing to offer these band members in return for whatever
[29:49] they wanted to hang out with them or for drugs or for
[29:51] parties. They knew that they had currency
[29:55] and that was their bodies. That was sexual favors.
[29:58] And for the most part, these women or young girls were fine
[30:02] with it. They would volunteer it up to
[30:04] these men. They wanted to give that over in
[30:07] exchange for what the men could give them.
[30:09] And I guess you also have to remember that a lot of these
[30:12] girls, young women did actually just fancy the band members and
[30:15] they did just want to get with them.
[30:19] I mean, there's a reason that like One Direction fanfics
[30:23] existed and stuff like that. It's because since the dawn of
[30:26] time, teenage girls have wanted to get with band boys.
[30:30] And let me just clarify, I am not defending the band boys
[30:34] themselves. They should have known better.
[30:36] They are the adults in that situation.
[30:38] They're the ones that can say no and should have said no.
[30:41] Those young girls, especially in cases where they were too young
[30:44] to consent, they are not responsible for what happened to
[30:47] them. Those band members are.
[30:49] But anyway, moving on from that, I want to talk about some of the
[30:52] huge super groupies from back in the day.
[30:55] We've already talked about Sable Star, who was a very famous one.
[30:58] But I do want to talk about Cynthia Plaster Caster because
[31:01] I've been interested in this woman for years.
[31:03] I sometimes I go back and read her Wikipedia article just for
[31:06] funsies because she's crazy. So Cynthia Plaster Caster, as
[31:10] you can probably guess from her name, she was a plaster casting
[31:13] artist and guess what she did with the band members?
[31:17] I will just give you like 2 seconds to think what she might
[31:20] have been plaster casting with those band members.
[31:22] If you guessed their penis, you would be right.
[31:26] She made sculptures of these band members, erect penises and
[31:33] and then she just had like, just like models of so many band
[31:36] members penises. And there were like loads of
[31:38] famous, famous men. She had Jimi Hendrix, members of
[31:42] The Who, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, The Rascals, Cynthia
[31:46] Plasticaster. He's a bit of a legend in that
[31:49] whole like groupie, super groupie scene.
[31:52] And I just think that it's such an interesting life story to
[31:56] have. What do you mean?
[31:57] In your like late teens and early 20s you were travelling
[32:00] around with some of the biggest bands of your day, making molds
[32:04] of their penises. But today we're talking about a
[32:07] different super groupie, a woman that found most of her fame
[32:12] after she actually died. And that was 20 year old Nancy
[32:16] Spungen. Born on February 27th, 1958,
[32:19] Nancy Laura Spungen had a terribly tragic life from start
[32:24] to end. Right from when she was born,
[32:26] when she actually came out of her mother, her umbilical cord
[32:30] was wrapped around her neck, starving her of oxygen, and she
[32:33] very nearly died. Like at her birth.
[32:36] She had to stay there in the hospital for a couple of months.
[32:39] She had so many blood transfusions, and her parents
[32:43] weren't even allowed to hold her for about a week after she was
[32:46] born. She had to be hooked up to all
[32:48] sorts of machines to help her breathe and to help her eat.
[32:52] And she was also very, very jaundice, like one of the worst
[32:54] cases of jaundice that that hospital had ever seen.
[32:57] And I didn't actually know before researching this case
[33:00] that babies can die of jaundice. I found that out.
[33:04] Nancy almost died from jaundice. There were so many things in
[33:08] just her first week or two on this earth that almost killed
[33:12] her right from the off. Life was such a challenge for
[33:16] Nancy Spongen. For her first few years, Nancy
[33:20] was inconsolable all the time. She was hysterically crying and
[33:25] screaming almost 24/7. She would barely ever sleep
[33:29] because of this. She would just be screaming and
[33:32] crying just so an emotional baby and no one could figure out why.
[33:36] Eventually she had to get put on sleeping medication to make her
[33:39] get some rest and as soon as Nancy learned to talk, she
[33:44] started to manipulate people with her words and with her
[33:48] actions. She was a very intelligent
[33:51] child, but in all the worst ways, in the scariest ways.
[33:55] She learned at such an early age how to wrap people around her
[33:59] finger. She always made sure that she
[34:01] got her own way from a toddler, and that never stopped all the
[34:05] way into adulthood. She was always manipulative.
[34:09] Whenever people wouldn't do what she wanted, Nancy would threaten
[34:12] to hurt herself or to hurt them. When she was younger, that was
[34:17] like her parents, her siblings, her teachers.
[34:19] And as she got older, that was her boyfriends, her partners,
[34:23] her friends. So Nancy was the first born
[34:26] child of her family and she had been such a problem.
[34:30] I hate to say it, but she had been such a problem for her
[34:34] parents over the past few years. She was constantly crying.
[34:37] They were never sleeping. She'd been in and out of
[34:39] hospital, and now she was a little shit.
[34:41] But anyway, they had another baby girl a few years after
[34:45] Nancy, and with the birth of this second girl, they finally
[34:50] had something to compare Nancy's behavior to, and they realized
[34:54] that Nancy was not normal at all.
[34:57] She was nothing like her sister, who was calm, well mannered,
[35:01] kind. She responded to her parents and
[35:05] to parenting methods. She was, you know, grown going
[35:08] into a nice young girl, whereas Nancy never responded to
[35:13] anything. She was quite literally a little
[35:16] shit. Nancy would go into these like,
[35:18] huge meltdown temper tantrums where she'd be kicking and
[35:23] screaming and trying to hurt herself physically fighting
[35:26] other people. And I mean, it's highly likely
[35:29] that she had some sort of mental issue or disorder that was not
[35:34] picked up on at such a young age.
[35:36] It really seems to me she has a lot of symptoms of some sort of
[35:40] mental illness. I'm not a professional, but I
[35:42] know when something is not healthy.
[35:44] I've looked into enough cases like this now that I can spot
[35:48] issues in childhood. I might not be able to identify
[35:51] them, but I know that something was very wrong.
[35:54] And it's always these older cases, isn't it, where parents
[35:57] talk about their children like, oh, she was a terrible kid.
[35:59] She was always acting out, always screaming.
[36:02] But if you were to bring that child to a doctor in this day
[36:06] and age, they would probably be diagnosed with something quite
[36:09] quickly. But at the time when Nancy was
[36:11] taken to the doctors because her parents were really worried
[36:14] about her, they took her to the doctors often saying something
[36:18] has to be wrong with our child. But doctors at the time just
[36:22] kind of shrugged her off as a naughty kid.
[36:24] Thank God we understand things, mental illnesses and disorders
[36:30] and issues a lot more these days that like naughty kids are no
[36:35] longer just brushed off as being bad, inherently bad children.
[36:39] Doctors now look at those behaviors and notice them as
[36:43] symptoms of something deeper that that child needs help with
[36:46] or needs a diagnosis of. But like I say, at the time
[36:49] everyone just thought that Nancy was a problem child and that
[36:52] there was no helping her. The doctors especially didn't
[36:55] think that anything was wrong with her because she had quite a
[36:57] good IQ level. All of her like developmental
[37:01] milestones were coming on fine. She seemed like a normal kids.
[37:05] She just seemed naughty. In fact, doctors at the time
[37:08] were quite convinced that it was just a parenting issue.
[37:11] They thought that it was Nancy's mum and dad's fault for, I don't
[37:15] know, not raising her well enough, not parenting her well
[37:18] enough. But there were a lot of things
[37:20] alongside her bad behavior that should have hinted to something
[37:24] deeper going on. Like Nancy was having night
[37:27] terrors almost every single night.
[37:29] She was deeply disturbed by something.
[37:33] She would see shadowy figures in in the corner of her vision.
[37:37] She would tell her mum that there were animals biting her as
[37:41] she slept. You know, she was clearly having
[37:43] some sort of like either hallucinations or delusions or
[37:48] but I don't, I'm not entirely sure, but there was a lot that
[37:51] ran alongside the bad behaviour that I guess was just kind of
[37:54] dismissed by doctors at the time that wouldn't be dismissed in
[37:59] this day and age. But even though a lot of Nancys
[38:02] issues, shall we say, even though a lot of her issues can
[38:05] be put down to undiagnosed mental illness, we can't forget
[38:09] how manipulative she was. I think that was intentional, at
[38:15] least to a degree, and I think she learned it as she was
[38:19] growing up. She was learning how to get her
[38:21] way, and every time she did get her way, she made a bit of a
[38:25] mental note and did it again next time.
[38:27] She wanted her own way, and her most common method to do this
[38:31] was through threats. Whether it was threatening to
[38:34] harm herself or other people, threatening to break things,
[38:38] just threatening until people give her what she wants.
[38:41] Nancy practically ran their household.
[38:44] She controlled her parents, her fully grown adult parents.
[38:49] Nothing could happen in the Spongen household unless it was
[38:52] run by Nancy 1st and she was all right with it or there would be
[38:56] hell in there. Everyone walked on egg shells
[38:59] around her at all times to avoid setting her off because like I
[39:02] said, her temper tantrums would be absolutely lethal.
[39:06] They would get physical. She would hurt people even from
[39:10] being a little girl. People were actually scared of
[39:13] this little girl because of how angry and how much energy she
[39:16] would get. When she would get angry, she
[39:18] would throw things things, break things, smash things, hurt other
[39:22] people. She would threaten to run away,
[39:24] and sometimes she actually would run away from home.
[39:26] And one of the only things that ever really worked to calm Nancy
[39:30] down was music. She would sit for hours on end
[39:35] in front of the family record player, just playing her
[39:38] favorite vinyls back-to-back. Her first musical obsession came
[39:42] when her family bought the vinyl soundtrack to her, and
[39:45] apparently Nancy would listen to this at least five times every
[39:50] single day. It drove her family insane.
[39:53] But none of them had a choice in the matter, because if they
[39:56] tried to turn it off, if they tried to ask her to play
[39:58] something else, she would go. Mental and Nancy only got harder
[40:03] and harder to live with as she got older as as a child a lot of
[40:07] her threats were more verbal like if you don't do this I will
[40:11] hurt you. But now it was like physical.
[40:14] She would grab the knife and put it up to someone as the threat
[40:17] instead of telling them I'm going to use this knife on you.
[40:20] She would show them that she was serious about it.
[40:23] She threatened her babysitter with a knife.
[40:25] She threatened to stab her sister.
[40:28] She chased after a mum with a hammer at one point.
[40:30] Like, she was actually a very dangerous, scary little child to
[40:36] live with. And she was a child.
[40:38] It's actually horrifying when you realize just how young she
[40:42] was. She was like 1011 and she was
[40:43] grabbing a kitchen knife and chasing her babysitter and her
[40:46] little sister around. Could you imagine being her
[40:49] parents and fearing that one of your children is going to murder
[40:53] the other one? So her parents took her back to
[40:55] the doctor's again after all of these like physical things were
[40:58] happening, chasing people around with knives.
[41:00] They took her to the hospital and they said, no, something has
[41:03] to be wrong with our daughter. We don't care what you say.
[41:06] She's chasing people around with knives.
[41:07] She needs a proper examination. So after that, she was admitted
[41:11] to a psychiatric hospital and Nancy hated her time in there.
[41:16] And I'm not surprised. A lot of these psychiatric units
[41:19] facilities did used to be very abusive, very strict.
[41:23] They don't have much freedom in there at all.
[41:25] So Nancy started calling her family back home, just begging
[41:30] and pleading with them to come and pick her up.
[41:32] She's promising that she would be well behaved, she would
[41:34] change her ways if they just came and got her out.
[41:36] She would never act up ever again.
[41:38] She wasn't even in that hospital for a full week before her
[41:41] parents took pity on her and they came and picked her up.
[41:44] But in the car on the way home, Nancy burst into laughter.
[41:48] She told her parents that she had tricked them.
[41:51] She was actually perfectly fine in hospital.
[41:53] She wasn't. It wasn't too bad actually, but
[41:55] she just didn't want to be there.
[41:57] And so she lied and manipulated her way out once again.
[42:00] As a young teenager, Nancy was kicked out of school for bad
[42:03] behavior and her parents ended up sending her to a boarding
[42:06] school for children with additional needs.
[42:09] And you know what? At first, this school was
[42:12] actually really good for Nancy. She did a course of therapy as
[42:15] well. While she was staying, she
[42:17] better learned how to deal with her emotions.
[42:20] She started to make plans for the future.
[42:22] Things were looking really good. She struggled to make friends at
[42:25] this school a little bit, umm. But then she did end up making
[42:29] friends with this group of boys who had a band and she started
[42:32] dating one of the boys. But very quickly this
[42:36] relationship turned very toxic. The two of them were very
[42:39] controlling and very possessive of each other.
[42:42] And her mom mentioned in her book that Nancy even tattooed
[42:47] this guys name on her chest in some like really shitty like
[42:51] stick and poke style. I tried to find photos of this
[42:54] and photos do not exist online, so I don't really know what
[42:59] happened to this tattoo. It must have just been so shit
[43:01] that it like wore off. But that wasn't Nancy's mother's
[43:04] book, so I'm inclined to believe it.
[43:06] But Nancy and this guy would get drunk and do drugs together all
[43:11] the time. And they're very, very young.
[43:13] She moved to that school when she was about 1314 I believe.
[43:16] And it started out with just alcohol, drinking alcohol a
[43:19] little bit, smoking weed. And then they started getting
[43:22] into hallucinogens and a lot harder stuff.
[43:26] And at the age of 15, Nancy Spungen tried heroin for the
[43:31] first time at 15. Of course, all of these drugs
[43:35] and different drinks and everything that they were
[43:37] consuming costs money. And neither of them had jobs.
[43:40] They were both in boarding school.
[43:42] And I don't know how, but they they managed it for the most
[43:46] part. But as they start to get a bit
[43:48] dependent on these drugs and they were really getting into
[43:50] it, they were getting desperate for money.
[43:53] And then one day, Nancy's mother noticed that her diamond wedding
[43:58] ring was missing, and after challenging Nancy about it, she
[44:02] later found out that Nancy had stolen it, taken it to the pawn
[44:06] shop, sold it, and then used that cash to go and buy drugs.
[44:11] So now her parents couldn't trust their own daughter in
[44:15] their own home. And so when the next summer
[44:18] rolled around and it was time for her to come home for the
[44:20] summer, they didn't want a home. They arranged for Nancy to spend
[44:24] the whole summer at a summer camp so she wouldn't actually
[44:28] have to come back and she wouldn't affect her sister's
[44:31] life and she wouldn't affect everyone's lives.
[44:34] So Nancy goes to this summer camp and she is just as badly
[44:38] behaved there as she is everywhere else.
[44:40] She's doing drugs. She's trying to pressure the
[44:43] other girls into smoking weed with her and drinking alcohol
[44:46] with her. She was regularly doing heroin
[44:48] there at this summer camp. She was self harming.
[44:51] She was, you know, using her manipulative tactics on her new
[44:55] friends and on the camp counselors.
[44:57] But something I'm really, really sad did happen to Nancy while
[45:00] she was away at this camp. She believed that she had fallen
[45:04] pregnant. Now, she hadn't taken a test,
[45:06] she had no confirmation, but she was pretty sure that she was
[45:10] pregnant. I don't know how or why, but she
[45:12] was pretty sure. So she decided to give herself a
[45:16] DIY abortion at summer camp. Now skip forward if you don't
[45:20] want to hear about this because it is quite graphic, I won't go
[45:23] into much detail, but still, it's not a nice thing to hear
[45:26] about. Skip forward if you don't want
[45:27] to hear about this. Nancy was found by one of her
[45:29] camp counselors bleeding out on the bathroom floor.
[45:34] She was hemorrhaging from a perforated uterus from where she
[45:38] had tried to give herself a DIY abortion with a coat hanger and
[45:43] she had then, I guess pierced her uterus.
[45:46] She was rushed to the hospital straight away where she told the
[45:49] hospital staff her whole situation.
[45:51] She thought she was pregnant, so she's tried to get rid of it
[45:54] herself and they gave her a pregnancy test that came up that
[45:58] she wasn't pregnant. Now, I don't know what that
[46:01] means. I don't know if that means that
[46:03] she never was pregnant or if maybe she had been pregnant and
[46:07] the abortion had been successful and then that's why it didn't
[46:11] show up. I'm really not sure how that
[46:13] whole thing works, but whatever the circumstances I think it's
[46:17] just absolutely heartbreaking to think of a 15 year old girl
[46:21] going through all of that all on her own.
[46:24] I just want to give her a huge hug.
[46:25] Everything about Nancy Sponges childhood and how misunderstood
[46:29] she seemed and how how people just didn't help her or people
[46:33] didn't have the knowledge to help her back then.
[46:36] I just feel really bad for her. She was just was never given a
[46:40] fair chance or enough support and help.
[46:43] As Nancy continued to grow up and become an older teenager,
[46:47] she just continued to deteriorate and her mother had
[46:51] this overwhelming premonition. Shall we said that her daughter
[46:55] was going to die young some way or another?
[46:58] She believed that she would outlive Nancy.
[47:02] After her abortion attempt, Nancy would be found bleeding
[47:06] yet again, this time by one of her classmates at her boarding
[47:10] school. I think they found her in her
[47:11] own dorm, and this time it wasn't because of a DIY
[47:15] abortion. It was because Nancy had stolen
[47:17] some scissors and used them to cut her wrists.
[47:21] She was trying to kill herself and it was very nearly
[47:25] successful. She'd almost completely bled
[47:28] out. Luckily her roommate came just
[47:30] in time. Nancy was sent to hospital.
[47:32] She was treated, but the doctors said that had her roommate been
[47:36] 5 minutes later walking in on her, then Nancy Spungen probably
[47:41] would have died. Then, as a teenager, her
[47:44] attempts to end her own life were becoming more frequent and
[47:47] more severe each time, more close each time, and no one knew
[47:52] how to help her. People always tried, but nothing
[47:56] ever worked and everyone around her was starting to feel
[48:00] helpless, almost like Nancy taking her own life was an
[48:05] inevitability just waiting to happen.
[48:15] The age of 16, Nancy was accepted into a College in
[48:19] Colorado. So she moved out there and
[48:21] actually this was really good for her.
[48:23] She seemed to improve mental health wise anyway.
[48:27] She was, however, very much addicted to heroin and other
[48:31] substances at this point in her life.
[48:33] She was 16 and she was actually caught by the police at one
[48:37] point trying to buy heroin. The FBI had set up this, like,
[48:40] undercover sting operation in the area to try to, I don't
[48:45] know, tackle the heroin trade that was going on around there.
[48:48] And Nancy had tried to buy heroin off of an undercover FBI
[48:54] agent. So I believe they arrested her,
[48:57] took her back to the police station, looked her up on the
[48:59] system and realized that she actually had a theft charge
[49:03] against her name. And so the police in Colorado
[49:06] proposed a deal with Nancy. They said that if she got the
[49:09] hell out of the state and moved back home, then they wouldn't
[49:12] press any charges against her. Not for the theft charge that
[49:16] she seems to be getting away with, and not for trying to buy
[49:19] heroin from an undercover cop. She wouldn't do any court or
[49:23] prison time if she just left the state.
[49:26] And so with that, she got her ass out of Colorado.
[49:29] So she moved back to Philadelphia to live with her
[49:31] family and all of her criminal charges were forgotten about.
[49:35] But now she wasn't in school, she didn't have a job, she had a
[49:38] lot of free time to fill. And it was at this point that
[49:42] Nancy Spungen started going to local music venues and concerts
[49:47] with her friends and she started laying the roots of her future
[49:52] super groupie fame. Nancy's family were very quickly
[49:55] troubled with her presence once again.
[49:58] She was just a very negative force within the household.
[50:01] She was a really bad influence on her siblings and she just was
[50:06] not pleasant to be around. She was very manipulative, very
[50:09] angry. Everything always had to be her
[50:11] way or there would be issues. And she also just kind of had no
[50:15] regard for her family, for their well-being, for their safety,
[50:18] for their privacy. She would host wild house
[50:22] parties at their house where her mum and dad were trying to sleep
[50:26] and her younger siblings were there.
[50:27] And there would be people like having sex in her siblings bed.
[50:31] And this is what I mean by she was a really bad influence on
[50:34] her siblings because she was bringing her lifestyle into
[50:38] their space. They couldn't move away from all
[50:41] these terrible choices that their sister had made.
[50:44] There was always heroin in the house.
[50:46] There were always drunk people, people drugged out of their mind
[50:49] in the house. At one point, Nancy even asked
[50:52] her own younger sister to tourniquet her arm for her so
[50:55] that she could shoot up with heroin.
[50:57] On another occasion, her little brother found her literally
[51:00] passed out on the bathroom floor after taking too many pills.
[51:04] It was it was really sad how much Nancy was subjecting the
[51:09] rest of her family to her lifestyle and to her issues.
[51:14] I know that sounds horrible to say, but this is a young boy and
[51:18] a young girl trying to grow up and develop normally, but they
[51:22] are now worrying about the health of their sister at every
[51:26] turning point. Her brother almost walked in and
[51:29] found her dead on the bathroom floor.
[51:31] That's not healthy. That's not normal.
[51:33] When her brother found her passive out on the bathroom
[51:36] floor. Nancy had actually been out with
[51:38] a bunch of friends that night and they've been taking loads of
[51:40] pills, but they'd all abandoned her, just left her alone to deal
[51:45] with it. When she started acting like
[51:46] this, when she seemed so out of it that they genuinely thought
[51:50] she was going to die. So they all left her.
[51:53] Her little brother himself literally had to shake her, slap
[51:57] her, scream in her face, pour water on her, anything he could,
[52:01] and eventually she came round. But had her brother not been in
[52:05] the house to find her, who knows if she would have actually died
[52:09] from an overdose that night. At this point, Nancy's parents
[52:13] were at a complete loss as to how they can help her.
[52:16] They desperately wanted to. They desperately wanted their
[52:19] daughter to have a normal, healthy, long, happy life.
[52:24] But no matter what they did, nothing was working.
[52:27] And at this point it was starting to affect everyone
[52:29] else. They didn't want Nancy around
[52:32] their other two children because it was ruining their lives as
[52:35] well. They knew that they needed to
[52:37] get Nancy out of their household, but they wanted to
[52:41] care for her in the process. So they spoke with Nancy and
[52:44] they tried to figure out what she really wanted to do with her
[52:47] life. They said that they would help
[52:49] her financially to try to achieve her dreams if she left
[52:54] the house, you know. And so Nancy said that she had
[52:57] always wanted to go to New York because, I mean, she was really
[53:00] into music and there was a huge music scene in New York at the
[53:04] time. She really liked the idea of
[53:06] living amongst all of that. So her parents told her that
[53:09] they would help her financially to set up her life in New York,
[53:14] hoping that if she got out there and she was chasing her hobbies
[53:18] and her dreams, her interests, that maybe if she was genuinely,
[53:21] truly happy, then she might heal.
[53:25] She might look after herself. She might get out of these
[53:28] addictions. She might then live a normal
[53:30] life. Maybe that is what she needed.
[53:32] So her parents told that they would pay for her rent in a
[53:36] small apartment for a whole year, and that would give her
[53:39] enough time to get settled in New York, meet some friends, get
[53:43] a job, get some savings. And then by the time that year
[53:46] came to an end on her rent, then she should be able to sustain
[53:50] herself, sustain her new life in New York.
[53:52] It was essentially like the adult version of sending her to
[53:56] board in school again. I was sending her to summer
[53:58] camp, literally just throwing money at the problem to get
[54:01] Nancy out of the house. But for her, this was a sweet
[54:05] deal. This was the best deal that her
[54:07] parents had offered her yet. When Nancy moved out to New
[54:10] York, she had one clear goal in mind.
[54:13] She wanted to meet and marry a rock star that would be able to
[54:17] take care of her financially and otherwise forever for the rest
[54:22] of her life and she wouldn't have to worry about anything and
[54:24] she could live that rock'n'roll lifestyle forever.
[54:26] Nancy really didn't want to work.
[54:29] She didn't like the idea of having a job and having to
[54:31] sustain herself. She just wanted to be around
[54:34] music and be around rock bands. That was what made her happy.
[54:36] That was what lit her up. So being some rock stars
[54:40] housewife was essentially her dream come true.
[54:44] She got to be around all of that action, but without having to
[54:48] actually lift a finger herself. And while that might sound like
[54:51] it's beyond most people's wildest dreams, you know to to
[54:55] move to New York with the goal of meeting and marrying a rock
[54:59] star that will make you a housewife.
[55:01] It seems way beyond most people's capabilities, but Nancy
[55:06] was pretty confident that she could do it because Nancy knew
[55:09] that she was attractive and she had had some encounters, shall
[55:14] we say, with a lot of band members in the past when she'd
[55:18] gone to venues, they had picked her out because she was
[55:21] beautiful. So she'd gone backstage with
[55:23] bands like The Rolling Stones, the New York Dolls, the Ramones,
[55:26] Iggy Pop. She knew that it wasn't hard to
[55:29] catch their attention. And a lot of these rock stars
[55:32] did want a piece of Nancy Sponges.
[55:34] So there she was in New York, living alone at the age of 17,
[55:38] doing drugs every single day, heroin every single day there,
[55:42] and hoping to find her soulmate in the form of a rich and famous
[55:46] rock star. And she loved life in the Big
[55:50] Apple. She thrived for the next year,
[55:53] well, socially at least. But she never really found much
[55:57] of A career, or she still hadn't found that husband by the time
[56:02] her lease came to an end and her parents were only going to pay
[56:05] for that one year. So now Nancy had to make a
[56:08] decision. Was she going to stay in New
[56:10] York? Find a stable job and pay for
[56:12] her own bills? Or was it time for her to move
[56:15] on? Well, it was actually around
[56:16] this time in 1977. Nancy was 18 years old, going 19
[56:22] now. By now, Malcolm McLaren had
[56:25] fully fueled the punk rock scene in London.
[56:28] Sex Pistols were taking over, loads of other great punk bands
[56:32] were taking over, and the rest of the world was realizing how
[56:36] much of A hub London was for the music scene.
[56:40] People were moving to London from like all over, I say all
[56:44] over the world, mainly from America.
[56:47] A lot of people that were in the old New York scene were seeing
[56:50] London as the new version of New York.
[56:52] So a lot of New York bands were moving over there, doing
[56:56] concerts and recording in London instead.
[56:59] And when Nancy noticed this shift, she wanted to follow it
[57:03] too. And so it was at that point that
[57:05] she moved to London, where she would fatefully meet Sid
[57:09] Vicious. When she arrived in London,
[57:11] Nancy was immediately quite famous among the groupie
[57:15] circles. It seemed that her reputation
[57:18] preceded her even from another country.
[57:20] But Nancy Spungen was a very polarizing character.
[57:24] People either loved her or absolutely hated her.
[57:28] People have described her as very loud, very obnoxious, very
[57:33] overpowering in a group conversation.
[57:36] People also reported that she was just as manipulative and
[57:39] vindictive as she always had been back at home as well.
[57:43] Honestly, All in all, people tended not to like Nancy Sponge,
[57:47] and it was more rare that people did like her.
[57:49] But there was something about her, something that meant people
[57:53] paid attention to her whether they liked her or not.
[57:56] She could command a room, she could get all eyes on her.
[58:00] Nancy's experience with men was quite an interesting one.
[58:05] Men tended to love Nancy at first.
[58:08] Men love like a powerful woman and she was very beautiful.
[58:12] She was very like grungy. She, she had like a whole
[58:16] concept about her look, I think she was beautiful.
[58:19] But as soon as these men would like properly get to know her
[58:22] beyond one night of like wild sex and drugs in a hotel room,
[58:26] they didn't want anything to do with her.
[58:28] Nancy very quickly became linked with the Sex Pistols pretty much
[58:32] as soon as she moved to London 'cause she started going out to
[58:35] concerts and they were popping at the time.
[58:38] So she would go to their gigs and use her usual tricks, you
[58:42] know, try to get backstage with offers of drugs and sex.
[58:46] And it actually worked. At first, Nancy caught the
[58:49] attention of Johnny Rotten, who invited her backstage, slept
[58:53] with her. And then as she was kind of
[58:56] hanging out backstage, she caught the attention of Sid.
[58:59] Now, Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious were absolutely magnetic
[59:04] when they first met. They got on like a house on
[59:07] fire. And I think that's actually a
[59:09] very good metaphor to use because they were so destructive
[59:13] and toxic together. But almost immediately, they
[59:16] became inseparable. They were obsessed with each
[59:19] other. They were in each other's
[59:20] pockets. They always had to have their
[59:22] hands on each other. They couldn't go anywhere
[59:24] without each other. And this relationship brought
[59:27] out a whole other side of Sid Vicious than people were used to
[59:31] seeing. I mean, he got the job because
[59:35] of how, like, crazy and edgy and unhinged he looked.
[59:40] But behind the scenes in this relationship with Nancy, Sid was
[59:43] very soft, very almost submitted.
[59:46] He worshipped Nancy. Whatever Nancy wanted, she got,
[59:50] and I expect that she loved that about Sid.
[59:54] Sid was no longer that commanding force that he was on
[59:58] stage. You know, that screaming ball of
[1:00:01] anger. Nancy turned him soft and for
[1:00:04] her, he was like a little puppy. He let Nancy call the shots.
[1:00:07] Whatever she said goes. Even when it came to like banned
[1:00:11] matters that didn't involve her at all.
[1:00:13] She started to get involved. She just started.
[1:00:16] Trying to control a lot of things that she didn't need to
[1:00:21] control, that weren't her business to control.
[1:00:24] And This is why I say she was a very polarizing figure,
[1:00:27] especially in the Sex Pistols, because everyone that worked
[1:00:30] with Sid didn't like his girlfriend.
[1:00:32] She was too, too much. As part of my research for this
[1:00:37] video, I was watching a lot of interviews of the two of them
[1:00:40] just kind of sat there. That's one thing that I really
[1:00:42] noticed was that in Sid Vicious interviews, Nancy is always
[1:00:46] there. Nancy is answering questions,
[1:00:49] but really, who was Nancy Spungen at the time?
[1:00:53] I mean, in this modern day, a lot of people know of Nancy
[1:00:57] Spungen because of this case, but at the time, before all of
[1:01:01] this happened, no one really knew who this girl was.
[1:01:04] I mean, some people knew that she was Sid Vicious as
[1:01:07] girlfriend, but why is she there in the interview answering all
[1:01:10] the questions? It didn't really make sense.
[1:01:12] But it is a little bit of a Gray area because, well, when you see
[1:01:16] some of the clips from these interviews, it's very obvious
[1:01:19] that Sid is off his face on drugs in most of them to the
[1:01:24] point where he can't speak. He can barely even hold himself
[1:01:27] up. So it makes sense that Nancy
[1:01:30] would be trying to carry these interviews for him.
[1:01:33] But in general, Nancy and Sid seemed very happy together.
[1:01:38] I mean, they stayed together for a long time.
[1:01:40] So I guess that speaks for itself that they did enjoy being
[1:01:44] together. But like I said, it was so toxic
[1:01:47] in so many ways. They would encourage each other
[1:01:50] to take more and more drugs. Both of them really enabled and
[1:01:53] encouraged each other's addictions that just got worse
[1:01:56] and worse by the week. And when they were so pumped up
[1:02:00] on all these drugs and alcohol, they would have fights,
[1:02:04] arguments that turned into physical fights, genuine
[1:02:07] violence. One of the biggest things that
[1:02:09] would cause these fights and these arguments were other
[1:02:12] women, not that Sid was getting with A other women.
[1:02:16] I mean, I'm not going to defend him completely because I don't
[1:02:18] know, I wasn't there. But a lot of the things that I
[1:02:20] read, it seemed like it was Nancy kind of filling in blanks
[1:02:25] or not even liking that Sid was too close to another woman.
[1:02:28] You know, there was one time that there was a fan of his like
[1:02:32] another young groupie that was getting a bit too close to him
[1:02:34] and Nancy didn't like it. And so she told Sid to just push
[1:02:38] her down the stairs. And he did it.
[1:02:40] He would do a lot of things just to keep Nancy happy because,
[1:02:43] well, everyone in her life would do a lot of things just to keep
[1:02:47] Nancy happy because if she wasn't happy, then things would
[1:02:51] be catastrophic. But despite all of the negatives
[1:02:54] in their relationship, Nancy was good for Sid in some ways.
[1:02:59] Some ways she helped him to stand up for himself a bit,
[1:03:03] especially when it came to banned matters, because he never
[1:03:06] really used to voice what he wanted in that band.
[1:03:09] He thought it was better to just kind of let them deal with it.
[1:03:12] But Nancy would tell him that he's getting shafted when it
[1:03:14] comes to percentages or when it comes to targets and he should
[1:03:18] stand up for himself and he should walk in there and and
[1:03:20] demand more. It's kind of similar to what
[1:03:22] happened with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, if you're
[1:03:25] familiar with that situation. She kind of came in and helped
[1:03:29] him, you know, demand more out of Nirvana.
[1:03:32] But it makes the band members and the whole crew surrounding
[1:03:37] that band dislike the girlfriend.
[1:03:39] Sid and Nancy went through bouts of trying to sober up together,
[1:03:44] which was really nice to read about.
[1:03:46] As much as they, you know, did make each other worse and
[1:03:49] encouraged and enabled the addictions, they really did care
[1:03:52] about each other deep down. And as hard as it was for them
[1:03:55] to try to go sober and for them to try to give things up, they
[1:03:59] they did. And they would do it with each
[1:04:01] other, alongside each other. They tried multiple times
[1:04:04] throughout their relationship to try to get clean together, but
[1:04:08] in this kind of environment, the punk rock scene in London, being
[1:04:11] a rock star, being a super groupie, it was like fighting a
[1:04:15] losing battle. There's always going to be
[1:04:18] cocaine and heroin and the whole lot offered to them for free.
[1:04:22] Literally everyone around them was on hard drugs as well,
[1:04:25] whether it was their bandmates or their managers, their
[1:04:28] friends, their fans. Even the groupies that would
[1:04:31] want to come backstage would give them free drugs.
[1:04:34] They just couldn't escape that environment.
[1:04:37] And so every time they would get clean, they would relapse right
[1:04:41] back into it again. The two of them both had
[1:04:43] terrible, terrible mental health issues.
[1:04:46] And I mean, we've spoken about Nancy's in great detail thanks
[1:04:49] to her mother's book. Her writing that book gives us
[1:04:52] such an insight into what Nancy was going through as a child and
[1:04:56] as a teenager. And we know slightly less about
[1:04:59] SIDS, although we do know that he was struggling, of course,
[1:05:02] being kicked out of the home and then literally squatting
[1:05:06] homeless for years. There was actually a lot of
[1:05:08] valuable insight to get from Nancy's mother's book.
[1:05:11] You know, having seen it from an inside perspective, she says in
[1:05:15] this book about how violent things would get between her
[1:05:18] daughter and Sid when they would have arguments and they would
[1:05:21] slap each other, push each other, kick each other.
[1:05:24] But some of the worst injuries were sustained by Nancy herself.
[1:05:28] There was one particular altercation where Sid had
[1:05:31] punched her in the face and broke her nose and even ripped a
[1:05:35] part of her I believe. I think that was at the same
[1:05:38] time her mum actually had to take her to the hospital for
[1:05:40] this. Like RIP in her ear.
[1:05:42] She needed stitches to stitch her ear back onto her head.
[1:05:46] I have no idea what Sid did to her, but it's fucking horrible.
[1:05:49] And while they were sat there in the hospital, Nancy looked up at
[1:05:52] her mum and asked if her dad was ever violent with her mum like
[1:05:57] Sid was with her. And her mum said that.
[1:06:00] That just broke her heart because no, he wasn't.
[1:06:03] No, husbands, men, boyfriends are not supposed to be violent
[1:06:09] to their partner. And she tried to explain this to
[1:06:12] Nancy, but she could tell that it just wasn't really going in.
[1:06:16] For the first part of their relationship, Sid and Nancy
[1:06:18] lived in London and very quickly she was starting to get on the
[1:06:23] rest of Sex Pistols and their management's nerves.
[1:06:26] She was way too involved in the running of things and like I
[1:06:28] said, she was just very loud and obnoxious.
[1:06:31] That's how she's been described. And I don't know exactly what
[1:06:34] they mean by that, but you can imagine.
[1:06:35] And it got to the point where the rest of the band, we're
[1:06:38] trying to tell Sid, look, we don't want to at practices.
[1:06:41] We don't want to on tour. Like, keep your relationship out
[1:06:44] of our band. But he wasn't.
[1:06:46] She was still coming to the studio and all of this.
[1:06:48] It got to the point where the band were like, right, OK, well,
[1:06:50] now we need to try and just get rid of her.
[1:06:53] We need to come up with a plan to get rid of this woman.
[1:06:56] In fact, Malcolm McLaren once said in an interview, Nancy was
[1:06:59] no pushover. I tried having her kidnapped in
[1:07:02] London and put on a plane back to New York, which clearly
[1:07:05] didn't work. That's the only time Malcolm
[1:07:07] McLaren has ever commented on this whole, like, kidnapping
[1:07:11] plan. I have no idea what he was going
[1:07:14] to do there or what he planned on doing.
[1:07:15] But, you know, didn't work, didn't happen.
[1:07:17] She quickly earned herself the nickname Nauseating Nancy.
[1:07:21] Amongst the Sex Pistols team, Sid was the only person that
[1:07:25] actually wanted her around. When the band started planning
[1:07:28] their U.S. tour, Nancy just kind of assumed that she'd be going
[1:07:32] with them because she was always there.
[1:07:34] She was always at practices and in the studio and on tour, but
[1:07:38] that was the last thing any of them wanted, Well apart from Sid
[1:07:42] was to be stuck on a tour bus travelling around this giant
[1:07:46] country with their nemesis and nauseating Nancy.
[1:07:50] So Malcolm did absolutely everything in his power to keep
[1:07:54] Nancy in London while the Sex Pistols went and played their
[1:07:58] last ever tour in the US. Well, the last ever tour ever,
[1:08:03] but it was in the US. On the final night of their
[1:08:05] American tour, Sex Pistols very suddenly broke up.
[1:08:10] And this was something that no one really saw coming, but kind
[1:08:14] of everyone saw coming at the same time.
[1:08:16] Everyone knew that Sex Pistols were hanging on by a string.
[1:08:19] Those boys weren't getting on very well anymore.
[1:08:22] It was only a matter of time until the whole thing blew up.
[1:08:25] But they never expected it to be at the end of a very successful
[1:08:29] U.S. tour. Like right now.
[1:08:31] They were at the peak of their career and they split up.
[1:08:34] But not gonna lie, at this point in their career, the boys
[1:08:37] weren't putting on very good shows.
[1:08:39] People said that they were on so many different drugs that they
[1:08:43] couldn't even remember the music.
[1:08:45] They couldn't remember the words, they couldn't remember
[1:08:46] the cards. They had no stage presence
[1:08:48] anymore. They were just trying to wing it
[1:08:51] and it wasn't working. It wasn't a good show.
[1:08:54] But anyway, after their biggest and most successful tour ended,
[1:08:59] so did the band completely, lead singer Johnny Rotten has said.
[1:09:03] I was bored chronic of singing the same set for two years and
[1:09:07] bored stiff with Sid's juvenile behaviour.
[1:09:10] Sid can go off and kill himself and nobody will care.
[1:09:21] After the band broke up, they all spent some time apart.
[1:09:24] Sid of course went right back to where Nancy was waiting for him
[1:09:28] in London. But actually on that flight back
[1:09:31] from New York to London, Sid had a near fatal overdose on
[1:09:35] methadone and Valium. They had to emergency land and
[1:09:38] rush him to the nearest hospital and he was fine.
[1:09:42] In the end, he was treated. He was eventually reunited with
[1:09:45] Nancy and they decided that there wasn't much need for them
[1:09:48] to be in London anymore now that Sid wasn't really working with
[1:09:52] Sex Pistols. Well, he wasn't working with
[1:09:54] them at all. They'd broken up, so they
[1:09:56] decided to go to New York together and just kind of start
[1:10:00] the next chapter of their lives living in New York.
[1:10:02] Sid was actually working on some solo music at this point in time
[1:10:06] that was never released during his lifetime.
[1:10:09] I believe it's out now. And Nancy was acting as his
[1:10:12] manager now that they moved to New York.
[1:10:14] And honestly, this role suited her very well.
[1:10:17] She'd practically been like his unofficial manager this whole
[1:10:20] time. She was always trying to argue
[1:10:23] for better for him, so made sense that she was now in
[1:10:26] control of all of that side of things.
[1:10:29] At the time they were living in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan,
[1:10:32] which is a very popular hotel for rock stars, musicians, any
[1:10:36] kind of celebrities really, and they were paying for it from Sex
[1:10:40] Pistols royalties. They were still living on that
[1:10:43] Sex Pistols money for a long time.
[1:10:44] Well, I say for a long time. They should have been able to
[1:10:47] live off of that money for a decent amount of time, but at
[1:10:51] the rate that these two did drugs, they were running out of
[1:10:54] money so fast. I don't know what they thought
[1:10:57] they were going to do when that money ran out, because they were
[1:11:00] spending it at an alarming rate. And once that run out, they
[1:11:03] wouldn't be able to afford drugs.
[1:11:04] They they had no kind of control over how they were spending this
[1:11:08] money. They were throwing insane
[1:11:10] parties in that hotel room. And one of these parties that
[1:11:14] they threw in the Chelsea Hotel just two months after arriving
[1:11:18] there in New York would be the fateful house party that killed
[1:11:23] Nancy Spungen. They'd thrown hotel parties
[1:11:26] plenty of times before, but on October 11th, 1978, it would be
[1:11:31] the last one that Sid and Nancy ever threw.
[1:11:33] As always, their parties were fully fueled with drugs and
[1:11:37] alcohol. There were multiple drug dealers
[1:11:39] in attendance at that party, and so there were so many different
[1:11:43] drugs to choose from as well. People were taking mixtures,
[1:11:46] people didn't even know what they were taking, just taking
[1:11:49] anything that they could get their hands on.
[1:11:51] And people were fucked up in that hotel room.
[1:11:54] As the party was beginning. Sid Vicious knocked back about
[1:11:58] 30 barbiturates, 30 pills, enough to kill some people.
[1:12:03] Also, I don't know if I just don't get it because I'm not
[1:12:06] like sex, drugs, rock'n'roll. But why would he take
[1:12:10] barbiturate? I thought that was like a
[1:12:12] sleeping tablet. I thought, I thought they used
[1:12:14] that to treat insomnia. Is that not just going to be a
[1:12:16] really boring night? You're not just making yourself
[1:12:18] really, really tired? 30 And I mean I'm going to
[1:12:22] answer my own question because Sid did actually fall asleep for
[1:12:25] the whole party because he took those 30 pills right at the
[1:12:29] beginning. He wasn't there for like the
[1:12:30] whole fucking party. He was just passed out on the
[1:12:32] bed. Maybe he did it on purpose,
[1:12:34] maybe that's what he wanted to do, I don't know.
[1:12:35] So as Sid was passed out on this bed, everyone around him just
[1:12:38] continues to party, continues to drink and do drugs and do lines
[1:12:42] off the fucking hotel furniture, everything.
[1:12:45] And every so often people would check on him and he was looking
[1:12:49] grey. People kept making comments all
[1:12:51] night about how he looks dead. Nobody did anything about it.
[1:12:54] Nobody was checking his pulse, making sure that he was OK.
[1:12:57] And I mean, part of that is because people are kind of used
[1:13:01] to Sid doing this. He would take so many drugs that
[1:13:05] he would be completely out of it.
[1:13:07] He would get himself into these states at parties where he would
[1:13:10] be passed out. So people just kind of looked at
[1:13:13] him and thought, oh, it's just Sid being Sid.
[1:13:16] The next thing anyone heard from Sid Vicious was actually the
[1:13:19] next morning at 10:30 AM. He called the front desk of the
[1:13:24] hotel very panicked, begging them to help him.
[1:13:27] When he regained consciousness that morning, everyone had
[1:13:30] obviously left the party. All that was left behind was
[1:13:33] mess and empty bottles. He couldn't even see Nancy
[1:13:37] anywhere. And then he looked down and saw
[1:13:40] red stains on the bed and on him.
[1:13:43] And, and there was a trail of red leading into the bathroom,
[1:13:48] so he anxiously followed this red trail and pushed up in the
[1:13:52] bathroom door to reveal Nancy, the love of his life, laying
[1:13:57] there on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
[1:14:01] She was dead. Her body was kind of half
[1:14:03] sitting up between the toilet and the sink.
[1:14:06] She was only wearing her bra and her underwear.
[1:14:09] And the stab wounds on her stomach were visible.
[1:14:12] She bled so much. Sid was utterly horrified.
[1:14:17] He was confused, he was scared, he didn't know what to do.
[1:14:21] And so he just called up the hotel front desk, told them they
[1:14:24] needed to order an ambulance now.
[1:14:27] And he didn't give them much more information, but they
[1:14:29] ordered it regardless. And staff didn't actually go up
[1:14:33] to the hotel room in the meantime.
[1:14:35] They just kind of waited for the ambulance to arrive.
[1:14:38] But they did arrive very quickly, along with police.
[1:14:40] So hotel staff sent them all up to Sid and Nancy's room.
[1:14:44] But as they approached the hotel room, before they'd even reached
[1:14:46] it, police bumped into Sid in the hallways.
[1:14:49] He was piercing up and down, crying, wailing, in fact,
[1:14:54] bashing the walls. He was barely able to walk.
[1:14:56] He was slurring his speech. To be fair, a lot of things that
[1:15:00] he was saying sounded more like Mumbles.
[1:15:03] Police were trying to ask him, you know, what was wrong, what
[1:15:05] he was saying, but he wasn't able to give any clear answers.
[1:15:09] And when they spoke with neighbors, one of them said that
[1:15:12] they'd heard a man shout, presumably Sid shout.
[1:15:16] She must have fell onto the knife.
[1:15:18] When police got to sit in Nancy's suite, there was no
[1:15:21] questioning what happened. Nancy had clearly been murdered.
[1:15:25] The knife was even still on the floor next to her.
[1:15:28] So naturally, police immediately arrested Sid on suspicion of
[1:15:32] this murder. He seemed like the only one that
[1:15:35] could have done it, or at least the prime suspect.
[1:15:38] At this point in time, he was still intoxicated as they
[1:15:41] dragged him out of the hotel and into the back of a police car
[1:15:45] and took him to a holding cell. Now, when he got put in this
[1:15:48] holding cell, there are rumors that he may have confessed to
[1:15:53] the murder. According to the security guard
[1:15:55] that was outside of that holding cell, Sid told him that I did it
[1:15:59] because I'm a dirty dog. Sid later retracted that he ever
[1:16:03] said that and said that he was just asleep the whole time that
[1:16:07] he was in that hotel room. And then it was when he woke up
[1:16:09] that he found a dead. But regardless of whether he
[1:16:11] confessed or not, police were pretty damn sure that they'd
[1:16:14] found their killer either way. Sid and Nancy's relationship was
[1:16:18] notoriously violent and aggressive and unhappy, and
[1:16:22] there were a lot of drugs in the mix.
[1:16:24] It's not hard to imagine that it could have escalated to murder
[1:16:28] one day. Police theorized that the couple
[1:16:30] must have gotten into to an argument, maybe at the party or
[1:16:33] after everyone left the party. That argument became violent and
[1:16:37] eventually fatal for Nancy. And one of the most eerie things
[1:16:42] I found out in my research was that the knife, the hunting
[1:16:45] knife that was used to kill Nancy, she'd actually bought
[1:16:49] that herself as a gift for Sid. A couple of weeks before this,
[1:16:53] Sid and Nancy had been chatting with a few members of the
[1:16:56] Ramones who were saying that they were always armed with some
[1:17:00] sort of weapon for self-defense, and they were urging Sid and
[1:17:03] Nancy to get themselves a weapon for self-defense.
[1:17:06] So Nancy thought she was doing a good thing buying this knife as
[1:17:10] a gift for her boyfriend, for him to protect herself.
[1:17:13] Little did she know it was that exact knife that she picked out
[1:17:16] herself and spent her own money on that would soon kill her.
[1:17:21] Sid was imprisoned at Rikers Island while he was awaiting his
[1:17:24] trial, but he was actually very quickly bailed out by his label
[1:17:28] executives who needed him out of prison.
[1:17:30] They needed in making music because Virgin Records actually
[1:17:34] planned to profit off of this tragedy and use it to leverage
[1:17:39] sales. Imagine a Sex Pistols reunion,
[1:17:42] but one of them is now a murderer and their case is all
[1:17:45] over the news. That would be great for
[1:17:49] publicity, but I mean, that was never going to happen.
[1:17:51] A Sex Pistols reunion. All the boys kind of hated each
[1:17:55] other at this point in time. They especially hated Sid and
[1:17:58] Nancy, so they didn't want any thing to do with the aftermath
[1:18:02] of all of this. So instead there was going to
[1:18:04] have to be some sort of solo career or maybe a rehashing of
[1:18:09] the old Sex Pistols music. They didn't know just yet, but
[1:18:12] what they did know was that they needed him out of prison to be
[1:18:15] able to put these plans into action.
[1:18:17] The day that Sid Vicious was released from Rikers Island, he
[1:18:20] went on a huge drug binge and actually tried to kill himself.
[1:18:24] He told people that he didn't want to be here without Nancy.
[1:18:28] He said that life wasn't worth living without her and he really
[1:18:31] did seem so distraught after her death.
[1:18:35] Regardless of whether he did it or not, the fact of the matter
[1:18:38] is it had a huge effect on his mental health.
[1:18:41] And he was not the same without Nancy.
[1:18:43] He was not well at all. And he was very, very depressed,
[1:18:47] very, very suicidal. He was always telling people
[1:18:49] that he wanted to go to the other side and be reunited with
[1:18:54] Nancy. He would tell people that they
[1:18:56] were meant to die together. They they should have died at
[1:18:59] the same time. So they could go on to the
[1:19:02] afterlife together. He would tell people that he
[1:19:04] didn't want to be on Earth, he didn't want to be alive, he
[1:19:07] wanted to be wherever she is now.
[1:19:09] Over the next few weeks, Sid continued to slip back into all
[1:19:13] his old destructive behaviours of, you know, drugs, drink,
[1:19:17] fighting. In fact, he was really, really
[1:19:19] violent after Nancy's death, more so than he ever had been.
[1:19:23] He'd always been an aggressive individual, but after Nancy's
[1:19:26] death he was just so angry at the world and it was coming out
[1:19:31] in so many different ways. Eventually, at one point he was
[1:19:34] in a club or in a music venue and he glassed someone.
[1:19:38] If you don't know what that is, it's where you grab like a
[1:19:40] bottle and you smash it off of something so then it's all sharp
[1:19:44] and then you use that as a weapon.
[1:19:45] And this got him sent right back to Rikers Island.
[1:19:48] But again, he was only there for about 6 weeks and somehow his
[1:19:51] record label managed to bail him out again.
[1:19:54] I didn't think that was allowed. I thought if you, you know, I
[1:19:57] thought if you fucked up your bail once, you weren't allowed
[1:19:59] back out again. I didn't realize you had like
[1:20:01] loads of different tries. So anyway, they got him out
[1:20:04] again. And at some point since Nancy
[1:20:06] Spungen's death, Sid Vicious had actually managed to find himself
[1:20:10] a new girlfriend. I know like this whole time he
[1:20:15] is in such a state over Nancy, he is so distraught.
[1:20:19] But he replaced her within weeks of her murder.
[1:20:22] I don't know where he met this other girl.
[1:20:24] I don't know who this other girl is.
[1:20:26] There's really not much information about her.
[1:20:28] It was a very short lived thing. But anyway, on the night that
[1:20:30] Sid was released from Rikers Island for the second time, his
[1:20:34] girlfriend came to pick him up and took him back to his
[1:20:37] mother's apartment, I believe. And they all had like a little
[1:20:41] release party for him in New York.
[1:20:43] Of course, Sid had been completely sober for the last
[1:20:46] six weeks that he'd been in Rikers Island.
[1:20:49] There's no way to get drugs or drink in there.
[1:20:51] But as soon as he left, he wanted to get right back on it
[1:20:54] all. And his girlfriend suspected
[1:20:57] that he would want drugs as soon as he left.
[1:20:59] So she went out and bought fuck loads, loads of different types
[1:21:03] of drugs, mainly heroin, because heroin was Sid's favorite.
[1:21:07] So in attendance at this release party was Sid, his girlfriend,
[1:21:12] his mother, who, let me remind you, is a severe drug addict,
[1:21:17] especially heroin. She had been been since Sid was
[1:21:20] a child. And actually remember before
[1:21:22] when I said that Sid's mom used to deal drugs out of their
[1:21:25] house? Well eventually when Sid was old
[1:21:27] enough to want to try drugs, it was his own mother that sold
[1:21:32] them to him. Which is just devastating.
[1:21:35] That whole concept that you would need money that bad, that
[1:21:38] you would sell a life ruining substance to your own offspring,
[1:21:44] It just everything about that is just heartbreaking and horrible.
[1:21:48] I believe there were a few other people in attendance at this
[1:21:51] release party. I'm not entirely sure.
[1:21:53] It could have just been him, his girlfriend and his mum.
[1:21:55] But regardless, as soon as Sid steps foot in that apartment, he
[1:21:59] shoots up with heroin. That's the first thing he wants
[1:22:02] to do and that's the first thing that he did do.
[1:22:04] But he wasn't very happy with the heroin that they'd gotten.
[1:22:08] He said that it was very weak stuff and it wasn't hitting the
[1:22:11] spot that he wanted. So someone left the party to go
[1:22:14] out and source. I don't know, stronger heroin.
[1:22:17] And when they brought it back, Sid immediately took half of it,
[1:22:22] which I think we can all agree is a is a dumb decision after
[1:22:25] you've been six weeks sober. Like half of, I don't know how
[1:22:29] much they brought back, but half of it is probably going to hit
[1:22:33] him like a fucking ton of bricks.
[1:22:34] And that it did. It knocked him unconscious.
[1:22:36] It hit him like a truck. His friends couldn't get him to
[1:22:39] open his eyes. He wasn't responding for hours
[1:22:42] and they actually thought he was going to die, but eventually
[1:22:45] they managed to bring him background and and he was back.
[1:22:48] So after that Sid's friends go to leave this party and they
[1:22:52] take the rest of the heroin and they give it to his mother and
[1:22:54] they say, look, don't give him the rest of this tonight.
[1:22:57] It's too dangerous. We almost just fucking lost him
[1:23:00] once. Just save it and give it to him
[1:23:02] another day. So everyone leaves the apartment
[1:23:05] and it's just Sid, his girlfriend and his mum in the
[1:23:08] house and the mood isn't very, you know, party, sex, drugs,
[1:23:12] rock'n'roll anymore. It's it's a very somber
[1:23:15] atmosphere. They thought they had almost
[1:23:17] just lost Sid, so they're just quite panicked and worried for
[1:23:21] him after that overdose. But Sid himself really didn't
[1:23:24] seem to care that he was just brought back from the brink of
[1:23:27] death. He was already asking for more
[1:23:29] heroin. At first she wasn't giving him
[1:23:31] it, but as he kept asking, she eventually caved and said that
[1:23:36] he could have some more. So Sid's own mother and Beverly
[1:23:40] sat there and prepared his next dose for him.
[1:23:42] She tied up his arm, she loaded up the syringe, and she injected
[1:23:47] her own son with his very last dose of heroin.
[1:23:52] After that, she left the room and went to bed, and when she
[1:23:55] woke up the next morning and walked back into the living
[1:23:58] room, she found her son dead. That last dose of heroin that
[1:24:03] she had administered him had killed him.
[1:24:06] Sid Vicious or Simon John Ritchie was just 21 years old
[1:24:11] when he died, just four months after Nancy was murdered.
[1:24:15] So of course, an investigation was done into Sid's death and it
[1:24:18] was found that the syringe that Anne, his mother, had loaded up
[1:24:22] that night, had enough heroin in it to kill two people, not just
[1:24:28] one. And bear in mind this was right
[1:24:30] after they had to bring Sid back from a near fatal overdose.
[1:24:34] They had only just saved his life and then she injects that
[1:24:38] much into him. I personally find it hard to
[1:24:41] believe that any of this was accidental.
[1:24:44] And Beverly was a lifelong heroin user.
[1:24:48] She understood dosage. She wouldn't have mistakenly
[1:24:51] doubled up a syringe and given it to her son.
[1:24:55] Well, I just, I just don't understand.
[1:24:58] I can't believe it was an accident, but I also can't
[1:25:01] believe that a mother would intentionally do that to her
[1:25:05] son, thinking it was going to kill him, unless that was her
[1:25:09] intention. Maybe not even in a murderous
[1:25:11] way, but she knew how depressed her son was and how much he
[1:25:14] wanted to be reunited with Nancy.
[1:25:16] What if she was helping him? Sid's mum never clarified her
[1:25:20] intentions when she administered that dose, so we don't know what
[1:25:24] she was trying to do. And we never will know because
[1:25:27] she actually died of a heroin overdose herself in the 90s.
[1:25:31] Sid Vicious was always the one and only suspect in Nancy
[1:25:35] Spungen's murder. And so with his death, that
[1:25:39] investigation was closed. It's believed that Sid murdered
[1:25:43] Nancy. But as we mentioned in the very
[1:25:45] beginning of this video, there are a lot of different theories
[1:25:49] about Nancy's murder. Specifically.
[1:25:51] Some people think that Sid wasn't Nancy's killer.
[1:25:54] Some people agree that he probably was her killer, but
[1:25:57] they believed that there had to be something more behind it than
[1:26:01] just an argument in the hotel room.
[1:26:03] And usually we don't sit here and theorize about closed murder
[1:26:07] cases. I'm very much team let the
[1:26:10] police do their job, let the law do their job, and you know,
[1:26:13] that's it. But when I found out that
[1:26:15] Nancy's own mother is one of the biggest believers of one of
[1:26:18] these alternate theories, I thought it was worth mentioning.
[1:26:21] Deborah Spungen actually believes that Nancy herself had
[1:26:26] orchestrated her own death in a way.
[1:26:29] She'd been suicidal pretty much her whole entire life.
[1:26:33] Nancy Spungen never knew peace, and she was always trying to
[1:26:37] find it. And when life got too much for
[1:26:39] her, Nancy Spungen had tried to take her own life multiple times
[1:26:43] over the years, but it was never successful.
[1:26:46] And her mother believed that this incident was Nancy just
[1:26:51] trying to get creative with how she put an end to her own life.
[1:26:57] Maybe she got into an argument with Sid that night and really
[1:27:00] riled him up, hoping that he would resort to violence, hoping
[1:27:05] that he would grab that knife that she bought him and kill her
[1:27:09] once and for all. There are a lot of rumours and
[1:27:12] theories that float around in relation to this case, that Sid
[1:27:15] and Nancy had a death pact together.
[1:27:19] If one of them was to die, then the other one promised to take
[1:27:23] their own life soon after in order to join them in the
[1:27:28] afterlife. And this theory could actually
[1:27:31] be backed up by a little piece of evidence.
[1:27:33] And I say could and, and I underline it because it's really
[1:27:38] uncertain. This piece of evidence was
[1:27:40] actually a suicide note that Sid's mother reportedly found in
[1:27:46] his jeans pocket the next day when she found him dead.
[1:27:49] Before I even read you what was supposedly written on this note,
[1:27:53] I want you to know that the existence of this note is not
[1:27:56] confirmed. This isn't like 100% evidence
[1:28:00] that there was a suicide note in his pocket.
[1:28:02] I don't know. I don't actually know.
[1:28:04] This is kind of debated, but this is what Sid's mom said
[1:28:08] happened. She found this note in his
[1:28:10] pocket that said we had a death pact.
[1:28:12] I have to keep my half of the bargain.
[1:28:14] Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me my leather jacket,
[1:28:18] jeans, and motorcycle boots. Goodbye.
[1:28:21] And that was it. Like I said, there's no proof or
[1:28:25] confirmation that this note even exists.
[1:28:28] Or if it was written by Sid, or if it was actually found in his
[1:28:31] jeans pocket, we have no idea. But if this note is real, even
[1:28:35] though it doesn't have any specific references to killing
[1:28:38] Nancy, this does seem like something that would be written
[1:28:42] about a death pact situation. You know, Nancy's gone, and now
[1:28:46] he feels like he can't be here without her.
[1:28:49] He has to go and join her. Of course, people doubt the
[1:28:52] legitimacy of this note. It is quite convenient that she
[1:28:56] happened to find a suicide note in his pocket after she
[1:29:01] administered the fatal dose to him, something that she could
[1:29:05] have got in trouble for. But if it looks like it's a
[1:29:08] suicide and he wanted that fatal dose, then I don't know.
[1:29:12] Maybe that absolves her of blame?
[1:29:14] I don't know. I'm not accusing anyone, I'm
[1:29:16] just talking. Also, I'm just personally
[1:29:19] confused when he would have got chance to write that note.
[1:29:22] He was so out of it, she administered that dose to him
[1:29:27] and then he passed out and never woke up.
[1:29:28] When would he have gotten a chance to write that note unless
[1:29:31] it had been in there all day but he'd been hanging out with his
[1:29:34] other girlfriend? At what point do you leave your
[1:29:37] girlfriend and go write a suicide note about wanting to be
[1:29:40] back with your soulmate in the afterlife or something and slip
[1:29:43] it in your pocket, return to the party, party as normal and then
[1:29:47] plan to die later on? I don't know.
[1:29:49] It just really doesn't. None of that's adding up for me
[1:29:52] personally, but I do kind of believe in general, just about
[1:29:56] Sid's death, that he was trying to die that night.
[1:30:00] And in fact, I believe ever since Nancy died, he was trying
[1:30:04] to kill himself just from some sort of like accidental drug
[1:30:08] overdose. He was trying to get to that
[1:30:10] point where it would kill him. That's just my own personal
[1:30:13] theory. And I think that because of the
[1:30:14] amount of drugs he was taking ever since Nancy died, he was on
[1:30:19] more than he ever had been. And he was, he really seemed
[1:30:22] like he was on some sort of road to destruction when he was in
[1:30:25] and out of Rikers Island. He was not the same Sid that
[1:30:28] he'd always been. And Sid Vicious had always been
[1:30:32] a character. He had always been quite
[1:30:34] dangerous when it came to his drug use and all of that.
[1:30:37] But that was on steroids ever since Nancy died.
[1:30:41] And I think it is quite believable that even if he was
[1:30:44] the one that killed her, I think he was still absolutely gutted
[1:30:48] by it. And I don't think he wanted to
[1:30:50] live anymore. I think him begging for the rest
[1:30:53] of that heroin, even him saying, Nah, this stuff too weak.
[1:30:56] Go out and get some more. I think he was trying to get in
[1:31:01] as much heroin as he could to die that night.
[1:31:03] There's another theory that I saw flirting around in relation
[1:31:06] to Nancys murder that I'm not going to get into much because I
[1:31:09] don't because I don't like this theory.
[1:31:12] That's why some people believe that Nancy may have stabbed
[1:31:17] herself that night in an attempt to, I don't know, get attention
[1:31:21] or to make Syd feel bad, something I really don't know
[1:31:25] what these people believe. And like I say, I really don't
[1:31:29] like this theory, so I'm not going to talk about it much more
[1:31:31] than that. I think it's important to
[1:31:33] remember the kind of official ruling of this case, Not even
[1:31:36] official ruling, because it didn't even go to court, did it?
[1:31:39] But the official believed series of events is that Syd killed
[1:31:43] Nancy, and I don't think it's very helpful to speculate that
[1:31:48] she might have done it to herself.
[1:31:50] Also, just with like the physical evidence and stuff like
[1:31:52] that doesn't make much sense at all.
[1:31:55] There was a lot of blood, there were a lot of stab wounds, and
[1:31:58] stabbing yourself to death in the stomach is a very uncommon
[1:32:05] form of suicide because it's difficult.
[1:32:07] Anyway, I do have one last theory that I want to end on,
[1:32:10] and this actually implicates someone else in Nancy's murder,
[1:32:14] someone that we actually haven't talked about for this whole
[1:32:17] video. This was a man named Rockets Red
[1:32:19] Glare. He was an actor, a comedian, But
[1:32:22] most importantly, and this is his link to Sid and Nancy, he
[1:32:26] was a drug dealer. He was at the party, of course,
[1:32:29] that night in the hotel room that Nancy died, and apparently
[1:32:32] halfway through the night, Nancy had asked Rockets Red Glare to
[1:32:36] go out and get them some more drugs.
[1:32:37] Now his version of events is that Nancy comes and asks him to
[1:32:41] get the drugs. He says yes, but then he leaves
[1:32:44] the hotel and never comes back. He said that when he left, Nancy
[1:32:47] was still alive, Sid was still comatose on the bed, and he just
[1:32:51] never returned. But a few years later, Rockets
[1:32:54] Red Glare randomly confessed to having killed Nancy Spungen.
[1:32:59] Whenever he would get drunk, he would confide in his friends
[1:33:01] that it was actually him and he was still getting away with it.
[1:33:04] He'd gotten away with it for so long.
[1:33:06] The theory here is that Rockets Red Glare did return after going
[1:33:10] out to get those drugs, but they think that when he returned, the
[1:33:13] party was dead. Everyone was gone, Sid was still
[1:33:16] comatose on the bed, and Nancy was nowhere to be found.
[1:33:19] And so, thinking he was the only one left, well, the only one
[1:33:23] conscious in the whole apartment, people think that
[1:33:26] Rockets Red glare decided to rob the suite.
[1:33:30] And the theory goes that Nancy stumbled out of the bathroom and
[1:33:34] caught him in the act halfway through trying to rob them.
[1:33:37] And Nancy being Nancy, she starts shouting at him.
[1:33:41] Maybe in that moment, rockets red glare spotted that hunting
[1:33:44] knife that belonged to Sid. He picked it up and started
[1:33:48] stabbing Nancy so that there'd be no witnesses to his attempted
[1:33:52] robbery. And police did actually notice
[1:33:55] at the time of Nancy's murder that over $1000 in cash was
[1:34:00] missing from the apartment. Now maybe that didn't have
[1:34:03] anything to do with Nancy's murder, but it's interesting to
[1:34:06] know. But if this whole like $1000 in
[1:34:09] cash missing thing is true, then there could be a lot of
[1:34:13] different explanations as to how that $1000 was now missing.
[1:34:17] Maybe it was spent on drugs or I don't know.
[1:34:20] They were associating with a lot of unsavory characters at this
[1:34:23] point in time so anyone could have stolen it.
[1:34:26] But anyway, to finish this video off, I do want to just remind
[1:34:29] you that despite all of these theories that we just spoke
[1:34:32] about at the end of the video, it is still believed that Sid
[1:34:35] Vicious, Simon John Ritchie murdered his girlfriend Nancy
[1:34:39] Spungen and then set about on a mission to end his own life.
[1:34:43] Whether that was intentional suicide or whether he would have
[1:34:46] just dosed himself higher and higher on heroin until the
[1:34:50] moment he died. But he got there in the end just
[1:34:53] four months after Nancy died. And that is everything I have
[1:34:57] for this case. This is one I've wanted to cover
[1:34:59] for so long. I get really interested in like
[1:35:02] Rockstar crimes. Well, just any kind of celebrity
[1:35:06] crime or scandal. Any of these stories that
[1:35:09] involve famous people. And there and Sex Pistols were
[1:35:12] one of the first like punk bands I ever got into when I was
[1:35:15] younger. And I remember hearing about
[1:35:17] this story and being absolutely flawed.
[1:35:24] Thank you so much for listening to Usual Disclaimer.
[1:35:26] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[1:35:29] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[1:35:32] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[1:35:35] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
[1:35:38] follow Usual Disclaimer on your podcast app so that you get
[1:35:41] notifications when we post new episodes.
[1:35:44] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it if you could leave a
[1:35:46] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[1:35:50] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[1:35:53] See you next time.

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