Simon John Beverley, aka Sid Vicious, punk rock icon and stone dead at 21 was a walking Kings Road clothes-horse. He could have been one of the the great frontmen, but the only job in that area he ever really wanted was taken right from under his nose by his best mate John Lydon.

Ironcially, the week before Lydon joined the Pistols, Vivienne Westwood had seen Simon Beverley in the Kings Road and recommended him to Malcolm McLaren as the perfect frontman for the group, based purely on image alone.

Sid Vicious could have been the frontman for the Damned, but on the day he was supposed to audition he failed to turn up. Sid could have ended up married to Chrissie Hynde, but on the day they were supposed to tie the knot he failed to turn up. When Simon Beverley created the action man Sid Vicious, to not care was very "hip". This Ladies and Gentlemen was the summer of hate.

His first group was The Flowers of Romance, a name coined by Lydon who thought the idea of the band hilarious. Over the years they became punks biggest myth, despite containing some future members of various punk bands, most notably The Slits, and having Sid as their frontman, they never played a single gig and left behind them no recorded work.

Moving from frontman to drummer he was roped into, rather than joined, Siouxie and The Banshees in its first and one-off line-up. They played the 100 Club punk festival in September 1976, split up the moment they left the stage and impressed Nils Stevenson enough to talk Siouxie and Steve Severin into continuing with the group. A deal with Polydor would follow, while Marco Pirroni left to find fame later in Adam and The Ants.

Sid moved back to vocals having missed the boat marked 'Damned' much earlier and found himself back with another version of Flowers of Romance. This time though he would write the song 'Belsen was a Gas' for them and much later both himself and The Pistols would record live versions of the song.

Even by punk standards Sid Vicious was a strange case, a star before he even made a record or was in a decent band. He made a name for himself on the street by just being a punk, but unlike his friend Lydon and band mates Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, Sid wanted to live the image to the full. To McLaren, he was a walking wet dream, every inch the image and the star.

He was 19 years old when he joined The Pistols. He couldn't play a bass guitar but once Glen Matlock quit the group Sid was in. Within days he was first signed and then dropped by A&M Records.

Sid had two stable things in his life. Firstly, Nancy Spungen, a 18 year old ex-stripper and full blown drug addict who had followed Johnny Thunders Heartbreakers to the UK and hooked herself to Sid after Johnny Rotten had turned her down. He was to play a sort of 'Clyde' figure to her punk rock 'Bonnie'. She also gave him the other stable thing in his life, heroin addiction. He had dabbled with speed at college, but this was the real thing.

There isn't really much to say about his career with The Pistols. They played less gigs than with Matlock, released an album that he only played two songs on and both of which were overdubbed with bass guitar parts by Steve Jones, but this mattered little to Sid, he was now a superstar. This was everything he had ever wanted.

On January 14th, 1978, less than 24 hours after Johnny Rotten had left the group, Sid nearly died from an overdose. He was saved by John 'Boogie' Tiberi, the groups road manager. McLaren who had already noticed the clock was ticking, decided to use Sid as his star. This idea was cut kind of short though, when during a trip to Paris in 1978, a film crew, McLaren, Nancy and Sid arrived to record and film 'My Way'. At which point Sid decided to turn on the hands that feed and beat up McLaren in his hotel room.

Nancy decided that if not being able to play the bass got Sid into a group, then no knowledge of the music business would make her the perfect manager for her boy.

Having finished any last work on the 'Swindle' movie, Sid and Nancy put all their hope on a career for Sid in America. To raise money for their airfare came the gig "Sid sods off" at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, featuring the one and only performance of the Vicious White Kids: Sid (vocals), Nancy (switched off mike), Glen Matlock (bass), Rat Scabies (drums) and Steve New (guitar). The punk supergroup made flesh, it's a genuine pity no one had enough about them to keep this group together and do some recording, but time was fast running out. Six months would be all it would take to fill two body bags.

Arriving in New York, Sid and Nancy checked into The Chelsea Hotel, rock n' rolls last chance saloon. Heroin in The Chelsea Hotel is like candy at the toffee shop. People have checked in clean and left hooked to the eyeballs. For Sid and Nancy this was a bridge too far.

To his credit, Sid did play some live shows in New York, most of these taking place at CBGB's or Max's Kansas City. All of these shows were with various backing groups featuring members of Pure Hell and The New York Dolls, while Mick Jones of The Clash (a friend from home) came along and played guitar at the odd gig. But things were not going well at all, every dollar was spent on drugs and Sid was in no state to play some of the gigs. The writing was plain on the wall.

Room 100 of The Chelsea Hotel was to be the venue of the couples suicide pact.

They had talked about it often enough at least, but only one body bag left the room on October 12th 1978 and it contained 20 year old Nancy, the victim of a single stab wound. She had bled to death under the sink during the night.

Sid was totally out of it on a cocktail of various drugs and drink. A police report would later state he had enough drugs in his body to kill a horse. He woke to find the bed covered in blood and Nancy dead and he called 911 for an ambulance but got the police. Showtime, Sid Vicious 'Mr. Showbiz', starts right here. The press went mad on both sides on the Atlantic 'Punk star stabs girlfriend' sure sells newspapers.

Sid was sent to Rikers Island prison on a detox programme, but once again he tried suicide. By the time Malcom McLaren and Sid's mother, Anne Beverley, were in New York. Back home on the Kings Road this story was already selling T-shirts. This was indeed a trial by Fleet Street. Virgin Records raised the bail and Sid was back on the streets and into the arms of his mother and new girlfriend, Michelle Robinson. McLaren was clearly a worried man and paid cash to have the knife wiped of finger prints. If Sid was found guilty, this was first degree murder and carried a charge of 20 years in any one of America's toughest prisons. In a matter of weeks before Christmas he was back inside Rikers Island jail, having smashed a bottle in the general direction of Todd Smith (brother of Patti and no fan of Sid). McLaren tried to talk Virgin Records into the idea of an album based on Sid singing just cover versions. He would fly out Jones and Cook, to give Sid something to keep his mind off the trial and to help raise money for lawyers costs. They could start work as early as mid-February, but at the next bail hearing the plan went wrong.

Sid was released on February 1st a full day ahead of schedule. By February 2nd he was dead, the victim of a heroin overdose. Almost pure heroin (unknown on the streets of New York only three weeks earlier) had been sold to Anne Beverley. Her son took the lot and she later found a suicide in his jeans.

At 21 years old Simon Beverley was dead.

His version of 'Something Else' released by Virgin 20 days later would out sell 'God Save The Queen'. A three track 12" version 'Sid Vicious Heritage', would be imported by the bucket load from France. In death he was a frontman. It was a shame no one thought to do something while he was alive.

In Simon Beverley's creation of Sid Vicious, punk got its martyr and the Kings Road sure sold a whole of clothes...