Sid Vicious and the Velvet Underground: Why did John Lydon call Lou Reed a “vacuous fat slob”?
It doesn’t seem possible that there’s a positive way to spin calling someone a “vacuous fat slob”. And in his career of takedown and insults, John Lydon, has rarely been trying to be kind. However, there is more to this callous takedown of Lou Reed, as Lydon’s shots come from a clear sadness.
In most cases, when it comes to Lydon’s cruel comments on his musical peers or new artists, it just feels like he’s trying to get a rise out of the press. That was always the Sex Pistols’ purpose in a lot of ways, as Malcolm McLaren crafted the group to sell outrage to the new generation masses. In 1976, they gained a new wave of attention after Lydon repeatedly swore on national TV with David Grundy.
For Steve Jones, the band’s singer, that was a landmark moment. “Before it, we were all about the music, but from then on, it was all about the media,” he said in his biography. “In some ways, it was our finest moment, but in others, it was the beginning of the end… In terms of the Sex Pistols having any kind of long-term future, this sudden acceleration was the worst thing that could possibly have happened.”
Before that moment, the band had been happy being kings of their distinct scene as London’s underground venues led the punk wave. But after that moment, as the attention mounted, everything changed as they booted out Glenn Matlock and replaced him with Sid Vicious, wanting someone wilder and more fitting with their look.
Vicious and Rotten were long-term friends, and Rotten hoped having his mate there might help the group dynamics a little. However, it would be a move everyone would come to regret or one that Lydon always seemed a little guilty over. For Jones, it was another changing point; “From the minute Sid joined the band, nothing was ever normal again.”
“Up to that time, Sid was absolutely childlike,” Lydon said of his friend. “Everything was fun and giggly. Suddenly, he was a big pop star. Pop star status meant press, a good chance to be spotted in all the right places, adoration.” With that naivety, paired with their reputation for being wild, the pressure put on them by McLaren to live up to that and the copious amount of drugs around them, it was a perfect storm for total and utter destruction. Add into the mix a self-serving desire for fame rather than a desire to make music or exist as a working band, and it seemed predictable that Vicious would fall into the deep end and not come out.
So, where does Lou Reed come in? In a 2009 interview with the Daily Star, when Lydon called The Velvet Underground leader a “vacuous fat slob”, it felt like nothing but a randomised attack on a name used as a scapegoat. Lydon isn’t angry at Reed. Instead, he’s angry at himself, at Vicious and maybe at the music industry as a whole for allowing fame to get dangerously ahead of all else.
“That’s all kids today want, fame. But there’s always been ‘artists’ or ‘puppets’ like that who are willing to do whatever the record company or television people tell them to do, a long time before me even,” Lydon said in a conversation about the contrast between stardom and art. He said that his friend fell victim to that vacuous view of making art where it was all about the image and the antics above all else.
“It’s all so trivial-minded, the fame and music game. Sidney made that mistake,” he admitted. “He was all: ‘Drugs yeah, it’s all about drugs’ – just because he had a Lou Reed record and he believed in the druggy image Lou gave off.”
Through his own career, especially during the early days of The Velvet Underground, Reed’s artistry was inseparably linked to drugs. His song ‘Heroin’ was a big one for ushering in the end of the 1960s’ trippy optimism and soundtracking the movement towards darker times and heavier substances. Through his lyrics and soundscapes, he painted the world of class A’s as twisted yet romantic, definitely being guilty of tying the links between drugs, art and the tortured artist myth close together. But he was one of many. The same could be said for Jim Morrison, the Ramones and a whole host of rock acts that came before Sex Pistols.
The thing that Vicious never got to see, however, was their grizzly endings. As he fell headfirst into the dark world he’d romanticised, the Sex Pistol would die before being confronted by the endings of his idols or seeing the effect drugs can have on a person. That’s what Lydon is upset about.
Lou Reed just became an easy target as he said, “Sid’s downfall was that he didn’t get a chance to meet Lou Reed before he knew what he was doing. He would never have messed with heroin had he seen what a vacuous fat slob Lou Reed really is.”
