Myth or madness: Where are Sid Vicious’ ashes really scattered?
The death of Sid Vicious was one that rocked the punk world to its very core, being as undeniably tragic as it was plainly mysterious.
Of course, the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen and the air of suspicion that clouded the Sex Pistols bassist was more than enough to send the conspiracy theorists, at any time from that fateful night in 1979 to now, into complete and utter overdrive, but the direct reality is that the exact truth of the matter will never be fully known, and people just need to live with that.
Whether it was a suicide pact between the pair, according to the theory peddled by Vicious’ mother, or a whole host of other sinister possibilities at play, is almost out of the question at this point in time. The more intriguing thing is not the circumstances around Spungen’s death or what led the Sex Pistol to his overdose, but where he actually rests.
In a lot of cases, for obvious reasons, those kinds of details regarding a transcendent star would undergo a painstaking process to be kept quiet. Yet for a man whose whole life was based on sheer exuberance and bloody-mindedness, to put it mildly, it also seems at odds with everything he would have wanted.
But regardless, you can probably be fairly confident in saying that he would likely not have approved of his ashes being scattered at Heathrow Airport. If it had some special significance to him, sure, but no one wants to be remembered in the scores of stressed travellers trying to find their terminal, or getting sucked in by the prices in duty-free.
What actually happened to the ashes of Sid Vicious?
So, it begs the question – how did the rumour come to be that his ashes were spread there? It might have had something to do with the fact that when Vicious’ mother, Anne Beverley, returned to London after taking her son’s remains back home from New York, she accidentally knocked the urn over in the arrivals lounge.
While this inevitably spilt a small part of the remains, as rockers often do, the story got fancified and exaggerated until it became the myth that the ghost of the former Sex Pistol remained floating around the hallowed halls of Heathrow, when this couldn’t have actually been further from the case.
The reality, it seems, was that Vicious’ ashes were actually scattered over the top of Spungen’s grave in Philadelphia, thus giving a romantic ending to this otherwise tragic affair. In doing so, it supposedly also confirmed that with the family’s blessing, he was the innocent party in his girlfriend’s death, although no one can ever formally confirm.
Ironically, for a genre so blazing and forthright in its approach, the punk era was littered with stories like that, which posed more questions than they did provide answers. Vicious and Spungen were obviously the most famous examples, and so long as their legacies live, the rumours will always thrive.
