Why did the Sex Pistols play under pseudonyms?
I don’t want to blow your mind too much, but it turns out that ‘Johnny Rotten’ and ‘Sid Vicious’ weren’t their real names. I know, shocking, right? Although perhaps it’s for the best that the men born John Lydon and Simon Ritchie weren’t born with monikers like that. It would have been dead awkward if they’d wanted to go into, like, accounting or something like that. That said, there was absolutely no way that those two gentlemen were going to be anything other than Sex Pistols.
Lydon because there was nothing else he wanted to do, and Vicious because there was quite simply nothing else he could do. There are several convincing arguments to be made that he couldn’t even do that, but he did look damn good shirtless holding a Fender bass. That was really what Rotten and band manager Malcolm McLaren wanted from the bass player of the Pistols, so when it came time for the musically gifted Glen Matlock to sling his hook, Vicious was a natural fit for the band.
However, why did he and Lydon have pseudonyms while the rest of their fellow Pistols did not? Guitarist Steve Jones was just as much of a punk caricature as Rotten and Vicious were, and the whole band were as manufactured as any boy band. Surely it would have been a great branding exercise for each member of the Sex Pistols to have their own nickname and visual identity, Kiss style? Well, perhaps, but the truth is a little more complicated than that.
After all, this was the heady days of punk rock. A subculture that prized authenticity just as much as it did freedom of expression. Yet, the Sex Pistols were a project masterminded by a Svengali-style manager to promote his girlfriend’s Kings Road clothes boutique. They had to look the part and have that air of provocative shock value, yet if they looked too much like cartoon characters, all the punks would start gobbing on them not out of respect but out of… y’know, that other thing.
So, why did the Sex Pistols have pseudonyms?
The truth is that both Lydon and Ritchie had their nicknames a long time before the Sex Pistols came together. Bringing their nicknames, along with their “characters” as it were, into the band rather than developing them for it. Which is arguably the ideal way that a British punk character could be created. It’s larger than life and clearly not “real” in the traditional sense, but still comes from a real place.
If anything, somewhat too real as the stories behind both nicknames kind of take away the edgy, rock-star sheen that both men once had. Lydon started being called Johnny Rotten because when he first started hanging out at Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex, his teeth were rotten to the point of falling out. Lydon told the Daily Star that at the time, “there were bits of my teeth missing. I had green mould growing on all the tops. I didn’t brush my teeth.”
Thus, his mates started calling him ‘Johnny Rotten’ to take the piss out of him. Much in the same way that they called Ritchie ‘Sid Vicious’. At the time, Lydon owned a hamster called Syd, named after Syd Barrett (“I Hate Pink Floyd” indeed), who once bit Ritchie when he was holding the rodent. Ritchie flipped out so bad that he accused his assailant (who was, and I can’t stress this enough, a literal hamster) of being “vicious”. The name stuck.
There was also a practical reason for these nicknames. At the time, Vicious was going by his middle name, John, Simon being too uncool for him, I guess. This left their entire group of friends all going by the name John, so something had to be done to tell them about it. John Lydon became Johnny Rotten. John Ritchie became Sid Vicious, and in a truly bizarre example of how small a world it is, John Wardle became Jah Wobble.
