Sid Vicious
Never Mind The Reunion (Cleopatra)
by Chris Adams
Sid did it his way. Which is to say, he played an awful bass for one of the most important rock bands ever, haplessly followed Johnny Rotten like a lost little puppy, acted as idiot marionette for Malcolm McLaren’s conniving manipulations, dated an obnoxious groupie, became a junkie, killed the groupie, died of an overdose, and had a movie made about him a decade later.
By far, the most important of these acts was the dying part. In doing so, he secured himself icon status for every half-witted hedgehog-head with a leather jacket, low self-esteem, and a propensity for self-mutilation. It’s evident in the title that Cleopatra Records is releasing this album as a reaction to the Sex Pistols reunion tour, playing up Sid as the crucified punk rock poster-boy, betrayed in death by Johnny “Judas” Rotten and his fat, 40-plus bandmates as they sold out some purist punk ideal in a desperate bid to make the mortgage payments.
I don’t buy it. First of all, the Sex Pistols tour didn’t suck because they “sold out.” Remember, this was a group whose motto, 20 years ago, was “cash from chaos.” So, if the original “punk ideal” was founded on capitalism, the reunion tour can be seen as a direct extension of that ideal, one final joke being perpetrated on the public at their own expense. The Pistols tour was crap simply because they played it straight, without acknowledging the implicit irony of the Sex Pistols playing packed stadiums across the world.
There was no implied subversion, no knowing winks, no “beating the enemy at his own game.” It was simply an old rock and roll band running through “the big hits,” stripped of all threat and relevance – peddling nostalgia to an audience generally far too young to have anything to be nostalgic about.
Rotten, once the cacklin’ enfant terrible of rock and roll, seemed little more than a clownish buffoon in maternity-ward pyjamas – an exercise in unintended self-parody. The Sex Pistols had become, essentially, the Eagles – a manifestation of everything they opposed the first time around.
Simply put, they were boring. But was Sid “turning in his grave,” as one reviewer put it? No fucking way. If he were still alive, you can bet your last safety-pin that he’d have been right up there with ’em. If Sid stood for anything besides heroin addiction, he stood for abject compliance – a willingness to take the path of least resistance, out of sheer lethargy and a desire to be accepted. (At least, that’s the way it’s told in Rotten’s autobiography, and, for want of any better source, I’ll go with it.)
O.K. – so the guys up it marketing got it all wrong. But the question remains, as always: does it rawk? The answer: yes – albeit, in Sid’s way. Which is to say it’s incredibly badly recorded, the performances are sloppy as hell, and the audience sounds like a buncha drunken yahoos not at all sure about what they’re witnessing, which is essentially Sid stumbling through a selection of cover tunes. You get “My Way,” of course, where Sid admirably forgets the words, Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” The Monkees’ “Stepping Stone,” Eddie Cochran’s “Something Else,” yadda yadda yadda. In short, you get everything you’d want on a Sid Vicious live album. Think about it: could you really bear cringing through an hour of tunes that Sid wrote, recorded in crisp DAT through the soundboard so you could catch every last nuance of the slop dribbling down his chin? Me neither. As it stands, I don’t know if I’ll ever wanna play this again, but, like Sid himself, it’s got it’s place in history. (Incidentally, kudos, as they say, are due to Cleopatra Records, for the sheer brazen balls to tag on four “alternative” versions of songs performed earlier in the disc – which, in fact, sound exactly the same as the initial performances.)
