FILTER BOOKS
Padlocks: Living With Sid And Nancy
★★★★
Den Browne
BACKSTAGE. £25
The untold story of life inside Sid’s secret London bolthole.
Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images
Overdosing at just 21, it’s unlikely anyone outside the Sex Pistols knew the grown-up Sid Vicious as intimately as Den Browne, the drug dealer Sid and Nancy Spungeon shared a flat with in 1977. Browne was no lowlife junkie, but a Cambridgeeducated culture vulture and friend of Tony Wilson’s. His evocative memoir of the claustrophobic goings-on in his one-room Hampstead basement finds compelling drama and revelatory detail in Sid and Nancy’s endless cycle of scoring, shooting up, nodding out and blanking star-struck visitors. Vicious emerges as witty, music-mad, damaged and cynical; Nancy as unexpectedly caring. That is, until they both transform into mercilessly horrible heroin addicts. Big on the mechanics of addiction, there’s still enough violence (Vicious has an uncontrollable temper), famous cameos (Kevin Ayers) and sex to keep drug-averse readers from suffocating in the book’s airless narcotic sewer. Does Browne think Sid dunnit? Find out…
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