A few years ago I was propping up the bar in a local pub (yes, I'm close to fifty and still live in the same town, very "punk"!) when who should walk in but that self same Friends Reunited claimant. After a bit of backslapping and banter of the "fucking hell I haven't seen you since were nippers" kind, the conversation got around to the summer I spent running with this fella's little kiddie gang.....he was a few years older than me and a brilliant footballer, so he was the natural leader....."Its funny how no other fuckers but us can remember Sid Vicious ain't it", I laughed and told him to fuck off. He looked at me incredulously and after being subjected to another couple of choice expletives said "you REALLY don't remember do you?"....."c'mon, gawky kid, John, he lived with his mum in Marine Parade, he latched on to us one day when we were climbing the rocks down on the beach, you must remember! His mum was Ann, their flat was a bit of a hippy tip!"

.........I went a little cold, fuck, I DID remember, and as I stood there chatting with my mate from all those years ago, it come flooding back in  torrents! He was right, John was gawky, in retrospect he also seemed very lonely, desperate for friends if you like, always prepared to go that one step further than the rest of us, just to impress us I suppose. But ordinary, so ordinary! Those of you who were expecting  tales of a sadistic, brash boy, a microcosm of his later alter ego if you like, will be so disappointed to know that he was a completely normal child. And this is why, I think, that he'd been filed away and forgotten right at the back of my mental filing system for all those years. Why would i remember him? Your childhood is packed full of much more interesting stuff, that an enormous amount gets forgotten until your memory gets a gentle jog.

 So what do I now remember of John? Nothing that's going to get your pulses racing if the truth be told, we only spent a few months together, climbing trees, playing on the beach, football, you know, normal kids things. The only mildly shocking tale I have to tell is of him throwing a maggot ridden dead squirrel at a bunch of workmen and then running away and acting as a decoy while the rest of us nicked all their jazz mags out of their hut. His mum was nice, if not quite all there at times...we now know why of course...and I wouldn't have said that their flat was a "hippy tip", more a scene of bohemian squalor! What happened to them? I really don't know. One day they were there and suddenly...gone! We've since learnt of course that this is how John and his mum lived their lives until they settled in London.

So there we are, my scant unimportant memories of John, but do you know that the strangest thing of all of this, is that if I'd have been able to remember him in 1976/77 I would have revelled in it and i daresay pulled a few pretty punkettes on the back of it, and yet having finally learnt that i knew him I just can't connect little "gawky John" with punk icon, big "gawky Sid"....I just feel a sense of loss, not of Sid Vicious, but of my childhood friend John.

Mad Daddy August 2007