For sale: Sid Vicious’ SEX tee and New Boots & Panties!!

THE LOOK can exclusively reveal that the vendor of the swastika t-shirt worn by Sid Vicious in The Great Rock & Roll Swindle is also selling two more of the Sex Pistols bass-player’s possessions: another t-shirt designed by the late Malcolm McLaren as well as Vicious’ own copy of Ian Dury’s album New Boots & Panties!!.

 

//Image courtesy of helen-hall.com//

The swastika tee is priced at £10,000 in the sale, which is being conducted privately by independent rock and film memorabilia specialist Helen Hall.

//Image courtesy of helen-hall.com//

The other top – which has one of the variations of the design Smoking Boys, produced by McLaren in autumn 1975 – is £2,000, while the Ian Dury record, which has Sid Vicious’ signature taped to it, is £2,500.

//Image courtesy of helen-hall.com//

Both were housed as part of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame exhibition in Cleveland. The swastika tee was offered, but not accepted because of its inflammatory nature.

Hall says the items were given to the vendor by Vicious’ mother Anne Beverley, after his death on February 2 1979.

The Dury album (the sleeve of which was designed by the great Barney Bubbles) was a gift to Vicious from a fan named Patsy during his spell in New York’s Bellevue Hospital in October 1978.

//Pages 8-9, Anarchy In The UK No 1, 1976//

The Smoking Boys is of particular interest since there are no photographs nor documentary evidence of Vicious wearing it; in 1978/9 during his time in London and New York he favoured more recent designs from 430 King’s Road in it’s Seditionaries incarnation, including Expose and Fuck Yr Mother & Run Away Punk!,  McLaren’s provocative and overtly sexual adaptations of novelty shirts bought at LA sex shop The Pleasure Chest and on New York’s gay strip Christopher Street.

Vicious did wear a version of SEX’s Smoking Boys in 1976, as shown in the Ray Stevenson photographs in the first and only issue of the band’s fanzine Anarchy In The UK (a copy of which I bought on my 17th birthday in December 1976 in a news agent’s in Goodge Street, central London).

//Detail, page 9, Anarchy In The UK No 1, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson//

The image, which was replicated in a number of different ways, came from an English underground magazine McLaren bought in south London.

“This was my first attempt at making a Sex Pistols T-shirt; I was acting on behalf of the group and wanted to create something of a stir,” McLaren told me last year.

“In the back streets of Brixton, I found photos of nude young boys, smoking. I chose one and he became my sexy young assassin: a ’sex pistol’.  All I needed was to draw a guitar.”

McLaren attempted to persuade associate Bernie Rhodes to print the t-shirts. “This was too much for him,” he said. “Bernie used to perspire at the kitchen table, as if somebody was about to break down the door, arrest him and charge him with being a paedophile, and so he would go to prison. That would all be my fault. I ended up simply making a single nude boy on pink jersey shirts for myself.”

For the versions with multiple images, McLaren coerced the Sex Pistols founding member, bass-player Glen Matlock to utilise the screen-printer at his college, Saint Martin’s School Of Art.

How Vicious had one two years later on the other side of the Atlantic is not explained.

“It was with Sid’s belongings when he died so we have to assume he likely wore it at some point,” says Hall, who was a specialist in rock and film memorabilia with Christie’s London and New York from 1998-2008.

Interested parties should direct their inquiries to Hall at helen@helen-hall.com