Sid Vicious (1957-1979)

Ritchie was born in London to parents John and Anne Ritchie, a former grenadier guard. His father left shortly afterwards, and, during his early years, he moved with his mother to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where she allegedly made a living selling drugs. The pair later moved back to England, where Anne married Christopher Beverly in 1965 before setting up a family home in Kent, England.

His stepfather died six months later, and by 1968 Ritchie and his mother were living in a rented flat in Tunbridge Wells where he attended Sandown Court School. In 1971 the pair moved to Hackney in north London where in 1974 Ritchie first met John Lydon (later known as Johnny Rotten), a fellow student at Hackney Technical College.

By 1974 he had already begun using drugs intravenously with his mother, and, by 1975, he had started to self harm and exhibited antisocial tendencies; some accounts of his life relate that he strangled a cat and assaulted a pensioner around this time.