10 Amazing Music Movies You Must See Before You Die

10. Sid And Nancy

Childhood prepared Sid Vicious for life in the fast lane. The son of a Buckingham Palace guardsman who abandoned the family when Sid was still a baby, he was raised by his mother, a drug dealing heroin addict. By the time Ritchie was 16, mother and son were injecting the drug together. Across the pond in Philadelphia, Nancy Spungen was a 15 year old, heroin-addicted schizophrenic whose attempted suicide saw her placed in a mental hospital. Fast forward to London, 1977, when fate star-crosses their paths. Bonding through a shared love of heroin and hell-raising, the pair begin to write what will become one of rock 'n' roll's most infamously tragic tales. Sid And Nancy, directed by Alex Cox, charts the couple's doomed relationship against a backdrop of deepening social outrage. What makes it so successful is the neutral way in which it depicts the drug use, violence and eventual murder-suicide of the fated pair, never glorifying their behaviour to shock viewers but not taking a judgemental stance either. The result? Sid and Nancy come across like two naïve children rather than the narcotic-addled monsters promoted by tabloid newspapers of the time, and the movie is all more the harrowing for it.
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Feature and fiction writer based in the north of England.