About Sid Vicious
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.
Described by peers as 'slender and likable', Ritchie took the stage name "Sid Vicious," which reportedly came from an ironic joke involving the name of Lydon's pet hamster "Sid the Vicious," which had a habit of biting people. The new name may have been helpful because both his co- squatters, Lydon and John Wardle (later known as Jah Wobble), were also named John and the three of them were sometimes referred to as The Three Johns. He reportedly made a deliberate effort to match the media myths that grew up around him and his name.