A FILM BY ALEX COX • DIRECTOR OF REPO MAN

SID & NANCY LOVE KILLS

'SENSATIONAL. A dynamic piece of work which brings audiences as close as possible to understanding its wayward heroes. Both actors are beyond praise.' VARIETY

'Gary Oldman has been hailed as the most brilliant actor of his generation.' THE GUARDIAN

EMBASSY HOME ENTERTAINMENT presents A ZENTIH PRODUCTION in association with INITIAL PICTURES A film by ALEX COX

GARY OLDMAN | CHLOE WEBB in SID AND NANCY

Director of Photography ROGER DEAKINS | Editor DAVID MARTIN | Music JOE STRUMMER, PRAY FOR RAIN AND THE POGUES
Co-Producer PETER McCARTHY | Written by ALEX COX & ABBE WOOL | Producer ERIC FELLNER | Director ALEX COX

A SOUNDTRACK LIKE NO OTHER
FROM A FILM LIKE NO OTHER

SID & NANCY LOVE KILLS

DIRECTED BY ALEX COX

MUSIC BY: JOE STRUMMER, THE POGUES, STEVE JONES, PRAY FOR RAIN, GARY OLDMAN, CIRCLE JERKS AND JOHN CALE

ALBUM: JULY 21     FILM: JULY 25

Sid and Nancy love story on film

THE controversial new film Sid and Nancy (Love Kills) is released today.

It’s not a docu-drama about punk or the Sex Pistols but the love story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

The film is almost certain to be shown in Dorset cinemas by the end of the year.

Meanwhile we have obtained a pre-release copy of the soundtrack album. Bands featured include Joe Strummer, The Pogues and John Cale.

It’s surprisingly good and it will be interesting to see the film.

MCA records have just released the soundtrack for the film, Sid and Nancy (Love Kills). The film, directed by Alex Cox, is not a docu-drama about Punk or the Sex Pistols, but the love story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

The sound track album features: Love Kills and Dum Dum Club (by Joe Strummer), Haunted and Junk Theme (The Pogues), Pleasure and Pain (Steve Jones), Chinese Choppers, Off the Boat, Burning Room and Taxi to Heaven (Pray for Rain), Love Kills (Circle Jerks), Never took No for an Answer (John Cale) and I Wanna Be Your Dog (Gary Oldman).

Soundtrack of a film portraying the relationship between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The music is suitably loud, raucous and vacuous. Joe Strummer, The Pogues and Steve Jones are among the performers.

Punk loving on film

SID and Nancy (Love Kills) is the name of a new film, directed by Alex Cox.

It tells the tragic story of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

Sid, you may remember, died from a heroin overdose, shortly after Nancy had been found stabbed to death in an hotel room in 1978. Sid was charged with murder.

The film, we're told, is not a documentary about punk, but a genuine love story about the controversial couple.

To coincide with its launch, MCA Records has released a soundtrack album. It features ex-Clash vocalist/guitarist Joe Strummer (who sings the title track), The Pogues, John Cale and former Pistols guitarist Steve Jones.

I POGO’D along to see “Sid and Nancy”, the film story of punk’s great romantic tragedy.

It is, quite simply, brilliant. The performances of Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious and Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungeon were magnificent as the film charts the decline of the couple as they dive into a drug-induced hell.

Despite the sombre nature of the story, the film has some great humour, particularly in the first half with Andrew Schofield as Johnny Rotten getting some great one-liners.

One touching moment shows Sid and Nancy kissing in an alley while garbage and dustbins fall around them in slow motion.

Another triumph for director Alex Cox (of “Repo Man” fame) whose next project is a Spaghetti Western starring Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer and the Pogues.

The Sunday Telegraph July 27, 1986 Page 19, CINEMA

Photo: Drew Schofield (Johnny Rotten) and Gary Oldman (Sid Vicious) in Sid and Nancy

Vicious circles

Gabriele Annan finds a love story beyond the noise of the Sex Pistols

A LOT of people will hate Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (Lumiere, Gate, Camden Plaza, 18), and a lot more will love hating it. Punk rock is not everybody’s can of Coke, but if you can stand the noise (the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious re-recorded by Glen Matlock, with extra music by The Pogues, Pray for Rain, and Joe Strummer), this is a very good film.

It’s about Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ bass guitarist. In 1979 he killed his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, at the notorious Chelsea Hotel in New York, and died of a drug overdose while awaiting trial.

Originally the film was to be called “Love Kills.” Cox says it recites a passage from Lucille’s autobiography about a young couple who killed themselves in a Madrid park for the transparent reason except that “a truly passionate love, a sublime love that’s reached a certain peak of intensity, is simply incompatible with life itself... it can only exist in death.”

Elvira Madigan? Tristan and Isolde? Mayerling? Yes, “Sid and Nancy” could be an updated Mayerling. For one thing, it’s about junkies. The Archduke Ferdinand was a junkie; Mary Vetsera was a Victorian groupie; and for a very short while Sid was a modern prince. None of the four (nor possibly Tristan and Isolde, for that matter) were particularly remarkable. It’s their love that makes them—or rather, their story—great. The story never fails, whether on stage, screen, in opera or ballet, so long as it’s well told.

It is well told here. And whilst Anatole Litvak had two great faces, Boyer and Darrieux, to play the Mayerling lovers, Cox pulls it off with a couple who are almost faceless: Gary Oldman has a thin dark boy with a neat nose and bad skin; Chloe Webb a bleached blonde with facial coarse features made coarser by heavy make-up. One wouldn’t recognise their pictures on a hoarding.

I can’t make out why the film is not more boring. It’s deliberately repetitious and monotonous, but that makes it real and harrowing, though not exactly heart-breaking. In spite of being set in London, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Paris, it has only three basic locations: a gig of varying degrees of poshness; a street of varying degrees of loucheness; and a hotel bedroom of varying degrees of sleaziness.

The squalor is relentless: no bed is ever made, no garbage ever thrown out. Everyone is in sweaty black leather or torn vests revealing unappealing armpits. You may not want to look when the needles go into the veins or Sid carves Nancy’s name across his chest. The dialogue is mainly four-letter words. Even the bus carrying the Pistols across the States has “F — off” sprayed on the roof. The jokes are black but very funny, especially in the S and M hooker’s flat, surprisingly located in Oakwood Court, London W14. “And who’s a naughty, naughty newsreader?”, she smiles roguishly at her client as she brandishes her whip.

Sid’s anger and excesses are a rebellion against banality. But banality is all he is capable of. Even his terminal trip, when he is dying of an overdose, is just a string of sentimental Hollywood bourgeois clichés: released from jail with a paternal lecture from a kindly black cop, he finds himself on a derelict riverside site in New York. Against a sky transfigured by the unearthly light of dawn, he dances innocently with some little black ragamuffins. A Rolls floats up with Nancy, inside, wearing a bridal dress and a coronet of barbed wire. They enfold one another and waft away to their meagre little apotheosis.

Poor corny creatures. This time the great story has turned out more sad than tragic. But I don’t believe it’s meant to be a cautionary tale about drugs, as some of the audience seemed to think.

+ + +

ROCK/POP - Robin Denselow

Joe plays it cool

SID AND NANCY: Love Kills Soundtrack (MCA).
ZODIAC MINDWARP and THE LOVE REACTION: High Priest Of Love (Food).
THE ELECTRIC BLUEBIRDS: The Electric Bluebirds (Making Waves).
CHAKA KHAN: Destiny (Warner).
ATLANTIC RHYTHM AND BLUES 1947-1974: (Atlantic Seven album set).

Photo: Joe Strummer

IT TAKES courage to make a film about Sid Vicious and not turn the soundtrack into a wall-to-wall punk thrash, and it’s one of the surprises of the Alex Cox movie that much of the music has nothing to do with the mid-Seventies. The film only fails badly when there is an attempt at realism in portraying McLaren, Rotten, or a Sex Pistols bash, and the soundtrack LP succeeds best when it allows ex-punks to try something absolutely new.

The most welcome tracks are those from Joe Strummer, simply because the Clash leader and grand old man of punk has been badly in need of rehabilitation since the last sub-standard Clash effort (especially when compared with the work Mick Jones has been doing with Big Audio Dynamite).

Now, Strummer has calmed down just a little to follow Jones into the Eighties. On Love Kills, which deserves to be more than the minor singles hit it is this week, he delivers a controlled, finger-clicking ballad over a dry, thumping riff. There’s more of a move to electronics on the clattering rocker Dum Dum Club, a mood piece about New York that again features agreeably solid and restrained Strummer vocals (even allowing for a little howling at the end). On this showing, those who have written him off are completely wrong.

The other great surprise comes from The Pogues, who on the face of it may seem to have no place in a film about punk (although Shane MacGowan was a regular around the clubs at the time). Here they move right away from their Irish roots and starts like an imitation of the early Velvet Underground, and moves on to become a gloomily tuneful pop song, with simple strummed acoustic guitar backing. Another Pogues track, Jim Finer’s Junk Theme, is like a demented skiffle piece, all wild wailing fiddle, and both sound more in the spirit of the New York Sixties underground than the track by a genuine ex-Velvet, John Cale, who adds the best thing, half-spoken blues The Never Took No For An Answer.

Those five tracks make the album well worth checking out. It’s a shame that the rest should be atmospheric fillers or the inevitably bad pseudo-punk. Gary Oldman (who plays Sid) contributes one track, I Wanna Be Your Dog, on which he drums, backed by what sound like a bunch of efficient Eighties session punks. The result is like the worst of PIL a couple of years back; I fear it’s how Sid might have ended up.

The current nostalgia for punk, ten years on, is in danger of over-romanticising an era that Johnny Rotten/Lydon now remembers most for “violence, pain, and lots of cuts and scars” (but which also produced some exceptional new noises). The mood is partly fuelled by the belief that current styles can’t match such excitement or outrage, and listening to the Zodiac Mindwarp album this is all too easy to understand.

Following the equally contrived and tacky Sputniks in the self-consciously “outrageous” stakes, this outfit present an album dressed up in pseudo-psychedelic designs that consists of little more than an adequately badly-played heavy metal thrash topped up with a dumb, unpleasant, bragging line in sexual lyrics. It’s all been done before, usually with far more style.

LOVE KILLS

Joe's title track is meaty and rocky, and the chorus swings, but that guitar riff is perhaps too blunt, emulating Sid's hollow swagger.

The lyrics had me feeling Joe was afraid to write explicitly about his friend's death and murder charge and so, after the opening salvo, which portrays Sid: "Walking out of England thinking you were the king, taking on the world..." ...he goes on one of his Hemingway inspired fantasy rambles, painting pictures of iniquity and local (in)justice in different locations across America (Alabama, Mexico, Mississippi, Rio Grande) like a sweaty noir novel while Sid rots in Riker's Island, where "they don't care about your fame." DUM DUM CLUB on the b-side, shows Joe turning his gaze more fully onto Sid (after detours in the first verse, as though carried over from the A-side, into Downtown NY and Queens).

It's harder-hitting and carries more anguish (one can detect Joe getting angry about the situation) because the lyric is less rooted in crime being something that evokes noir fiction and more about the cheap despair of drugs and the tawdry awfulness of the couple's fate: "This is New York, boy, Murder one in court, boy.

This is New York, boy, You ain't ever gonna walk.
You were a rebel in a drum town, son,
Somebody loaded up the plastic gun.
I seen that monkey got you shooting in your blood,
Using bullets from the dum dum club.
You had a shot at a thing called love In the Hollywood hills,
You can't help but follow that love...

Even if it kills." DUM DUM CLUB has never been included on any of the Strummer album re-releases and compilations and I don't know why.

I think it's one of solo Joe's best songs. -- I'd say the two songs demonstrate the struggle Joe often experienced in writing personal material. He rarely wrote about himself, his partners, his brother and family, unless masked or coded in the lyrics.

These songs about Sid frequently look away to describe the wider world instead of the more intimate, personal one... it's why the lines that deal with Sid directly are the most affecting.

But the one everyone is waiting to see is Alex Cox's Sex Pistols inspired remake Sid and Nancy.

The film originally entitled Love Kills has been given the official thumbs down by John Lydon who was less than happy with a movie which centred on the drugs-inspired death of the two main charac-ters.

Soundtrack But that hasn't stopped original Pistol Glen Matlock re-recording some of their material for the album sound-track and for former Clash-man Joe Strummer to sing the title track Love Kills which comes out on July 14.

The film is premiered in London later this month, and will probably get a panning from our serious critics.

But anyone who can make a film like Cox's Repo Man has got to be worth checking out.

Photo: Chloe Webb and Gary Oldman, who play Sid and Nancy.

Punk loving on film SID and Nancy (Love Kills) is the name of a new film, direct ed by Alex Cox.

It tells the tragic story of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

Sid, you may remember, died from a heroin overdose, shortly after Nancy had been found stabbed to death in an hotel room in 1978.

Sid was charged with murder.

The film, we're told, is not a documentary about punk, but a genuine love story about the con-troversial couple.

To coincide with its launch, MCA Records has released a soundtrack album.

It features ex-Clash vocalist/guitarist Joe Strummer (who sings the title track), The Pogues, John Cale and former Pistols guitarist Steve Jones.

ALEX COX handed me his business card when he was in Edinburgh recently, telling me all about his film, "Sid and Nancy." playing the Cameo from next Friday.

"Straight to Hell," it said, in black and red, Straight Productions being his company.

We're entitled to think he's been been to hell and back directing the sensationally sad love story of Sex Pistol Pistol Sid Vicious and his girl friend Nancy Spungen.

Nancy's body, you may recall, was found in New York's Chelsea Hotel in October 1978.

Sid was charged with her murder and died of a drug overdose before he could be brought to trial.

Cox, whose previous claim to directional fame was the highly successful "Repo Man," has done a grand job again, skilfully if expensively managing to avoid making the sort of fast buck, sensationalist-for-the-sak film we might expect considering the subject Cox, 31, from Merseyside and a product of Bristol Film School, said: "It was a really good love story story, an approximation to my own experiences in love.

In most films the problems in a love affair are from the outside a bad man or a jealous girl.

"In my experience the partners tend to wind each other up and do things to each other that aren't nice to test their love for each other.

Sid and Nancy had a truly demanding relationship.

"We started last October and shot the film in 11 weeks, half of it here, half in the States.

It looks like a high-quality film and the reason for that is Roger Deakins, who shot it very painstakingly.

He doesn't compromise.

He shot 1984 and "Another Time, Another Place." He's an artist.

Sid and Nancy cost 'a32,750,000 in Anglo-American money, which may sound peanuts in today's market, but Cox reasons: "That's a lot for a British film.

Think of Bill Douglas' films which were made for a tiny amount.

Bill's first cost about 'a310,000, his second 220,000 and his third 230,000.

"My Beauti ful Laundrette" and "Letter to Brezhnev" both cost a lot less than Sid and Nancy.

"I'm not worried about the out-lay.

I'm sure we'll recoup all that CINEMAS JOHN GIBSON and more because the picture is getting worldwide distribution and video too.

That's That's worth about four million dollars.' Casting here was done by Lucy Boulting, who found Gary Oldman, the rest of the a stage actor, and the British cast.

Gary plays Sid. Chloe Webb, who plays Nancy, and the rest of the American cast were fixed up in the States.

"Our story spans 18 months, from the spring of 1977, and originally we were going to call the film 'Love Kills," which I thought was better because that's what it's about.

There was a copyright problem in the States, but the American end end of the partnership weren't prepared to fork out the relatively small sum it would have taken to clear it up.

"That apart, this is the film we wanted to make.

Some of the rayed in it are still people portrayed in it around today.

Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren for instance.

We've not defended him and anyway we weren't trying to find a villain or point a finger at anybody." Something else Cox desperately wanted to make was a spaghetti western, and he's just done it with "Straight to Hell," w which he shot in Spain in a month in -in Almeria, where Connery and Bardot starred in "Shalako." "We're editing it now and it'll be finished by Christmas.

Dennis Harper and Grace Jones are in it, along with Elvis Costello, ex-Clash front man Joe Strummer and The Pogues."

Photo: ALEX COX director who has been to hell and back.

But the last thing lead singer Shane McGowan ever expected in his wil-dest flights of fancy was to wind up as a bandelero in a spaghetti western somewhere in the middle of Spain.

And yet there they were under the hot Spanish sun, all geared up and ready for action.

And if ever the Pogues wished for a couple of pints of stout it was while making their Hollywood debut a summer holiday.

"Alex Cox, the guy who made the film "Love Kills," the story about Sid Vicious, has made this movie called "Straight To Hell," Shane declared the afternoon after their show in Manchester this week.

"It stars people like Joe Strummer from the Clash and then there's us, but we don't say very much.

We're just this bunch of bandits. And we wrote most of the music for it as well." The film is due out next Easter.

It was made on the ver very same location as that for "For A Few Dollars More" and many other blood splattering-Clint Eastwood epics.

But the call of the ballad was too strong for these particular rogues and so they left behind their movie star status on the Spanish dust and pre-pared for their return to the wild roving highways of Britain and Ireland, for some yuletide festivities of the wildest fashion.

The band invade the nation's eardrums this Friday, December 19 in the Olympic Ballroom (late night) with their own "Back From Hell Tour" and again the following night in the SFX Hall.

With an extra con-cert in the Top Hat, Dun Laoghaire on Sunday night.

A Pogues concert is a sight never to be forgotten. It may not be their the lads are back from hell fault but the lads just happen to attract every type of oddball, folkie, trendy, punk and rock and roller from every corner of the country. The only thing this crowd have in common is that most of them will have had a wee dram or two before the show.

"Basically Irish crowds are like a lot of crowds", says Shane. "A third of o them are complete nutters, but the rest of them just want to have a good time.

We've nev really had any real trouble at our gigs. Everyone just gets smashed." Shane says the band love to play both Dublin and Belfast. Their Irish connections in both music and background speaks, or rather sings for itself. But the best show by far for Shane was in Kenmare ON HIS OWN Shane MacGowan lead singer with the Pogues.

in 1985. He starts to laugh as he tried to re-member just exactly what happened that night. "Aw it was just crazy. I mean it was the wildest crowd I have ever played to. That was when the crowd were significantly ... well they couldn't stand up right for a start, and the band were pretty bad too.

It was great. I'd love to go back". By now y you may have you may gathered that the Pogues like a drink now and again.

Their fast and furious sprint through the heart and soul of the traditional Irish ballad to say nothing of Shane's own original songs has won praise on both sides of the Atlantic and has meant plenty of work on the live circuit every-where.

Their last release was a single called "Haunted", taken from an Alex Cox film. It's a very different sounding Pogues. They almost sounded pretty.

But fear not. As Shane says, they just wanted to see if they could score a hit with a pop song.

PHOTO: WITH THE REST Shane with the other members of the band including Calt O'Riordain who left after she married Elvis Costello.

The return of Joe Strummer. A silhouette caught in the desert sun. A spaghetti western shot amid the city streets. And the title track, so to speak, from the soon come movie Sid And Nancy. And, yes, it really is ten years since punk.

Alex Cox, director of the film, has it that this is Joe Strummer's best work for a long, long time. But then he's in cinema, so what does he know? Quite a lot, as it happens. Great slabs of crucial Clash style gutter guitar rip this song wide open like a Texan with a chainsaw. And the rhythm which follows is pure combat rock. Oriental eyes peer at the corpse of Nancy Spungeon. There is blood on the blade. And plenty of Strummer heroics and myth-taking.

You still can't understand half of whatever he's singing about. But there's that familiar plaintive edge to his voice – a sensation we cannot do without – and there's a familiar power in his open range swagger.

I'm given to understand that, even as we speak, Joe Strummer is getting together with Mick Jones with a view towards lending a hand on the new BAD LP. I do hope this very nice story is true because 'Love Kills' is a far better record than anything BAD have come up with so far – although it is not entirely removed from that style and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Jones has had at least half a finger in this pie. You would almost swear that you can hear his voice and it would be good to have the old firm trading again.

But even if it isn't true, this is still a better record than anything by BAD and it's still a very nice story. And one of these days these people will get themselves organised.