I said, 'What are you going to do about it?' He was very well marked. In an interview, perhaps sometime in the 80s, Mercury himself recalled the encounter with Vicious: “I called him Simon Ferocious or something, and he didn't like it at all.

“Fred casually got up, walked over to him and quipped: 'Aren't you Stanley Ferocious or something?', took him by the collar and threw him out.

“One afternoon when Queen were working in the control room, Sid Vicious stumbled in, the worse for wear, and addressed Fred: 'Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?' (A reference to a quote Fred had made in the music press.) In his 2011 book Queen Unseen, Peter Hince, Queen's former longtime roadie, recalled what happened:

While the details have slightly varied over the years in the subsequent retellings of this incident, the basic premise was that Queen and the Sex Pistols were simultaneously working on their respective albums, News Of The World and Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols, at Wessex Sound Studios in north London. (What Elton John's manager John Reid once described as, “Anarchy on one side, and monarchy on the other.”) It was the “confrontation” between Queen's flamboyant frontman Freddie Mercury and the Sex Pistols' urchin bassist Sid Vicious in 1977-two men with a flair for drama who later met untimely ends. It was a moment in British music history that perhaps symbolized the apparent divide between the rock establishment and the upstart punk movement.

Queen a night at the opera sweatshirt