Sex Pistols Announce Fall 2026 North American Tour With Frank Carter on Vocals

A 50th-anniversary run, with a new frontman

On Sept. 11—nearly five decades after Sid Vicious staggered across the stage bleeding at Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom—the Sex Pistols are set to walk back into the same Texas venue under very different circumstances. The band that helped ignite British punk will return as a 50-year-old institution playing a theater tour, fronted not by Johnny Rotten but by Frank Carter.

The reconfigured group—guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, bassist Glen Matlock and vocalist Frank Carter—has announced a rescheduled North American tour for fall 2026, replacing a 2025 run that was canceled after Jones broke his wrist. From Sept. 11 through Oct. 18, the band plans to play its only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, in full each night at clubs and theaters across the United States and Canada.

The tour is billed as part of a broader 50th-anniversary celebration of the Sex Pistols’ formation and the early punk era. It has also renewed a long-running dispute inside and around the band over what, and who, the Sex Pistols are without their original singer, John Lydon—better known as Johnny Rotten.

Cities and venues: Dallas to Los Angeles

The 2026 itinerary opens at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, then moves through a mix of mid-size venues: Emo’s in Austin on Sept. 12; House of Blues in Houston on Sept. 13; Marathon Music Works in Nashville on Sept. 15; and Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sept. 17.

The band will cross into Canada for a Sept. 21 show at HISTORY in Toronto and a Sept. 22 stop at L’Olympia in Montreal, before returning to the East Coast for The Fillmore in Philadelphia on Sept. 25. Additional dates include Royale in Boston on Sept. 28, 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 29, and The Agora in Cleveland on Oct. 1.

From there, the tour heads to The Fillmore in Detroit on Oct. 3 and Newport Music Hall in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 4, then west to The Fillmore Minneapolis on Oct. 6, Ogden Theatre in Denver on Oct. 9 and The Union Event Center in Salt Lake City on Oct. 10. The run wraps along the West Coast and Southwest: Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Oct. 12, The Warfield in San Francisco on Oct. 14, SOMA in San Diego on Oct. 16, Marquee Theatre near Phoenix on Oct. 17 and the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Oct. 18.

Most of those shows are pitched as rescheduled dates from the axed 2025 run, with previously purchased tickets expected to be honored where possible. Two cities, Montreal and Denver, have been moved to different venues. New shows in markets including Austin, Boston, Columbus, Houston, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and San Diego expand the routing beyond what was announced for 2025.

Ticket details

Tickets are slated to go on sale March 6 at 10 a.m. local time through major ticketing platforms, with venue and artist presales in the days before. The band and promoters have urged fans holding 2025 tickets to confirm details with the original point of purchase.

From a benefit gig to an anniversary tour

The current incarnation of the Sex Pistols began not as an anniversary machine but as a benefit. In 2024, Jones, Cook and Matlock agreed to play a series of small shows at Bush Hall, a historic but financially distressed West London venue, with Carter on vocals. Billed as “Frank Carter and Sex Pistols,” the gigs were designed to raise money to keep the 400-capacity room open amid rising costs.

Those shows—featuring Never Mind the Bollocks performed front to back—quickly sold out and drew largely positive reviews. The response led to a U.K. tour in late 2024 built around the same album, followed by festival and headline dates in Europe and Australia in 2025. A North American leg was announced for late 2025 but called off after Jones’ injury.

“Mr. Jones here with an update on my wrist,” the guitarist said in a statement announcing the 2026 rescheduled dates. “I think it’s good enough to do the upcoming tour. Now if I can just stop my legs from buckling up, I think I’ll be in good shape.”

Jones has described the decision to keep touring as a matter of enjoyment more than nostalgia. “If it ain’t fun, I ain’t doing it,” he said in remarks released with the tour announcement. “I’m too old for bullshit.”

Cook, who has been playing periodically with Jones in various Pistols-related projects over the years, emphasized demand for the shows. “We’ve had a blast,” he said. “People want to come and see us play live… If I must say so myself, we are a great live band.”

Frank Carter’s role—and Lydon’s objections

Carter, 41, made his name fronting the hardcore band Gallows in the mid-2000s before forming Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes. He is known for high-intensity performances that often blur the line between stage and crowd, and for frank discussions of mental health and addiction.

Taking on material so closely associated with Lydon, Carter has said he approaches the role with a mix of reverence and commitment.

“There will be nothing left of me after these shows,” he told NME in an interview about the collaboration. “I’m going to leave every single ounce of me on that stage because that’s what the record deserves. I’m nervous because they’re big, big shoes to fill, but I’m just going to do my best and try and make them all proud.”

In a separate interview cited by rock outlet Kerrang!, Carter argued that the band’s catalog speaks to present-day audiences. “I think everybody needs this band right now,” he said. “I think the world needs this band right now. And I think definitely America is screaming out for a band like the Sex Pistols.”

Lydon, who is not involved in the reunion, has been sharply critical. He has repeatedly rejected the idea of the Sex Pistols performing without him, calling the Carter-led shows “karaoke” and questioning the motives of his former bandmates.

“It’s almost malicious in its intent,” Lydon told NME last year. “And it’s karaoke—that’s all it will ever be.”

In comments reported by music site Consequence, Lydon said, “They’re absolutely going to kill all that was good with the Pistols by eliminating the point and the purpose of it all. They’re trying to trivialize the whole show to get away with karaoke.”

Lydon has framed the issue as one of authorship and identity. “I wrote the fucking songs, didn’t I? I gave them the image,” he said in the same interview. “I was the frontman. I am the voice what made the whole world sing.”

His objections come against a backdrop of personal and legal conflict with Jones and Cook. In 2021, the High Court in London ruled that the band’s music could be licensed for the television drama Pistol based on a “majority rules” agreement among band members, over Lydon’s opposition. Lydon has also said publicly that the others did not contact him after the 2023 death of his wife, Nora Forster—something they have not extensively addressed in public.

How fans are responding

Fan and critical reaction to the Carter-fronted lineup has been mixed but substantial. Local and national coverage of U.K. and European dates has highlighted packed venues and high energy, with some reviewers noting that initial skepticism about a Pistols show without Lydon tended to recede once the performance began. Jones has said he was “surprised” by how little backlash materialized compared with what he expected.

Online, a generational divide is evident. Some older fans and longtime Lydon supporters echo his view that the Sex Pistols are inseparable from his voice and persona. Younger concertgoers, including many familiar with Carter’s work in Gallows and the Rattlesnakes, have treated the shows as a rare opportunity to hear Never Mind the Bollocks performed by most of the musicians who recorded it.

A landmark album, in a different era

The album, released in 1977, reached No. 1 on the U.K. charts and is widely judged by critics and historians as a landmark in punk. Its tracks—including “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “God Save the Queen,” “Pretty Vacant” and “Holidays in the Sun”—helped define the sound and imagery of the movement and drew intense opposition from British institutions at the time.

In 2026, those songs will be heard inside a far more structured live-music economy. The Sex Pistols’ North American tour is routed through the modern concert industry, with Live Nation venues, ticket presales and secondary-market speculation that would have been unrecognizable in the band’s original era. At the same time, the story of this latest reunion still traces back to a small London venue worried about keeping its doors open.

By starting in Dallas, at a ballroom tied to one of the band’s most infamous nights, and ending in Los Angeles theaters nearly 50 years after the group first crossed the Atlantic, the fall run places the Sex Pistols’ short, chaotic history in a longer frame. Whether fans view the shows as a faithful celebration of a pivotal record—or as an iteration too far from the band that made it—will be decided night by night as Carter steps to the microphone and Jones, Cook and Matlock strike up the opening chords.