Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook are reuniting as The Sex Pistols for two London shows with Frank Carter in place of John Lydon. Can you even call them The Sex Pistols without Johnny Rotten? Lydon would certainly argue “no” and most other people would too, and these shows are officially billed as Frank Carter & The Sex Pistols. They’ll play Never Mind the Bollocks front-to-back.
The shows happen August 13 & 14 at Bush Hall and are for a good cause, with proceeds benefiting the venue to help keep it going. “This is my local venue. I grew up in Shepherd’s Bush and I still live round here,” Paul Cook said in a press release about the shows. “It would be a real shame to see it disappear and we want to keep it going. So everyone get down to the gig!”
“Will be an honour to smash our way through one of the most influential records of all time together,” Carter wrote on Instagram.
No word from Lydon…yet.
The Sex Pistols, all of them, reunited for the “Filthy Lucre” reunion tour in 1996, and then again in 2002-2003 (including North American shows) and one more time in 2007-2008, but in the years since have fractured, with Lydon on one side and the rest of the band on the other. Lydon took Jones, Matlock and Cook to court trying to bar the use of Sex Pistols songs in Danny Boyle’s 2022 biopic miniseries about the band, and lost.