Fifty Years Later, The Sex Pistols Still Bring the Anarchy in Detroit

**The Sex Pistols Featuring Frank Carter©John Swider**

Detroit,Michigan(October 3,2026)-The Sex Pistols have always been more complicated than any of the mythology that surrounds them. They were a band that lasted only a few years, released one proper studio album, lost bassist Glen Matlock along the way, replaced him with Sid Vicious and eventually imploded under the spotlight of their own notoriety.

Fifty years after the band formed, three of those original members were standing onstage in the Motor City.

The Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter brought 50 Years of Punk to The Fillmore Detroit with Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock burning through a setlist that still sounds remarkably well suited for a current day, crowded, rowdy club.

That rowdy spirit was evident right from the first guitar lick. “Holidays in the Sun” hit with the kind of blunt force that made the Sex Pistols so disruptive in the first place, followed by “Seventeen” and “New York,” that had Carter prowling the stage as Jones, Cook and Matlock kept the songs lean, loud and fast. By the closing stretch of “New York,” Carter had clearly decided the stage wasn’t close enough to the action. He moved to the edge, signaled for the general admission crowd to open a path then watched as a passage formed toward the growing mosh pit. Finally, he jumped the stage and went straight into it, joining the fans rather than directing them from above.

Carter was not trying to be the legendary Johnny Rotten and that distinction is important. Rotten’s voice is permanently tied to the original Sex Pistols recordings, but Carter brought his own approach to the Pistols. His vocals were rough and aggressive while his constant movement gave the songs a physical edginess that matched the music.

He also had the freedom to make the performance his own.

“Pretty Vacant” and “Bodies” kept the set moving through some of the band’s best-known material before “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” offered a flashback that the Pistols’ musical identity wasn’t limited to their own catalog. The Paul Revere and the Raiders cover has long been associated with the band’s live history, and here it fit naturally between the more familiar Pistols material.

“Liar” and “God Save the Queen” followed, with Jones, Cook and Matlock sounding anything but tentative. Remember now, these guys are in their seventies!

That’s worth emphasizing because the Sex Pistols’ history has always been as much about the personalities as the music.

The original lineup of Jones, Cook, Matlock and John Lydon—better known as Johnny Rotten—helped establish the band’s reputation in the mid-1970s before Matlock departed and was replaced by Sid Vicious. The band’s original run was brief, but its impact was enormous. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols became the group’s defining statement and songs from that album still made up a majority of Saturday’s 14-song set.

Matlock’s presence was particularly noteworthy.

He was back playing bass on songs he helped create before Vicious entered the picture and there was nothing old or stale about his chops. His bass sat underneath Jones’ guitar and Cook’s drums and provided the sound structure that sometimes gets lost when the Sex Pistols’ history is reduced to controversy and attitude.

Vicious, meanwhile, remains one of rock’s most recognizable tragic figures despite having played a relatively small role in the band’s recorded catalog. His image became almost as powerful as the music, but Saturday’s performance offered a stark reminder that the Sex Pistols were also a functioning band with three musicians who remain to this day, very much capable of playing these songs live.

That became increasingly apparent during “No Fun.”

The Stooges cover was a particularly fitting choice for Detroit, connecting the Sex Pistols to the American proto-punk that influenced them. It also gave the band a chance to introduce Jones, Cook and Matlock before powering back into “No Feelings,” “Problems”and “E.M.I.”

The audience had become just as important as the band on stage by that point of the night.

Carter repeatedly worked the crowd and when he wasn’t singing from the stage, he was finding ways to get into it. The mosh pit became one of the night’s main attractions, eventually leading to a designated women-only section.

Carter was the acting stage general establishing specific rules that kept men out of the circle, allowing female fans to participate in the pit on their own terms. It was an interesting evolution of punk’s traditionally chaotic audience culture: still physical, still unruly, but with a clear understanding that everyone should have a place in it.

Later in the set, Carter told the entire crowd to jump and they did.

Afterward, he looked out over the audience and asked, “How’s the knees? And the hips?”

The question drew laughs because plenty of people in the Fillmore had likely been listening to the Sex Pistols for decades or maybe even attended a show during that ill-fated 1978 implosion. But the response to the music was hardly passive. Fans were still jumping, shouting and throwing themselves into the pit just as they had nearly fifty years ago.

That’s where the 50-year gap between the band’s origins and Saturday’s show became almost irrelevant.

“Pretty Vacant” still sounds like “Pretty Vacant.” “Problems” still sounds like “Problems.” And when “God Save the Queen” or “Anarchy in the U.K.” starts, there isn’t much explanation necessary.

The same could be said for “My Way,” the band’s famously abrasive take on the Paul Anka standard. Rather than playing it as a novelty, the band used it as another reminder of how the Sex Pistols have always approached familiar material from a different angle.

By the time “Anarchy in the U.K.” arrived, with Dave King of Flogging Molly fame joining the band, the audience had already spent more than an hour being pulled in every possible direction.

It was the appropriate ending to a performance that may never see a Detroit stage again.

There was no attempt at any point to recreate the Sex Pistols of 1977 because that would have been impossible. Lydon isn’t there, and Vicious died in 1979. The people onstage Saturday were Jones, Cook and Matlock, three original members who understand the songs from the inside, joined by Carter, a frontman with enough personality and physicality to make the material his own.

And that combination worked.

Jones’ guitar still had the necessary edge. Cook played with the directness these songs demand. Matlock anchored everything from deep underneath, while Carter turned the performance into something much more immediate than a greatest-hits spectacle.

Fifty years on, the Sex Pistols don’t need to recreate their past.

They just need to play the songs and give the audience a reason to jump.

In Detroit, they did both—and judging by the state of the knees and hips afterward, the audience was more than willing to take the risk.

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