U p until the second the Sex Pistols took the stage at London’s Bush Hall last September with new vocalist Frank Carter, nobody had any real idea if this new incarnation of the band could work. In the group’s five-decade history, they’d never played a single gig without John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) — inarguably the most iconic figure of the Seventies U.K. punk revolution — and the band was attempting to move forward without him following years of acrimony, nasty barbs in the press, and a massive legal row that brought band tensions to an all-time high. 

“As I was walking up the street towards the venue, someone called out my name, pointed at me, and went, ‘Big shoes,'” says Carter, a heavily tattooed, 41-year-old singer who cut his teeth in hardcore U.K. punk bands like Gallows and Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. “I kept walking, but what he said really stayed in my head. I hadn’t given it much thought until that moment. But he was right. And then I was shook, really fuckin’ nervous.”

His nerves vanished the second that drummer Paul Cook pounded out the intro to “Holidays in the Sun,” and bassist Glen Matlock and guitarist Steve Jones fell in line, with the capacity, overwhelmingly young crowd frantically pogoing like their parents — and even grandparents — did at the 100 Club back in 1976. The chaotic state carried through the entire show, which included a complete performance of the band’s sole studio album, 1977’s Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and “No Fun” by the Stooges, a mainstay of their early gigs.

“It was just like going back in time,” Jones says. “It was nuts. We were looking at each other, me, Glen, and Paul, like, ‘This is happening!’ This was right off the bat. It wasn’t even a question.”

Once footage of the performance hit the Internet and rave reviews appeared in the U.K. press, offers for festival and headlining gigs soon poured in, leaving the band stunned. Since then, they’ve spent the past few months gigging across Europe and Australia, and, in September, will launch a North American leg that will take them through the U.S. for the first time since 2003. (The played a one-off L.A. date in 2007, and another in Las Vegas in 2008.)

Needless to say, Lydon isn’t happy about any of this. “That’s a clown’s circus at work,” he told the Independent. “Sorry, I’m not going to give a helping hand to this any longer, as far as I am concerned, I am the Pistols, and they’re not.” In another interview with NME, he said the concerts were little more than “karaoke. “That’s all it will ever be,” he said. “Bloody hell, the Three Stooges in that band have had how many years to write some new songs? That’s what I’d like to hear.” 

His former bandmates weren’t the least bit surprised. “It says lots of things, don’t it?” says Matlock, who spent the past few years playing bass in Blondie. “It’s all to do with respect. And people who respect other people wouldn’t say something like that.”

“He’s entitled to his opinion,” adds Cook. “He always thought he was the Pistols, but I think he hasn’t read the reviews. I think we’re better with Frank in the band at the moment. And I don’t know if John knows this, but me, Steve, and Glen were the Sex Pistols as well.” (We attempted to interview Lydon for this article. “I’m afraid John isn’t up for this,” says his press spokesperson. “I’m sure you’ll understand why!”)

This isn’t the first time the Sex Pistols tried to carry on without a founding member. That was in February 1977 when they made one of the most ill-fated decisions in rock history to jettison Matlock — a key architect of the band’s sound and their primary songwriter — and replace him with Sid Vicious. The fact that Vicious had a severe heroin addiction and no ability to play bass, let alone write songs, didn’t seem to bother Lydon or Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, the two orchestrators of the scheme.

“Sid did become this iconic figure,” says Cook. “Image-wise, it was fantastic because he had all this aggression. The band looked great. But it wasn’t great songwriting-wise for the band. And everything just imploded and went so crazy when Sid joined. We just couldn’t hold it together. We all became Public Enemy Number One. It’s hard to explain the press reaction, what went on with punk over here at the time. It was out of all proportion, really.”

Looking at the Sex Pistols suddenly as an outsider, Matlock was horrified by the provocations of the band in the Sid Vicious period, including an infamous 1978 U.S. tour where McLaren (who died in 2010) booked them at honky-tonk bars in Texas, hoping to invite a hostile reaction from the crowds. “We were pelted with all sorts of things, dead rats, pig ears, coins, bottles,” says Cook. “Just talking about it now is going to give me nightmares tonight.”

“It just became a cartoon,” says Matlock.

The Sex Pistols cartoon show came to an end just a little over a week into their inaugural U.S. tour in January 1978. Nobody was shocked. “There was no way it was going to last,” says Jones. “You’ve got to remember we’re like 19, 20 years old. And we were just all nuts at this point.” (Vicious died of a heroin overdose one year later while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.)

In the years that followed, Lydon maintained a high profile with his post-punk band Public Image Ltd, who scored radio hits like “Rise” and “This Is Not a Love Song.” Matlock worked with Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders, while lifelong friends Jones and Cook attempted to carry on together as the Professionals, but struggled to find relevance in the MTV era. “I was living hand-to-mouth,” says Jones. “I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent on my apartment.”

Lydon told the press packed into the 100 Club in March 1996. “But we’ve found a common cause, and that’s your money.”

The Eagles, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and other fractured Seventies acts had all reconvened in recent years, lured by enormous paydays, and the Sex Pistols were jumping on the bandwagon. “These are the people that wrote the songs, and now we’d like to be paid for it,” Lydon said. “Over the years every fucker has lived off us, and we haven’t seen penny one.”

He was only slightly exaggerating. The Pistols never rose out of the clubs during their original incarnation and lived off near-starvation wages doled out to them every week by McLaren. A reformation was a chance to finally make money, play proper venues, and right the historic wrong of pushing Matlock out of the band.

“These are the original members,” Lydon said, pointing to Cook, Jones, and Matlock. “Sid was nothing more than an empty coat-hanger to fill an empty spot onstage.”

The timing was perfect. Not only was the 20-year rule of nostalgia starting to kick in, but punk was now mainstream, thanks to young bands like Green Day, Rancid, and the Offspring. An ambitious slate of 72 shows was booked that took the group to Eastern Europe, North America, Australia, England, Japan, and South America between June and December 1996.

“In the Seventies, you always heard, ‘Oh, them guys can’t play,'” says Jones. “And this tour was, ‘We’ll show you we can play!’ And the shows were great. I wish we could have done it another year since I really needed the bread.”

All four of them needed the bread, but the grueling schedule left Cook and Matlock miserable after just a few months. “Old resentments came up within the band and all this same sort of shit was going on,” says Cook. “John’s not the easiest person to get along with. And to be honest, I couldn’t wait for it to end. It went on way too long.”

Future runs were limited to two concerts in 2002, a dozen U.S. shows in 2003, and seven 30th-anniversary U.K. gigs in 2007. The next summer, however, they agreed to 32 concerts that focused almost entirely on festivals. Much like 1996, it proved to be too much time together for a group of people that, with the exception of Cook and Jones, didn’t particularly like one another in the first place. 

The tour also happened to coincide with the 2008 global financial meltdown. “We thought we were getting a certain amount of money at the beginning, and we ended up getting half,” says Jones. “We were making peanuts. I was just like, ‘Fuck this, I’m done.’ It was so toxic.”

After just four shows, Jones was already thinking of taking drastic action to end the tour at England’s Isle of Wight Festival. His desperate ploy — which he didn’t pull off — involved feigning a fall off the stage. “I was going to break my wrist on purpose,” he says. “I got on the ferry after we played, and was like, ‘Get me out of here. I didn’t ever want to fucking hang out with [Lydon] again!'”

There were another 28 shows to go. In his 2016 memoir Lonely Boy, Jones described a particularly harrowing scene on a private plane after a show, when Lydon was told by the flight crew that he had to put out his cigarette. 

“Rotten goes absolutely ballistic,” Jones wrote. “He’s like a fucking baby having a tantrum — banging on the pilot’s door, trying to open the windows and doors in the fuselage, basically risking all our lives to have a [cigarette]. It’s two in the morning, we’re all knackered and everyone’s trying to make out they’re [sleeping], but no one is, cos a man in his fifties has gone into full-on meltdown mode about not getting his way.”

The band is reluctant to get into too many other details of Lydon’s behavior on that tour. “I thought that [plane story] wasn’t for public consumption, but there was lots of things like that,” says Matlock. “It wasn’t good. It was childish. Most people in their life, when they upset people when they’re growing up, their mum and dad make them stand in a naughty corner for a bit. And some people, I don’t think that ever happened to them. I wonder who that could be…”

The tour finally ended Sept. 5, 2008, at a festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The night is seared into the memories of Jones and Matlock, with the trouble starting before they even got onstage: Lydon, accidentally or not, blew a giant wad of snot onto the back of Matlock’s pants. “There was a towel on top of my amp and I went to get it to wipe it off,” he says. “When I went to do my background vocals for the first time, a glass of something, hopefully it was beer, hit me in the face. I went to get the towel off my amp, but I couldn’t use that because I knew it had Johnny Rotten’s snot all over it. That’s what I remember. And that kind of summed everything up.”

Later in the night, not realizing they were in Basque country, Lydon said, “Viva Spain.” “The people there don’t like the Spanish,” says Jones. “They wasn’t happy about that. They started slinging shit at us.”

The newest chapter of the Sex Pistols saga began very quietly last year at a tiny coffee shop in the Soho neighborhood of London. At the behest of Cook, the group was beginning to plot a show to save the beloved Shepherd’s Bush concert venue Bush Hall. They initially thought about playing Never Mind the Bollocks straight through with a rotating cast of guest singers. 

“A couple of names, I won’t tell you who, had been put forward, I wasn’t that keen on,” says Matlock. “And my son Louis overheard me talking to our manager. I thought nobody else was in the house. But Louis come in, and he’s going, ‘No, no, no…'”

Louis Matlock has his own group, Dead!, and they toured a few years back with Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. He believed Carter would be perfect for the job, able to deliver Lydon’s words without succumbing to imitation. Intrigued, Glen Matlock asked to meet the singer at the coffee shop to run the idea past him. “I was shocked when I heard what he was proposing,” says Carter. “I thought he just wanted to meet and hang out.”

Jones was at his home in Los Angeles, but Matlock invited Carter to jam at a West London rehearsal hall with him and Cook. He gave him just two days to prepare. “I got in the room and forgot everything,” says Carter. “I’ve been listening to that record probably since I was 12, and all of a sudden I was starting too early, coming in late, forgetting words. I remember leaving and calling my mom. I was like, ‘I just played with a couple of the Pistols and I really feel like I did a bad job.’ She’s like, ‘Well, that’s punk.’ And I was like, ‘No, not how I wanted it to be.'”

Matlock and Cook disagreed and invited him back a few days later to rehearse with Jones. It was the first time the three of them had played together since the end of the 2008 tour. In the years that followed, Cook and Jones briefly teamed up with Billy Idol and his Generation X bandmate Tony James to form the supergroup Generation Sex. It lasted just a handful of dates, but it was proof that some form of the band could exist without Lydon. “I never thought about it until we did that thing with Billy,” says Jones. “I think that was a stepping stone.”

Right around this time, all hell broke loose in Sex Pistols world over Danny Boyle’s FX miniseries Pistol, which was based on Jones’ memoir. The series pissed off Matlock for portraying him as a privileged, out-of-touch teen unconnected to the genuine punk movement. He was even more incensed by a scene that showed Jones firing him in the bathroom of a pub at the behest of McLaren. Matlock insists that he walked away from the band at his own volition, exhausted by endless spats with Lydon and their manager. “I told Danny Boyle what really happened and he totally ignored me,” says Matlock. “Maybe it’s not a big deal, but it’s important to me. It comes across as a quasi-documentary, and people won’t know any better.”

“I don’t think Glen was portrayed very well,” says Cook. “I’m with him on that. But that was kind of out of our control once Danny Boyle got involved.”

Jones can only shrug his shoulders at the whole thing. “Glen and I talked about it, but he’s never going to be happy about that,” he says. “Yeah, he came across a little bit of a scapegoat, I guess. Danny Boyle wanted it that way, but I was happy with it because it was about my book and I loved it. Look, it’s not a documentary. It’s a biopic.”

A much bigger problem erupted when Lydon filed suit against his bandmates in England, arguing they couldn’t use the Sex Pistols music in the series without unanimous agreement. “[It’s like] telling the story of World War II without Winston Churchill,” he told England’s i Paper. “The idea you can remove the man that wrote all your songs and gave you your image is pretty damn ludicrous to me.”

A judge ultimately ruled that a simple majority of the band had the right to license the music. If Matlock had sided with Lydon, it would quite possibly have gone the other way. “I did sort of have the casting vote,” says Matlock. “But if people don’t really give you the proper respect over the years, they’re hardly going to get you on their side. You can read into that what you like.”

It was a clear declaration that despite all the bitterness in the past, Matlock was firmly aligned with Jones and Cook against Lydon. And now with Carter at the helm, the group may have found a lineup stable enough to play gigs without drama. Unlike bands like Yes, Journey, and Judas Priest, who turned to imitators in tribute bands when they needed a new frontman, Carter makes no attempt to copy Lydon.

“He’s like a ringleader in a circus, and brings a ton of energy,” says Jones. “He gets in the crowd, he gets them doing crowd-surfing. He gets them doing a circle. It’s nuts to watch. I think he’s going to get killed when he’s out there sometimes. But he’s brilliant and his voice is great. He’s not trying to be Johnny Rotten.”

The Sex Pistols kick off their U.S. tour Sept. 16 at the Longhorn Ballroom in Texas, 47 years after they dodged pig ears and dead rats on the same stage. “I’d like to believe that America won’t do the same to me,” says Carter. “We’ll wait and find out, won’t we?”

No matter what happens at the Longhorn Ballroom, don’t expect to hear any new songs. The Sex Pistols repertoire remains frozen in the amber of 1977. “I don’t know if people want to hear new music unless it’s on a par with the old stuff we’ve done,” says Cook.

Carter can’t imagine how it could even work. “It would be a different band,” he says. “And John wrote all the lyrics. Unless I could sit with John, and we could write some lyrics together…but I think the problem there is that I don’t think we agree on a lot of the same things.”

There’s no universe where Lydon would be willing to write lyrics for the Frank Carter incarnation of the Sex Pistols. But is there a universe where both sides of the divide get over their anger and agree to a full Sex Pistols reunion, perhaps for the 50th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks in 2027?

“Look, maybe one day down the line, even I’d like to see it again,” says Carter. “And if there’s ever the opportunity for me to be part of bridging that and being some sort of conduit between them to get the lines of communication open again, I’ll step in and I’ll do that as well. And then I’d step aside in a heartbeat.”

Cook simply cannot imagine this. “We wouldn’t want to do it, and John definitely wouldn’t want to do it after what’s happened,” he says. “So, that’s it. And I don’t want to do it with John anyway.”

Matlock agrees. “People paint themselves into a corner sometimes,” he says. “And some people use very slow drying paint, and sometimes that corner might be right at the other side of a big fuckin’ ballroom.”

But countless other bands have said similar things shortly before their own big money reunions. “You said the magic word: ‘money,’” says Jones with a laugh. “How much money? We’ll see. It all depends if I need a new kitchen or something.”