The Sex Pistols host a women-only mosh pit during Hollywood Palladium show

Late in the Sex Pistols night at the Hollywood Palladium on Sunday, Oct. 18, singer Frank Carter thanked its original members Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock for inviting him into the fold two years ago.

“It’s been a pleasure to bring these three gentlemen around the world on a victory lap they never got,” Carter said, perfectly describing what this current 50 Years of Punk tour has been for the band.

For a band like the Sex Pistols, the notoriety that swirled around the band from its debut in November 1975 to its implosion a little over two years later, was both very good and quite bad.

It made their legacy as punk rock influencers, as godfathers who helped birth the entire movement, a standing that endures to this day.

But while the Pistols’ burned with a white-hot intensity at the start, the band broke up amid chaos and acrimony after a show on Jan. 14, 1978 in San Francisco, snuffing out its future before it had barely started.

Sure, there were a handful of brief reunions with original singer Johnny Rotten, who’d reverted to his birth name of John Lydon after forming Public Image Ltd. in mid-1978. [Matlock, who’d been replaced by the late Sid Vicious, returned at that point.]

The new lineup with Carter, a veteran of British punk bands such as Gallows and the Rattlesnakes, isn’t likely to end in fisticuffs, lawsuits, and recriminations as the band has in the past.

And after nearly 90 shows around the world since 2024, the Palladium show sounded fantastic with power and passion over 14 songs in 70 minutes. [This show, which closed the band’s North American leg of the tour, was originally scheduled for October 2025 before Jones broke his wrist.]

“Holidays in the Sun” kicked off the show just as it opens “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols,” the band’s only studio release before breaking up. With Carter bounding around the stage as Jones, Cook and Matlock blasted through the power chords and crushing beat of the music, the first of many mosh pits broke out midfloor.

“Seventeen” and “New York” followed – all 11 tracks of the original release of “Never Mind the Bollocks”  were eventually played, though not in the album order.

“We didn’t come all the way to Los Angeles for you to stand still,” Carter shouted after “New York.” “I wanna see the biggest circle pit ever.

“This one’s for you,” he added as he made his way with his microphone to the center of the floor. “It’s the best punk song ever written.”

“Pretty Vacant” set an impressively large pit aswirl, Carter gleefully singing as dozens of fans bounced off each other, and sometimes him, as the song raced to its finish.

After “Bodies,” Carter had a new request, or demand, for the crowd.

“Now I get it. I understand,” he began. “You’re a little bit older. Your ankles will probably hurt at 9 a.m. And I know you don’t have universal healthcare, so a mosh pit is a bit of a risk.

“But I wouldn’t ask you to pogo for anyone but the Sex Pistols,” Carter finished. And if you must know, yes, we pogoed, and OK, our ankles did complain a bit in the morning, but it was totally worth it to be part of the bouncing crowd as the Pistols played Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone.”

“God Save the Queen,” the 1977 Sex Pistols single that infuriated prim and proper British society, was a mid-show highlight, the sold-out crowd singing loudly on the chorus of “No future / No future / No future for you.”

A cover of Iggy Pop’s “No Fun,” the final song the band played in San Francisco before its breakup, let Jones, Matlock and Cook each take a turn in the spotlight for solos. Carter had enough time to walk backstage, grab a tall can of some kind of beverage, and make it back in time to introduce the band.

Before “No Feelings,” Carter commanded the fans to open up the middle of the floor, and then invited all the women in the crowd to come forward for a female-only mosh pit.

“You don’t have to worry about getting an elbow in the face or being groped by some neanderthal,” he announced as the pit filled quickly with women and girls. “For the rest of the room, I promise you will never see a happier mosh pit in your life. And fellas, if this offends you somehow, I’ve got a number for a therapist for you.”

A few minutes later, as the song wrapped up, Carter pronounced the moment as “a beautiful thing right there.

“Remember when you leave here tonight, punk rock is for everybody,” he said.

“Problems” and “E.M.I.” flowed into “My Way.” The standard had been sung by Sid Vicious on the soundtrack to the Sex Pistols’ movie “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and the band performed as they had there – first a slow, dramatic take, then a sped-up punked-out buzzbomb to the finish.

That left just one song in the set, arguably the best saved for last. “Anarchy in the U.K.” was the Pistols’ debut single in November 1976, and in its roar of guitar, bass and drums, and lyrics captured the anger and frustration of disaffected youth in Britain, and ultimately anywhere; its one of the great rock and roll anthems.

After tearing through it once, the band played on as Carter urged the crowd to take over the final, repeated chorus. And so we sang, “And I wanna be anarchy” over and over.

“Tempe, Arizona was louder than that the other night,” he taunted us, so the crowd sang even louder until Carter, Jones, Cook and Matlock were finally satisfied that, truly, we mean it, man.