Sex Pistols Featuring Frank Carter @ Hindley Street Music Hall, Adelaide 6/4/2025

The stench of stale smoke lingers, the obnoxious attitude and demeanour overwhelming and the sensation of being covered in beer are rife at the Sex Pistols show in Adelaide.

This isn’t 1977, it’s 2025 and while the fans are little wider, a lot greyer and their bones will creek in the morning, the filth and the fury is still there.

Vantage points were scarce as the Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter took to the stage to the ode of East German adventures in Holidays In The Sun.

The actual Pistols line up of Paul Cook on drums, Steve Jones on guitar and the dapper Glenn Matlock on bass, lock themselves at the back and just play. No gimmicks, no incitement just good old rock n roll riffs.

Frank Carter, taking the mantle of Messers Rotten, doesn’t attempt to be version 2.0, he attempts to be Frank Carter, an all-conquering legendary punk front man himself, and he pulls it off.

Running through a set list which features heavily, and naturally, from the bands one sole album, Never Mind The Bollocks, with a few nods elsewhere sprinkled in, the Pistols really can’t lose.

Seventeen, New York and Pretty Vacant are all classics which the audience go note for note on. Carter prowling the stage like a lion surveying its prey before eventually deciding the stage is too small and jumps right into the crowd for Bodies.

While the Pistols of old could sound raggedy depending on who was playing and various substances, the bands sound tonight is in the pocket and prove it’s live with no backing tracks as Carter stops Bodies to rearrange how the crowd do a circle pit around him.

The anarchy if you will, doesn’t stop, greeting the crowd from the mixing desk before Silly Thing, Carter crowd surfs back to the stage making the song now his, taking it away from the original Steve Jones sound.

The chants of ‘no future’ tell you God Save The Queen is being roared by all before the band rip into No Fun, a chance for Jones and Cook to show what they are really about behind all the fury.

That’s the thing about the Pistols music that set them apart from their peers, they were damn bloody good songs performed by damn good musicians – the same ones on stage tonight. Yes, the attitude was iconic, but the music and that album endures not because of Bill Grundy’s antagonism or Malcolm McLaren’s wheeling and dealings. They changed the world because they actually have quality behind them.

Satellite, No Feelings and Problems sound frantic, as much as E.M.I. sounds huge. A restrained My Way leads way to Anarchy In The UK. More beer is launched across the room, more bodies pushed around the pit, more surfers waving the chaos.

For ninety minutes, we got as close to 1977 as we will ever get. We got filthy. We got agitated, we got rocked. But never mind all that bollocks, this truly was the Sex Pistols.

Live Review By Iain McCallum