- SEX PISTOLS (Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock) feat. Frank Carter w/ Panic Shack
- 9/12/26 - Emo’s - Austin, TX
- ©M'Lou Elkins / Skip2Photography.com
Nothing says punk rock quite like going to see the Sex Pistols two days after oral surgery.
I’d been off work all week thanks to a pesky tooth infection that eventually ended with the tooth being yanked and a bone graft shoved into my jaw. Not exactly what I had planned when I booked this shoot. But there I was at Emo’s anyway. Because apparently nothing says “aging punk rocker” quite like needing a tooth extracted…and then deciding the logical next step is to photograph the Sex Pistols and stand next to a mosh pit.
As I waited for Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Frank Carter to take the stage, I kept thinking about how I was going to write this review. What was the angle? Then I realized I was already living it.
But before I could make questionable post-operative decisions involving a mosh pit, there was Panic Shack.
The Cardiff band formed in 2018 around vocalist Sarah Harvey, guitarists Meg Fretwell and Romi Lawrence, and bassist Emily Smith, with drummer Nick Doherty-Williams joining them behind the kit. They came up through Cardiff’s DIY scene, released their Baby Shack EP in 2022 and followed it with their self-titled debut album in July 2025.
And holy hell, were they a good choice to open this show.
Panic Shack hit the stage with exactly the kind of attitude you want before a Sex Pistols set: loud, funny, sharp, and completely uninterested in standing politely in one place.
Check out the Panic Shack photo gallery below:
Their set pulled heavily from Panic Shack, including “Gok Wan,” “Thelma & Louise,” “grin & bear it,” “The Ick” and “Tit School,” while reaching back for “Jiu Jits You” from the band’s earlier days. The crowd caught on quickly. By the time they finished, Emo’s was properly warmed up and ready for what was coming.
And what was coming was a pretty big deal.
This wasn’t just another stop through Austin. Somehow, nearly 50 years after the Sex Pistols first detonated into punk history, this was the band’s first actual performance in Austin. The Pistols famously came through Texas during their disastrous 1978 U.S. tour, but Austin wasn’t one of the stops. Steve Jones, in fact, spent some time here during that trip and apparently wasn’t particularly impressed with our fair city. Forty-eight years later, he finally came back to play it.
By 2026, the configuration is different, but three of the people responsible for that original sound are still standing onstage: guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock, with Frank Carter out front. Carter first joined them for three benefit shows at London’s Bush Hall in 2024. What was initially a small run of shows worked well enough that the lineup kept going, eventually taking the songs around the world.
Carter wasn’t exactly some random guy handed a microphone, either. He made his name as the original frontman of hardcore band Gallows, later formed Pure Love and then Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, building a reputation along the way as one of those singers for whom the stage and the audience are more like vague suggestions than actual boundaries.
Which would become relevant very shortly.
The Kinks’ “Shangri-La” blasted over the sound system as we waited. Then the lights dropped to blue. Showtime.
Paul Cook took his seat behind the kit, and I had one of those moments where the photographer part of my brain briefly lost an argument with the music fan part…Holy shit. I’m actually here shooting this.
Glen Matlock entered, waving as he crossed the stage and took his place. Steve Jones and Frank Carter followed.
Then came the unmistakable opening of “Holidays in the Sun.” And that was it. Within seconds, one thing was obvious: Frank Carter was made for this role.
There was something in that crazed, piercing stare he shot into the crowd that immediately brought Johnny Rotten to mind. Not because Carter was impersonating John Lydon. He wasn’t. It was that same slightly unnerving sense that the guy staring back at you might be having considerably more fun with this than is probably healthy. It fit.
And behind him were Jones, Cook and Matlock doing the thing they’ve been doing together, in various configurations, since the 1970s.
Cook’s drumming still drives these songs with that wonderfully blunt force they need. Matlock’s bass gives them far more movement than the Sex Pistols’ reputation for musical destruction sometimes gets credit for, while Jones still produces that huge, dirty guitar sound that helped make Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols sound like it did in the first place.
There was no attempt to turn the songs into museum pieces. Thank God. As the third song ended, my allotted time in the photo pit was over. I started making my way out just as Carter hopped off the stage and onto the barricade, towering over the people smashed against the front.
Apparently he wasn’t staying up there. By the time I made it out of the photo pit and into the regular crowd, Carter had descended directly into the circle pit, where he stayed to sing the next few songs.
“Pretty Vacant” and “Bodies” came from the middle of the floor, leaving Jones, Cook and Matlock alone onstage and, for a few minutes, putting the visual focus squarely on the three founding members.
Eventually Carter climbed back onto the stage. Later in the set, before “No Fun,” he gave a shout-out to openers Panic Shack: “This one’s for them.” Then came what Carter called the “most important part of the evening.”
“This will astonish you. Open the mosh pit as big as it can go.”
The crowd obeyed.
“For the next song, this mosh pit belongs to some important people. This mosh pit belongs to the ladies only.”
My fellow music photographer, Lauren, immediately started heading toward the center. “Let’s do it!” she told me. I considered this proposal…
I had undergone oral surgery two days earlier. I had a fresh bone graft in my jaw. An elbow to the mouth would be a spectacularly stupid way to end my evening.
So obviously…I went. Because it’s not every day somebody opens up a women-only Sex Pistols mosh pit right in front of you.
I tagged along behind Lauren, piggybacking on the pathway she and several other women carved through the crowd until suddenly I was standing right in the middle of it for “No Feelings.” And it was fucking glorious. The guys stayed out. Some of them even stood along the perimeter, keeping the space open and making sure nobody decided the rules didn’t apply to him.
What had started with me thinking, I probably shouldn’t do this with stitches in my mouth, ended with me staying right there in the middle of everything for the rest of the show. Absolute musical bliss.
My friend had also seen the Pistols the previous night at their first stop on this tour – the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas…the same venue the band played during its notorious 1978 U.S. tour. She told me Austin’s crowd was considerably more into it, particularly when it came to the women-only pit.
Apparently Carter noticed too. Austin, he declared, did it “better than Dallas.” We’ll take it! Dallas did get one thing Austin didn’t, however: “EMI.”
It was printed on the Austin setlist, but it wasn’t played. After “Problems,” the band went directly into the final song. And if you’re going to skip something, you’d better have one hell of a closer waiting. They did: “Anarchy in the U.K.”
Hearing that song on a record is one thing. Hearing an entire room scream: “I…WANNA BE…ANARCHY!” back at three of the people who created it? That’s something else entirely.
Nearly five decades after Jones, Cook and Matlock helped create one of punk’s most infamous bands, none of this felt like four guys trudging through songs because nostalgia pays well. Carter was grinning, prowling, disappearing into the crowd, and staring people down. Jones, Cook and Matlock sounded locked in and looked like they were genuinely enjoying themselves.
And Carter really does make this version of the Sex Pistols work.
He doesn’t try to be Johnny Rotten. That would be embarrassing, and more importantly, unnecessary. Carter already has enough personality of his own. Even he has acknowledged that comparisons to Lydon followed him during his Gallows years and that he actively resisted them because he wanted to be seen as himself. That’s exactly why this works.
For the music snobs who feel compelled to announce that it isn’t the Sex Pistols without John Lydon…Fine. Go see PiL.
Had Lydon been part of this tour, it undoubtedly would have been a different show with a completely different dynamic. Maybe a great one. But it wouldn’t have been this one. And I liked this one.
This one had Frank Carter singing from the middle of a circle pit. It had a women-only mosh pit guarded by a bunch of guys who understood the assignment. It had three founding Sex Pistols ripping through songs they helped create almost 50 years ago while an Austin crowd screamed every word back at them.
Check out the Sex Pistols photo gallery below:
And somewhere in the middle of it was this 50-“something” concert photographer with a freshly extracted tooth and a bone graft, thinking that getting into a Sex Pistols mosh pit was a perfectly reasonable medical decision. No regrets. Just don’t tell my oral surgeon.
Catch Sex Pistols Feat. Frank Carter on the Road…
