Last week, Mötley Crüe announced 2026 dates celebrating the 20th anniversary of their “Carnival Of Sins” Tour and the 45th anniversary of the band. The trek will feature support from Tesla and Extreme and is scheduled for 33 cities.
During a recent appearance on Oregon’s KPTV FOX 12, bassist Nikki Sixx reflected on the band’s 45 years. “We’re musicians, so we make music,” Sixx said. “I’m a writer for different things — books and, obviously, all the lyrics for the band — so it’s always about writing music and being creative and then taking it out to the people. It never really felt like — I don’t know — it’s always felt pretty cohesive. It’s part of our process.”
Mötley Crüe did a highly publicized farewell tour back in 2015, but obviously have continued in the years since. Sixx explained why the Crüe couldn’t stay away.
“We did in 2015 do a farewell tour,” he said. “And we honestly thought that was it. We were done. Everything was cool. And then the movie came out on Netflix, ‘The Dirt’. And I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of people saw that, and it put us in a place where they came to us and asked us if we wanted to do eight shows. And we were, like, it’s a lot of work to put a show together. And we were, like, ‘We love to play for our fans, but we’ve kind of already wrapped it up,’ and blah, blah, blah. They said, ‘No. Eight stadiums.’ And we were, like, ‘Oh.’ And then we ended up doing 138 stadiums, us and Def Leppard. And it was just exciting to be back out there again.”
Sixx was asked how the band would be able to top their original “Carnival of Sins” Tour. “You top it with technology, and we’re just talking about all that now,” he said. “It’s good to get an early start on that kind of stuff. And we have to build out video content. We just did a Vegas residency and we used some really cool software to build in some storytelling in the show. And it was just over-the-top beautiful, what you can do. So the whole idea of the carnival or what’s going on behind the carnival in the ‘Carnival Of Sins’ is open-ended. It’s not a big towering wall of metal they have to stick in a truck. It’s literally — you can take people somewhere else, which is super exciting.”
Check out Sixx’s full interview below.
