Mötley Crüe signed their Cessation of Touring agreement on January 28, 2014 and played their final show at Staples Center in Los Angeles on December 31, 2015. Mötley Crüe then recorded a handful of new songs in 2018 for the release of their 2019 biopic flick The Dirt, and later that same year destroyed their Cessation of Touring agreement. The band was set to embark on their reunion tour this year with Def Leppard, Poison and Joan Jett, but it's since been pushed to 2021.
So why reunite after only four years of being broken up? Drummer Tommy Lee tells SiriusXM's Debatable they were offered a stadium tour, which they'd never gotten to do in their career and couldn't pass it up.
"That was it. 2016 — I'll never forget it. I think it was New Year's Eve. Staples Center [in] L.A. That was it. We all said goodbye. That was the dopest 32, 33 years of our lives. We're out. This is the best way ever to go out — on top. Mic drop, boom, see ya. We're out. And that was it. We're done. We didn't really speak to each other for probably a year. Everybody just went and did their own thing. And here it is four years later, Live Nation asked us if we'd like to do a stadium tour, and all of us were, like, 'Ehhh…' And then we thought about it for a minute. We were, like, that is the one thing that this band has never done. Yeah, we played stadiums on festivals all over the place, but our own stadium tour? We were, like, 'Hold on. Let us think about this. Okay.'"
Let's be real with ourselves – who really thought Mötley Crüe was actually done?
