Two months ago, Sixx touched upon CRÜE‘s setlist for the upcoming run in an Instagram post. Nikki wrote: “[It was] great to spend the evening with @tommylee discussing #TheStadiumTour. Wait til you see the setlist. Hits,deep tracks and some cool surprises.@motleycrue Look forward to seeing @thevinceneil & @mr.mickmars and the whole crew at rehearsals soon”.

When it happens, “The Stadium Tour” will mark the CRÜE‘s first live dates since wrapping its 2014/2015 farewell tour. CRÜE toured with POISON back in 2011 and DEF LEPPARD teamed up with POISON for a string of road dates in 2017, but the upcoming jaunt marks the first time all four acts have hit the road together for an extended tour.

Last October, Sixx told Germany’s Radio Bob! that he and his CRÜE bandmates will “start rehearsals in May” for “The Stadium Tour”. “I start training in December,” he said. “Now it’s down to hard work, getting ready, getting the band into rehearsal.

“We rehearse really hard because we will take a song like ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and while we’re building the show — let’s just say the show is… all the lights are moving, they’re green and they’re slowly moving — we’ll build a whole intro in and design the lights and the lasers around that,” he explained. “So it’s a long process and tedious. So we go to rehearsal and we might need to build in those 32 bars. And then we’ve gotta work with the lighting and the laser company. And then we’ve gotta make sure everything is organized so we get our count-ins for where we need to be onstage. So there’s so much going on.”

In a December 2019 interview with “Extra”, CRÜE singer Vince Neil stated about his preparations for “The Stadium Tour”: “There is a lot of sacrifice you have to do… from running around clubs to running around theaters to running around arenas to running around stadiums… the whole big difference, you gotta be ready for it.”

CRÜE fans who shelled out for the band’s 2014/2015 “farewell” tour were led to believe that the group would never return after playing its final show on December 2015 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The band touted the signing of a pre-tour “cessation of touring” agreement as cementing the fact it truly was the end of CRÜE‘s life on the road.

On November 18, 2019 — three years and 11 months after the band played its last show — CRÜE posted a video with Machine Gun Kelly, who portrayed Tommy Lee in the band’s biopic “The Dirt”, explaining that due to the band “becoming more popular than ever” and “gaining an entirely new legion of fans” in the four years they’d been off the road, the band felt the need to blow up their previous contract in order to come out of retirement.

At a press conference in Hollywood announcing the CRÜE‘s stadium tour, Sixx explained the band’s decision to return, saying: “Honestly, I don’t think any of us thought, when we were on ‘The Final Tour’, we would ever get back together. We weren’t really getting along at that point. We had been together 35 years, and it had been a lot of years on the road. I don’t think we took a lot of time for ourselves off; we were just constantly touring for all that time. And when it came to the end, we broke the band up and everybody went their own ways.”

Sixx continued: “It was during the making of ‘The Dirt’ movie, we started working on the script, started being on the set, we started hanging out again together. And I think we really started to realize — without even talking about the music — how much we missed each other. And then that got us to go in the recording studio, which is where the whole thing always starts for all of us.”

“The Dirt”, a film adaptation of the CRÜE‘s 2001 memoir, featured four new songs recorded by the band expressly for the soundtrack.