Three years ago Elton John walked off a stage in Stockholm and told everyone that was it. The show was the final date of the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, a goodbye that had run more than 300 shows across five years and touched pretty much every corner of the map. He’d said his goodbyes the slow way, one city at a time. He wasn’t going to take any of it back.
Then last week he took a little of it back.
The announcement came on Tuesday: Mexico City, two nights, October 2 and 3, at Estadio Banorte. He’s calling them “final farewell” concerts, which is a phrase that only lands the way it’s supposed to if you know the piece everyone kept repeating in the coverage. He hasn’t played Mexico City in 14 years.
Fourteen years is a long time to be missed
The last time Elton John stood on a stage in that city, it was 2012. Nobody in that crowd had any reason to think it would be the last time for over a decade. Then the years stacked up, the farewell tour came and went without a Mexico City date on it, and it started to look like 2012 was simply where his history with that audience stopped.
He’s 79 now. Born in March of 1947, a working musician for most of the last sixty years, and by every public account genuinely done with touring. That’s what makes two new dates read as more than a routine calendar update. This isn’t a man adding shows to a run. This is a man who already closed the door, opening it a crack for one specific place.
What was actually announced
Two concerts. October 2 and October 3, 2026. Estadio Banorte in Mexico City. Consequence and other outlets carried the news the same week, and the framing was consistent everywhere: these are being sold as farewell shows, the last time that particular crowd gets to see him, filling a gap that had sat open since 2012.
There’s a reason people did the math out loud on this one. Fourteen years without a hometown-sized show, then a farewell tour that skipped the city entirely, then retirement — and now, out of that, two nights. If you were one of the people who assumed 2012 was the end of the road, the announcement rewrites your own memory a little. The last show wasn’t the last show after all.
The part worth reading before the tickets are gone
Here’s the catch, and it’s the thing a lot of fans wanted to know first. The tickets didn’t all go on sale at once. There was a Rocket Club presale on July 15, a full day ahead of everyone else, and the general sale opened July 16. For two nights in a single city, after fourteen years, that one-day head start is the whole ballgame — the people who knew about the presale had a real shot, and the people who found out from the general sale mostly found out that it was already a scramble.
That’s the small print underneath the sentimental headline. A man who swore off touring, playing exactly twice, in one city, for a crowd that had waited since 2012 — and the actual doorway into the room was open a day early for the people paying attention.
Two more nights. One very deliberate exception to “I’m done.” And then, presumably, he means it.
