Royal Arena: What Copenhagen Gained (and Lost) With a Proper Big Room
The city finally got an arena the big tours would stop for — and paid for it in intimacy
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The city finally got an arena the big tours would stop for — and paid for it in intimacy
A former GI cinema by Tempelhof and an 1880 pleasure garden in Neukölln — two mid-sized Berlin rooms with long, strange pedigrees
The Oranienstraße room where West Berlin punk was born, and where it still lives
A cinema on the Reeperbahn and a market hall by the station — two of Hamburg's essential mid-size stages
A few hundred bodies, one low attic room, and a PA that refuses to lose
The 500-capacity basement club under the old Oslo bathhouse, where the heavy circuit lands before it graduates upstairs
How a 1930s public baths on Torggata became the anchor of Norwegian live music
Named after a Pixies song, marooned under a bridge on Södermalm, and still swinging
The biggest room in the Freetown, an 1891 riding hall that swallows sound whole
Fifty-odd years of Finnish noise in a stubborn old house off Urho Kekkosen katu
A converted postal package house by the station has been Odense's rock stronghold for nearly forty years — the third pillar of provincial Danish live music
From a squat in an abandoned school to a purpose-built hall by the station — fifty years of one stubborn Nijmegen venue
A former slaughterhouse hall in Stockholm's old meatpacking district, reborn as a black-box for the heavy end
Inside Vilhelm Lauritzen's listed functionalist temple on Enghavevej
The two central Aarhus clubs that raised a generation of Jutland gig-goers — including me — reviewed by someone who grew up in their sweat
Denmark's national stadium was built for football and drafted into stadium rock — what the pitch, the roof and 50,000 bodies do to a gig
A raw salt warehouse in Nordhavn and a functionalist exhibition hall from 1926 — the city's two flexible mid-big rooms, and how to survive them
The yellow-brick sweatbox on Studiestræde, and the garden that saves you
Frederiksberg's functionalist arena died in a 2011 fire and was rebuilt as a near-copy of itself — here's what that costs and what it keeps
One funkis building in the old town that has been a hotel, a theatre stage, and the city's great jazz house in turn
The purpose-built Dutch pop hall that became the doom world's annual pilgrimage site
The two intimate stages hiding inside Vesterbro's VEGA complex, where tomorrow's headliners play tonight
The three-floor Guldbergsgade institution that turns from live room to nightclub as the hour gets late
The squat-born Nørrebro club that has carried Copenhagen's loud fringe since 1972
A raked mid-century auditorium on Nyropsgade that swaps a rock club's shove for chandeliers and a proper seated view
The 300-capacity regional venue in the old Godsbanen freight yard, and the Musikcaféen it grew out of
The Amager cinema that traded film reels for a 1,300-capacity live floor
An elegy for the seaside crane-hall that ran Finnish live music for twenty years, until the developers came for the shore