Columbia Theater and Huxleys, Berlin: Two Rooms in Old West Berlin

Berlin hides its best mid-sized rooms behind ordinary doors, and two of them sit in the old western half of the city carrying histories that have almost nothing to do with music. One is a former American Army cinema staring across the field at the shuttered Tempelhof airport. The other is an 1880 beer garden in Neukölln that has been, at various points, a variety stage, a roller-skating rink and a hall where Jimi Hendrix once plugged in. If you are following a loud band around Europe, sooner or later the routing puts you in one of them, so it is worth knowing what you are walking into.

I have washed up at both on trips down from Copenhagen, and what I like about them is that neither pretends to be a purpose-built box. They wear their past lives openly, and that past feeds the way each room feels when the lights drop.

The Columbia Theater and the ghost of the American garrison

Start at the Columbiadamm, on the northern edge of the Tempelhofer Feld, opposite the vast dead runway of the old airport. There is a low complex of buildings here that reads as municipal, even faintly bureaucratic, and that flatness is the giveaway. This was American territory. The Columbiahalle opened in 1951 as a sports hall for the US soldiers stationed in West Berlin, and right next door sat a 400-seat cinema built for the same garrison — somewhere for GIs to watch films a long way from home while the Cold War froze around them.

When the Americans finally left in 1994, after more than four decades in the city, the whole complex passed to the Berlin authorities and promptly fell dark. The cinema and the hall sat disused for years before new operators saw what they were: two ready-made rooms of different sizes, side by side, in a city that was about to become the live-music capital of the continent. The hall reopened as a concert venue toward the end of the 1990s — for a stretch it ran as the ColumbiaFritz — and a comprehensive 2014 refurbishment brought it back up to standard. The old cinema became the Columbia Theater.

That two-room arrangement is the practical thing to understand before you buy a ticket. The Columbiahalle is the big one, holding somewhere around 3,500, a broad flat hall for touring acts who have outgrown clubs but are not arena-sized. The Columbia Theater is the smaller sibling, roughly 800 capacity, the former GI cinema itself. They share a car park and a postcode, so double-check which name is on your ticket, because turning up at the wrong door with a band already onstage next door is a specifically Berlin kind of misery.

The Theater is the more characterful of the two. It still carries the bones of a cinema — a raked feel to parts of the room, a stage where a screen used to hang — and at 800 people it lands in the sweet spot where a rising band and a hot crowd can actually cook. The Halle is a more honest workhorse: a plain, capable, high-ceilinged hall that does the job for a 3,000-capacity show without ever making you gasp at the architecture. What both have going for them is the location. You come out into the open expanse of the Tempelhofer Feld, that surreal decommissioned airport now given back to the city as parkland, and on a warm night the walk back across the edge of it beats spilling out onto any high street.

Sound in the Halle is what you would expect from a big flat metal-and-concrete shed: perfectly serviceable with a good engineer flying the PA, prone to a bit of low-mid wash at the back when the room is rammed. Stand two-thirds forward and off the centre line and you will be fine. The Theater, being smaller and part-lined with its cinema past, holds together more tightly. Neither is a boutique listening room, and the reputation of a place like VEGA in Copenhagen is safe. What the Columbia rooms give you instead is scale, history and that eerie Tempelhof frontage.

Huxleys Neue Welt, and 140 years of Berlin having a good time

Cross town southeast into Neukölln and the story gets older and stranger. At the eastern end of the Hasenheide — a long stretch of parkland with its own tangled history — sits Huxleys Neue Welt, and the “Neue Welt” part of the name predates recorded rock and roll by a wide margin. The site opened on 2 May 1880, when a man named Rudolf Sternecker laid out a sprawling beer garden and amusement complex on the grounds of a former Hasenheide brewery. This was mass Berlin entertainment in the age of the Kaiser: gardens, a dance floor, a variety stage, the works.

Over the following century the place shape-shifted the way durable buildings do. It ran as a variety theatre, at one point as a roller-skating rink, and from the 1960s until it closed in 1982 it became a genuinely serious rock and pop room. The list of people who played the Neue Welt in those years is a jolt: Jimi Hendrix, Ted Nugent, Whitesnake, Dio, Bob Seger. For a couple of decades this Neukölln pleasure ground was on the touring map of loud American and British music, then it went quiet.

The revival came in the 2010s, when the operator Trinity Music reopened it as Huxleys Neue Welt — a modern multifunctional hall stitched into the old fabric, with updated sound, refreshed interiors and a capacity of around 1,600 standing or 750 seated. That standing figure is the number that matters to me. Sixteen hundred is a beautiful size for a rock show: big enough to feel like an event, small enough that the band is a real physical presence rather than a distant light show. It slots neatly between a club and an arena, and Berlin routes a lot of excellent mid-tier touring bills through it for exactly that reason.

The ornamentation is what people remember. Where the Columbia rooms are functional, Huxleys leans plush — a proper old European hall feel, a sense of decoration and occasion baked into the walls from its variety-theatre lives. It photographs like a place that has seen a hundred years of Berliners dressing up to be entertained, because it has. Sightlines are decent for a flat-floored room; the stage sits at a sensible height and the hall is wider than it is deep, which keeps most of the crowd within reach of the band. My standing note is the usual one for a room this shape: come in off the centre and settle around two-thirds of the way forward, where the PA coverage is even and you are clear of the worst of the churn but still inside the energy.

The Hasenheide itself is worth a word, because it frames the walk in. This long green strip on the Neukölln–Kreuzberg border has been public recreation ground since the early nineteenth century — it is where Friedrich Ludwig Jahn opened the first German open-air gymnasium in 1811, and it has been a place for Berliners to exercise, drink and gather ever since. Sternecker’s 1880 pleasure garden was one more expression of that, an entertainment complex plonked down at the edge of a park that already existed to let the city blow off steam. Understanding that lineage changes how the venue reads. Huxleys is the indoor survivor of a whole vanished culture of open-air Berlin amusement, and when 1,600 people fill it for a loud band, they are doing in a modernised hall roughly what their great-great-grandparents did in the beer garden outside it.

One practical caveat about the modern room: it is a hard-floored standing hall with a lot of reflective surface, and on a very loud, bass-heavy bill it can wash a little at the edges when it is full. A good touring engineer tames it easily, and from the forward two-thirds you will hear a clean, punchy mix. Hang at the very back by the bar and you trade some of that definition for elbow room and a faster route to a drink — a fair swap on a long night, and one every seasoned gig-goer makes at some point.

How to think about the two of them

These are both West Berlin rooms with imported histories — one American and military, one imperial and hedonistic — and that is a large part of the pleasure of them. You are not in a black box that could be in any city on earth. At the Columbia Theater you are inside a cinema built to keep homesick soldiers entertained during the occupation, staring out at a dead Nazi-era airport turned public park. At Huxleys you are standing where Berliners have come to drink, skate, gawp and eventually mosh since Bismarck was chancellor. That texture survives every refurbishment, and it is why I would happily see a band in either.

Practically: for a genuinely big touring act you will most likely be pointed at the Columbiahalle and its 3,500 capacity; for the more interesting mid-sized bills, the 800-cap Columbia Theater and the 1,600-cap Huxleys are the rooms to hope for. Berlin’s public transport is extensive and runs late, and both venues sit on it, so getting home across the city after the encore is rarely the drama it would be elsewhere. Do check the small print on the Columbia ticket so you enter the right of the two adjoining doors, and give yourself a minute at Huxleys just to look up at the old hall before the support band starts.

Berlin has grander institutions and it has grungier holes, and both of those have their place — the sweaty punk end of the city lives at rooms like SO36 in Kreuzberg, and the club-scale German rock experience is captured just up the coast at Docks and the Markthalle in Hamburg. The Columbia rooms and Huxleys sit above those in size and below the arenas, occupying the most valuable slot on any touring circuit: the mid-sized hall where a band on the way up plays the show people talk about for years. Pick your night by which band is playing and which room they have been given, and let the strange old bones of the building do the rest.