Copenhagen on vo.rs

Royal Arena: What Copenhagen Gained (and Lost) With a Proper Big Room

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2026: The Maiden Voyage, Again

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

D-A-D: The Danish Cowboys Who Nearly Conquered America

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a photograph in every Danish rock fan’s memory of four men in cowboy hats who have plainly never worked a ranch in their lives, grinning like they got away with something. They did. For roughly eighteen months at the tail end of the 1980s, a Copenhagen band that started life with the gloriously stupid name Disneyland After Dark had a Warner Bros. contract, a song climbing the American rock charts, and a genuine, credible run at the thing every European band dreams about and almost none of them get: breaking the United States. They did not break it. But how close they came, and precisely how the door swung shut, is one of the best near-miss stories the Nordic scene has to offer — and the reason D-A-D remain a national institution at home forty-odd years on.

Little Country, Loud Export: How Denmark Became a Metal Heavyweight

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2025: Is It Still a Metal Festival?

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Volbeat: How a Rockabilly-Metal Hybrid Became Denmark's Biggest Export

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Loppen: Christiania's Sweatbox Where the Sound Still Wins

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

You climb a narrow staircase in an old military warehouse, push through a door, and the ceiling drops on you like a lid. Timber beams a hand’s width from your skull. A stage barely raised off the floor. A few hundred people already generating the kind of collective body heat that fogs the windows within twenty minutes of doors. This is Loppen — “the flea” — on the first floor of a warehouse on Bådsmandsstræde, deep inside Freetown Christiania, and it has been sweating out loud music since roughly 1973. The room is small, hot, and cramped, and it is one of the best places in Copenhagen to stand three metres from a band that is about to become your new favourite thing.

Metallica's Danish Accent: Lars Ulrich and the Band That Keeps Coming Home

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Den Grå Hal: Christiania's Cathedral of Noise

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2024: Bigger, Broader, Louder

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell: Building Hell on a Harbour

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Distortion: The Week Copenhagen's Streets Become the Venue

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

VEGA: The Union Hall That Became Denmark's Best-Sounding Room

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Parken: What Happens When a Football Ground Becomes a Stage

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Docken and Forum: Copenhagen's Big Utility Rooms

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Pumpehuset: Rock in an Old Waterworks, With a Beer Garden Out Back

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

KB Hallen: The Hall That Burned and Came Back

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Hotel Cecil: The Copenhagen Club That Time Swallowed

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Ideal Bar and Lille VEGA: The Small Rooms Where Careers Start

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Rust: Where Nørrebro Goes to Lose the Plot

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Iceage: The Copenhagen Kids Who Grew Into a Great Band

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Stengade: Nørrebro's Sweatbox for the Underground

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Bremen Teater, Copenhagen: Gigs in the Grand Old Theatre

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

There is a specific kind of Copenhagen night that ends with you sitting down in a red plush seat under a chandelier while a band you love plays to a room that is dead silent between songs. Most of my nights end in a puddle of spilled lager on a flat club floor, so the Bremen Teater is the corrective — a proper old theatre on Nyropsgade, a couple of minutes from the lakes, where the seats are raked, the sightlines are honest and nobody is going to headbutt you during the encore.

Copenhell 2022: The Return

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Amager Bio: Copenhagen's Perfect Mid-Size Room

Tue, 10 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Tool at Royal Arena: Patience, Geometry, and 10,000 Held Breaths

Sat, 07 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

The Two Years Hell Stood Empty: Copenhell 2020–2021

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Rammstein at Parken: Fire as a Civic Event

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

On 19 June 2019, Rammstein brought their first stadium tour to Parken and set a Copenhagen football ground alight. The show sold out. Somewhere in an office in Østerbro, weeks earlier, a Danish official had signed a permit that authorised a German band to burn several hundred litres of propane, in choreographed bursts, in a residential neighbourhood, for two hours, on a Wednesday night. That signature is the thing I keep coming back to. A stadium concert is loud. A Rammstein stadium concert is a small municipal decision to allow fire.

Metallica at Parken: When the Biggest Band Alive Plays a Football Ground

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000

On 11 July 2019, just under forty-five thousand people packed into Parken, the Copenhagen football stadium, to watch Metallica. It was a Thursday. The roof was open, the Danish summer holding for once, and the pitch that normally belongs to FC København had been floored over and turned into the biggest standing crowd the city can legally assemble. There is a specific strangeness to seeing the biggest band alive play the ground where you watch the national team lose to Germany, and that strangeness is the whole subject here.

Copenhell 2019: The Last One Before the Silence

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Slayer's Farewell: When the Riffs Meant Goodbye

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Judas Priest in Copenhagen: Leather, Chrome, and the Metal God

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2018: Long Days on the Harbour

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Iron Maiden at Royal Arena: The Circus Comes to Copenhagen

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2017: The One That Got Serious

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2016: Refshaleøen Settles In

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Motörhead in Copenhagen, 2015: The Last Time Lemmy Came North

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 09:00:00 +0000

In the first days of December 2015, Motörhead’s fortieth-anniversary tour crossed Scandinavia and left Denmark off the map. The routing went Gothenburg on the first, Oslo on the third, Stockholm on the fourth, Helsinki on the sixth — a tight little arc across the top of Europe that came within sixty kilometres of the Danish coast and never touched it. From Copenhagen you could stand on the Øresund shore and more or less watch the tour bus pass on the Swedish side. We got nothing. And because of what happened three weeks later, we now know that nothing was final.

Copenhell 2015: The Year I Finally Went

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 09:00:00 +0000