Live-Music on vo.rs

Roskilde: The Festival That Gives All Its Money Away

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

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

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

Clutch: The Best Bar Band That Also Sells Out Theatres

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a category of band that never troubles the charts, never has the crossover single, never gets the magazine cover, and yet can roll into almost any city on almost any continent and fill a room of a thousand people who know every word. Clutch, four men from Germantown, Maryland, are the reigning champions of that category. They have been at it since 1991 with the same four musicians, no reunions required because they never broke up, and they have quietly become the closest thing modern rock has to a guaranteed good night out.

The Rider: What Bands Actually Ask for Backstage

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Roskilde 2025: Still Giving It All Away

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

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.

SO36: Kreuzberg's Punk Cathedral

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Docks and Markthalle: Hamburg's Reeperbahn Rock Rooms

Wed, 26 Feb 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.

John Dee, Oslo: Rockefeller's Little Sister

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Rockefeller: Oslo Rock in an Old Bathhouse

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Debaser: Stockholm's Waterside Rock Institution

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Den Grå Hal: Christiania's Cathedral of Noise

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

Tavastia: Helsinki's Legendary Rock Club

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Why the Crowd Sings the Guitar Solo

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Tinderbox, Odense: The Corporate Danish Festival

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Posten: Odense's Loyal Little Rock Room

Tue, 28 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Doornroosje, Nijmegen: The Dutch Room That Rebuilt Itself

Tue, 21 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Slaktkyrkan, Stockholm: The Deconsecrated-Church Metal Venue

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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

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

Voxhall and Train: Aarhus Rock, Where I Started

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Roadies and the Load-In: Live Music's Invisible Labour

Thu, 11 Jan 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

The No-Phones Gig: Locked Pouches and the Return of Attention

Thu, 16 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

What the Mosh Pit Is Actually For

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The Setlist as Strategy: Building a 90-Minute Arc

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

KB Hallen: The Hall That Burned and Came Back

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

Roskilde 2023: Back to Full Strength

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Hotel Cecil: The Copenhagen Club That Time Swallowed

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

013, Tilburg: Roadburn's Home Room

Sat, 15 Apr 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

The Classic Album, In Full: The Anniversary-Tour Racket

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

The poster tells you everything before you have read the small print. A band you loved a long time ago, a famous album title, and the words “performed in its entirety” — often with an anniversary number bolted on, thirtieth, fortieth, whatever the maths demands. You already know the setlist. You have known it for decades. That, depending on your mood, is either the whole appeal or the whole problem, and I have stood in rooms feeling both at once.

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.

Radar, Aarhus: His Hometown's Loud Room

Tue, 24 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

I grew up in Aarhus, and the first small rooms that taught me what live music was for were not in Copenhagen. They were up here, in Denmark’s second city, in the years before I moved to the capital in 2011. So when I come back to see family and there is a band on at Radar, in the old Godsbanen freight yard, it lands differently than any other venue write-up I do. This is the hometown room, and it is a good one — 300 people, professional kit, and a booking policy that goes looking for the odd, the experimental and the not-yet-famous rather than the safe.

Amager Bio: Copenhagen's Perfect Mid-Size Room

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

Nosturi, Helsinki: The Beloved Room We Lost

Sat, 15 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Roskilde 2019: The Last Summer Before the Silence

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Nobody at Roskilde 2019 knew they were living through the last one for a while, which is exactly why it plays back so strangely now. Held from 29 June to 6 July, it was a completely ordinary edition of an extraordinary festival — a wide, warm, sprawling week in the Zealand fields with a top-heavy bill and the usual hundred-thousand-strong temporary city around it. Then the world shut, the 2020 and 2021 festivals were cancelled to silence, and 2019 became, in retrospect, a kind of farewell nobody attended as a farewell. I have gone back to it in my head more than any other year, precisely because it was so normal.

Roskilde 2017: The Year the Mud Won

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Every Roskilde regular keeps a private ranking of the years, and 2017 is filed, in most of the ones I know, under the muddy one. The rain came on the Friday and the site never fully recovered its footing; the camping fields turned to the particular grey-brown churn that gets into your boots, your tent, your food and your soul, and by the back half of the week you were navigating a hundred thousand people’s worth of trodden mud on progressively less sleep. And yet — this is the thing about Roskilde — it was still, by common agreement of nearly everyone I spoke to, a magnificent week. The mud won the war of attrition. It did not win the festival.

Roskilde 2015: Orange Feeling in the Rain

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 09:00:00 +0000

The 2015 edition is the one where a Beatle closed the Orange Stage and the sky spent a week deciding whether it liked us. Paul McCartney headlined the final Saturday, 4 July, and the whole festival bent itself around that fact for days beforehand — an actual member of the band that half your parents’ record collections were built on, standing under the orange canopy that his old rivals the Rolling Stones commissioned in the seventies. If you want a single image for how strange and how big Roskilde gets, it is a 72-year-old Liverpudlian playing to a field in Zealand under a Stones-era awning while a hundred thousand Danes lose their minds in the drizzle.