Most clubs treat the floor as a place to stand. In October 1999, fabric opened beneath Smithfield Market in London and treated it as a loudspeaker. The idea was simple enough to explain and strange enough to feel: if low frequencies can be felt as well as heard, put the machinery for feeling them in […]
Gilman Street opened on 31 December 1986 with a ban on alcohol and a vote for every major decision. Four decades on, the governance is the thing that survived.
A members-only room in a former parking garage, a custom Richard Long sound system and a DJ who retuned it all night. How Paradise Garage made the dance floor an instrument.
The Room That Was Built for Films Most legends about Hamburg’s Star-Club begin with the Beatles. Start instead with the building. Manfred Weissleder opened the club at Grosse Freiheit 39 on 13 April 1962, and the address was a former cinema. That detail explains almost everything about how the place worked. A cinema is a […
On November 2, 1989, a support band nobody outside Olympia, Washington had heard of opened for Tad at a club in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. About sixty people showed up. The band was Nirvana, two years before Nevermind, and the room they played had a legal capacity of five hundred. That gap, […]
Sanremo Rock was born in 1987 in a separate building, with its own presenter and a satellite link back to the theatre. It took 31 years to get inside the Ariston.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the thing that could get a nightclub raided was not the volume, the hours or the drugs. It was the dancing. A 1948 Law Written for Dance Halls Fueiho, the Law Concerning Business Affecting Public Morals, was enacted in 1948 under the Allied occupation. Its actual target was prostitution […]
On Friday morning at Parc Jean-Drapeau, somebody will inflate a very large board and write the day’s set times on it by hand. Until that moment, nobody attending Vans Warped Tour knows who plays when. That is not a logistics failure. It is the oldest working idea in the festival and the reason the thing […]
Ask a touring guitar band to name the best room they have ever played and a startling number of them, from every scene and every decade, land on the same answer: a former dancehall on Glasgow’s Gallowgate that was never designed for rock music at all. The Barrowland Ballroom was engineered in the 1930s for […]
How a sealed bank vault under no-man's-land became the room that carried Detroit techno into reunified Berlin.
