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.
How Brixton’s Windmill, a flat-roofed council-estate pub, became the incubator of South London’s guitar scene, from black midi to Black Country, New Road.
Dubstep was not born on a record but in a dark Shoreditch basement. How FWD>> and Plastic People's soundsystem forged a genre Thursday by Thursday.
Most festivals ask the same question every year: who is available, and who will sell tickets. Roadburn asks a stranger one. What music does not exist yet, and what would it take to make it exist for one night in Tilburg? That question is the whole thing. It explains why a festival built by two […]
Most legendary venues start with a business plan. The Haçienda started with a slogan borrowed from the Situationists, “The Hacienda Must Be Built,” and a record label that had no idea how to run a nightclub. That naivety is exactly why it changed music history. Opened on 21 May 1982 in a former yacht showroom [&hellip
Music can turn a stadium into a single voice, but only a handful of bands ever reach that altitude. Here is what separates the few who move millions from everyone else.
