A label that began in a kitchen, a cassette series and a six-day convention. How K Records turned Olympia, Washington into an indie scene with its own rules.
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.
Marseille has no Paris style club economy and a thriving electronic underground anyway. The reason is structural: a converted tobacco factory, a rap festival that adopted the machines, and collectives that double as political spaces.
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.
