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A trend I noticed in the best gig/worst gig a lot of people seen some big bands in small spaces, and I thought a nice brag thread was in order.
Maybe we could even work out a ratio like record sales divided by capacity!
Saw Arctic Monkeys in the cluny in Newcastle. They weren't even the headline act (MIlburn were LOLOLOLOL)
Saw Coldpay at ULU. Couldn't have imagined the scale they'd reach
Not terribly small, but I saw blur at their Astoria residency in 2003. Being in the front couple of rows it felt insane to see a band of that size in that venue
Saw Arcade Fire at a church in Westminster. It was rubbish. I was gutted
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 12:20 - Apr 9 with 6418 views
Saw Muse 2 years ago play an charity gig at the S.E.B., max crowd, the balcony rocked to a heck of an extreme i thought they would collapse. Huge gig in an intimate location.
I can't claim to have attended it, sadly, but John Otway ran a competition for which the prize was him playing live in the winner's living room.
Not that they are / were a particularly big band (Metallica, wanna step in here?) but I saw Wrathchild play live in the same Newbury gym that I played badminton in. Note: No badminton took place while those glam rockers were strutting their stuff...
"Things had started becoming increasingly desperate at Loftus Road but QPR have been handed a massive lifeline and the place has absolutely erupted. it's carnage. It's bedlam. It's 1-1."
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 14:01 - Apr 9 with 6322 views
I saw New Order playing in a place called Jenkinson's Bar in Brighton in 1981, but I can barely remember the show let alone the size of the venue. I saw The Cure at the old Marquee Club a couple of times, back when people still gobbed on them.
While still at school, I saw Free at the Farx club in Southall. It was basically the back room of a pub. Alright Now had just been released and there must have been about 400 people in there. Couldn't move and the only thing keeping us cool was the sweat dripping off the ceiling. My chest stopped pounding about 2 days after the event.
Also saw British Sea Power downstairs at the Academy in Dublin, when I was working there. Wasn't overcrowded, but they had a mascot of a 7' high polar bear. The ceilings were about 6'3".
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one's lifetime." (Mark Twain)
Find me on twitter @derbyhoop and now on Bluesky
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 14:26 - Apr 9 with 6301 views
Saw The National opening for Clinic at the Warsaw in Brooklyn about 15 years ago. There's a lyric in Born to Beg that may be about that set of gigs.
Easiest way to cheat on this one I suppose is to see someone on the 'quieter' side of their career. Saw Teenage Fanclub last year at the 02 Institute in Birmingham. It sounded appropriately sized to me on paper, as a fan, but I didn't realise it's all split into rooms. The Fannies' room held 200 people max. Weezer had the bigger room upstairs (what an outrage, rolls eyes etc).
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 14:59 - Apr 9 with 6272 views
The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 14:40 - Apr 9 by BklynRanger
Saw The National opening for Clinic at the Warsaw in Brooklyn about 15 years ago. There's a lyric in Born to Beg that may be about that set of gigs.
Easiest way to cheat on this one I suppose is to see someone on the 'quieter' side of their career. Saw Teenage Fanclub last year at the 02 Institute in Birmingham. It sounded appropriately sized to me on paper, as a fan, but I didn't realise it's all split into rooms. The Fannies' room held 200 people max. Weezer had the bigger room upstairs (what an outrage, rolls eyes etc).
I saw Oasis at The Venue in New Cross and Elvis Presley at a Pontins holiday camp on the Isle of Wight, when I was about seven. I think he opened for the comedian Mick Miller.
Stayed in a sh it pub round the corner rather than joining mates to see Radiohead at the Horn of Plenty pub in St Albans, which I regret, and couldn’t be bothered to go downstairs to see Blur playing in the basement at the Dome in Tufnell Park. Which I’m quite relaxed about.
My wife saw most of Artic Monkeys first gigs as she was living in Sheffield and her best mate worked with Andy, the bass player.
Fulham FC: It's the taking part that counts
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 15:06 - Apr 9 with 6269 views
Reef - Tunbridge Wells Forum - 250 capacity I think Guns & Roses - Old Marquee, Wardour Street Aerosmith, Motley Crue (as the Four Skins), The Black Crowes - Marquee Charing X Road Pearl Jam - ULU
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 16:51 - Apr 9 with 6163 views
Pink Floyd in a lecture theatre at Essex Univ in 1970. Dire Straits supporting Talking Heads (or it might have been the other way round) in a small hall at Leicester Univ in 1978.
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 17:33 - Apr 9 with 6126 views
I remember see blur in the powerhouse in Angelback in the late nineties . They were playing back up to Desmond decker. Think it was a fiver entrance fee. Flimsy plastic pints were the order of the day, lots of them.
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 17:41 - Apr 9 with 6118 views
I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Apollo Theater in NY 8 years ago and it was like sitting beside the tracks with a train blasting through .Incredible
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 18:58 - Apr 9 with 6075 views
As I posted elsewhere, I saw Clannad in the foyer of Wandsworth Town Hall.
Dick Gaughan in a room above a pub in Islington - more like a corridor than a room.
The Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road was great for seeing uo and coming bands. I saw the Stranglers, Supertramp, the Bangles (behind closed doors) and Matching Mole (Robert Wyatt) to name a few,
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 19:20 - Apr 9 with 6052 views
Saw Jungle in Aus in a bar of about 300 max. That was cool.
Saw Franz Ferdinand around the release of the first album at The Astoria. That felt small given all the hype at the time.
Saw Goat in a barn in Christianna in Copenhagen. Probably 500 in there, mind, but again, felt small.
Saw Tom Grennan at a small venue in Brighton a good 6-9 months before he released his first album. We didn’t even know who he was at the time, just down for the weekend so bought tickets on an exchange site on a whim. There were teenagers in their talking about their GSCEs. Never felt so old!
None of those are really that big though! Sorry.
The one I missed was seeing Kasabian in 2004 at Fibbers in York (capacity at the time was 150 I think) around the time of the release of the first person. Queued up from 6am and the bloke in front of me got the last ticket. Gutted.
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The Smallest Space You've Seen the Biggest Band in on 20:02 - Apr 9 with 6013 views
The Who at Pryzm in Kingston about 6 weeks ago - acoustic set! Seen Foals in there too and Elbow in the last year! But a CD get a free gig - its the way they rig the charts!
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