KOKO

In the room

The experience

The building opened as the Camden Theatre on Boxing Day 1900, designed by W. G. R. Sprague and opened by Ellen Terry, with 2,434 seats under a dome. It has been the Camden Hippodrome (1909), a picture house (1913), the BBC Camden Theatre from 1945 to 1977, where The Last Goon Show of All was recorded on 30 April 1972, then the Music Machine from 1977 and Camden Palace from 1982. The Clash played three nights here in July 1978 and the footage is in Rude Boy. Madonna's first UK show was at Camden Palace; Prince brought Ronnie Wood on as guest guitarist in 1988 and came back for a secret show in 2007. Oliver Bengough's Mint Entertainment bought it in 2004 and reopened it as KOKO, where Madonna launched Confessions on a Dance Floor the following year.

On 6 January 2020, in the middle of a refurbishment, the roof caught fire; eight engines and about sixty firefighters fought it. The theatre reopened in April 2022 after a multimillion-pound rebuild, with Arcade Fire playing the first night. It now takes about 1,500 people, standing in the stalls and stacked up through the gilt balconies, and the thing you notice first is that you are in a theatre: the stage is a proscenium, the balconies hang over it, and the sound has a hall's bloom rather than a warehouse's slap.