seks aylal

Overall: Oh, Koko. What an enigma you are. On the plus side, this is one of London’s most beautiful venues. It was built as a theatre in 1900 and for 20 or so years after the second world war was used as a BBC theatre – The Goon Show was recorded here. It became a music venue, the Music Machine, in 1970, and was one of the key punk venues, before morphing into the Camden Palace in 1982. It closed in February 2004 and was extensively and expensively restored before reopening in 2005. From the stage it looks beautiful – tier upon tier rising like a scarlet wedding cake. In the right spot, too, it’s great – down on the floor, you feel remarkably close to the band for a 1,400-capacity room. The problem lies in the number of the 1,400 who can actually get to see the stage: the front of the dancefloor can get rammed, and so you’ll find people at the back perching on the stairs to try and get some sort of sightline. Upstairs, in the balconies, only those in the front rows can see anything: rather than having a conventionally raked single balcony, or two balconies, Koko has a series of shallow, flat tiers, with bar areas hidden behind them. For a live music venue, it’s a startlingly inefficient use of space, and one that makes trying to watch bands a frustrating pastime. There’s also the fact that those upper tiers are bizarrely maze-like: it can be awfully confusing trying to find your way up and down. On the bright side, if you get to the very top, you rarely have to queue for a drink.