Camden Palace

Camden Palace was a nightclub and live music venue at the foot of Camden High Street in north London, inside a grand Edwardian theatre building originally known as the Camden Theatre. Designed by William Sprague and opened in December 1900, the building had earlier lives as a cinema and, for a period after the Second World War, a BBC radio theatre used to record shows such as the Goon Show. It became a live music venue called The Music Machine in the late 1970s before being relaunched under the Camden Palace name in 1982.

The Camden Palace is best remembered for its role at the heart of the New Romantic scene, when Steve Strange and Rusty Egan took the Blitz club's door policy and sense of spectacle to a much bigger stage, drawing the likes of Boy George and Spandau Ballet and making the club a magnet for photographers and the pop press. From the mid-1980s the venue turned increasingly towards dance music, with the pioneering house night Delerium run by Robin King and residents Colin Faver and Eddie Richards bringing early house, electro and Hi-NRG to a London crowd. By the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, as acid house and rave culture took hold, Camden Palace became one of the city's key rave venues, with Friday night Orange Raves (hosted by Chris Paul and DJ Squirrel) growing into one of the biggest club brands in the capital, and early performances from acts including The Prodigy taking place on its stage.

Through the 1990s the venue ran a varied diet of club nights across different evenings, from the long-running Tuesday indie and alternative night Feet First to the Saturday house and acid house institution Clockwork Orange, hard house and trance night Frantic, and the trance-focused Peach, which brought DJs such as Armin van Buuren and Tiësto to UK audiences. The club also continued to host live gigs throughout its history, with notable shows from Madonna, Prince, Hüsker Dü, Blur and the Cardiacs sitting alongside its club nights, reflecting its dual identity as both a concert hall and a dance venue.

By the early 2000s the building was showing its age, and Camden Palace closed in 2004. New owners, led by Oliver Bengough and Mint Entertainment, carried out an extensive refurbishment of the Grade II listed building, and it reopened later that year as Koko, which has continued to operate as a concert and club venue, including hosting the long-running indie night Club NME from 2005. Koko suffered a serious fire during further renovation work in 2020 but was subsequently restored and reopened in 2022.