O2 Academy Brixton

If you are going to a rock or pop show and you have this place as an option to see it in, do yourself a favor and just go there. I went to O2 Academy Brixton to see YMAS and Deaf Havana and it was simply an awesome venue. When you get there you have this lightened dome with the name of your band in big old-school theater style letters, then you get in line and you go inside, you can see the stage perfectly from wherever you are on the standing floor section, and it's a beautiful stage by the way. O2 Academy Brixton is also a good place to go to a show if you like to be surrounded by people, but not by that many people (because it's a big place, but not an Arena), the disadvantage in this is that the place sells out pretty fast, so if you decide you want to go there I advise to buy the tickets in advance. Getting there by subway or bus is very easy you get out in Brixton Tube station and you walk a bit, and you have nearby places to eat like Honest Burgers or Subway on your way there (I mean you are about to watch a show, you need your fast food carbs to get through it and not some fancy stuff). Another good thing about this venue (or bad because, you know, the show ends early) is that the show ends around midnight, so you can still have public transportation to get home or partying as you prefer ;)

I saw David Guetta here in 2010, and the concert was fantastic. The venue is on the large side—or so I thought before I went to a U2 concert—but that didn’t mean that my friend and I didn’t get as close to the stage as humanly possible without stepping on people, which may have happened later—it was a messy night. That said, the o2 Brixton Academy caters to epic-sounding and epic-looking concerts, and David Guetta’s was no exception. There were larger-than-human-sized robots on stage at one point—don’t know what that was about. We ended up getting on the night bus in the wrong direction and ending up in the rougher side of Brixton, but it made for a great story.

I saw Phoenix here several years ago and I fell in love with this venue, which is saying something since I'm generally not a big fan of larger concert venues and this one was pretty big. The opening bands were an absolute blast and the concert-goers seemed to be just as excited to be dancing around to the sounds of the local artists as they were with Phoenix. I was seated up in the balcony, overlooking the throbbing masses on the floor below, and it was comfortable at first, but almost nobody could stay seated during the main event (despite security/crowd-control's best attempts). I can't say much about the different kinds of acts that go here since I only went the one time, but I would definitely consider going back based on only on my single experience there.