Arena: The Roundhouse - The People's Palace was a BBC Four documentary first broadcast in 2016, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Roundhouse, a venue in north London, which hosted its first gig - the launch of radical newspaper International Times. The audience included Paul McCartney and Marianne Faithfull, along with 3,000 others trying desperately to get in. The result was a glorious shambles. Since then, virtually every big name in rock and alternative theatre has played there. Today it's as vibrant as ever, continuing to attract big names and full houses and running an array of outreach and youth programmes enabling young people to express themselves in the arts.
Links To Peel[]
"I felt part of a community here" - John Peel on The Roundhouse
A short piece of footage of Peel from 1992 makes an appearance in the programme. Referring to the late 1960s - early 1970s period, when the Roundhouse staged many underground and hippy events (including the 1968 Doors/Jefferson Airplane concert, which he introduced), he described the venue as part of a community, where the sort of bands he liked were playing and where he felt at home. It is not known where the footage of Peel from 1992 originally came from [1]. At another point in the programme he is heard describing the Roundhouse as "one of those places where any attempt to kind of impose logic and order and reason on it is doomed to failure".
The programme also includes clips of artists Peel admired who played the Roundhouse, from Pink Floyd, Cream and Jefferson Airplane to the Clash, the Jam, X-Ray Spex and James Brown.
External Links[]
- BBC Programme page
- BBC The Roundhouse at 50
- Financial Times
- Time Out
- Footnotes
- ↑ The appearance of the filming strongly suggests it was part of the 'Late Show' special, the introduction to which by presenter Kirsty Wark was also used in the documentary.