Metro Theatre
624 George Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
Tucked into George Street in the heart of Sydney's CBD, the Metro Theatre is the city's pre-eminent independent live room, the sort of mid-size space that bands graduate to and then keep coming back to. It began life as the Roma Cinema in 1963 and was reborn as a music venue in 1994, holding onto enough Art Deco flourish (a chandelier, a certain faded grandeur) to feel like an occasion rather than a black box. With a main auditorium in the region of 1,300 to 1,500, it threads the line between sweat and scale, taking in rock, indie, electronic and hip hop without apology.
Its reputation rests on the kind of nights people talk about for years. Jeff Buckley played a run of revered shows here in 1995, and Australia's own You Am I famously sold out seven nights in the space of six days in 1996, a feat that says as much about the room as the band. A brief stint trading as the Century Theatre in 2006 came and went; the Metro name, sensibly, stuck.
