The Marquee Club (former site) — AC/DC's UK breakthrough

The Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street in Soho was the most important small rock venue in Britain from its opening at that address in 1964 through to its closure there in 1988. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie — every significant act in British rock history played the Marquee, and being given a headline slot there in the 1960s and 1970s was a specific kind of endorsement: the room that determined whether a band could hold a London audience. The capacity was around nine hundred people. The stage was small. The sound system was aggressive.

AC/DC played the Marquee in 1976 during their first extended UK tour, at a point when they were entirely unknown to British audiences. The shows were the first real test of whether the music translated outside Australia, and the answer the Marquee crowds gave was unambiguous. The band came back and played it again. Word spread through the London rock community in the way that word only spreads when something is genuinely alarming — people describing what Angus Young was doing on stage in terms that sounded exaggerated until you saw it yourself. The Marquee shows were the beginning of a British following that would eventually dwarf their Australian one.

The original Marquee building at 90 Wardour Street is now a bar and restaurant, the facade largely unchanged but the interior unrecognisable as the venue it was. A plaque marks the history of the address. The Marquee brand moved to 105 Charing Cross Road in 1988 and went through several subsequent iterations before finally closing. The 90 Wardour Street room — the actual room where the shows happened — is the one that mattered, and it is the one that no longer exists.