The Rainbow Theatre, London — It's Too Late to Stop Now

The Rainbow Theatre at 232 Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park operated as a major rock venue from 1971 to 1981, after the building's previous life as the Astoria cinema. It held around three thousand people in a proper theatrical space — balcony, stalls, a proper stage — at a time when most rock venues were either enormous arenas or small clubs with nothing in between. The Rainbow occupied the middle register with considerable distinction: Led Zeppelin played here, the Who, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix shortly before his death.

In July 1973, Van Morrison performed at the Rainbow with a forty-piece orchestra — the Caledonia Soul Orchestra — on the tour that was recorded for what became It's Too Late to Stop Now, released in 1974 and widely regarded as one of the greatest live albums in the history of popular music. The album drew from multiple nights across the US and UK; the London shows at the Rainbow are among its most celebrated. Morrison was twenty-seven years old, at a peak of live performance that he would spend the following decades approaching and occasionally recapturing but never quite sustaining for as long. The orchestra arrangement allowed the songs to breathe at a scale that the usual four or five-piece band couldn't accommodate, and Morrison's voice — fully formed by that point, capable of extraordinary things — found a setting that matched its ambition.

The Rainbow closed in 1981 and has had various uses since, including a spell as a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall. The Seven Sisters Road building still stands, the facade recognisable, the interior altered. It is a registered building and has been the subject of various renovation proposals. The shows recorded there in the summer of 1973 are one of the reasons it deserves to be preserved.