John Dee is a live music venue in Oslo, Norway. Located at Mariboes gate 5A, beneath Rockefeller Music Hall in the former Torggata Bad complex, it opened on 1 October 1997 as the smaller club stage in the Rockefeller venue family.

The venue is operated by Auditorium AS, the same company behind Rockefeller and Sentrum Scene. John Dee has a capacity of 500 people and functions as a compact standing-room venue, with a low ceiling, bars and close contact between the stage and audience.

John Dee was created to give Oslo a smaller professional concert room below Rockefeller. Before the venue opened, the premises had housed Restaurant Ludvik, an unusual restaurant remembered for furniture mounted upside down on the ceiling and a mechanical elk head on the wall. After later restaurant and club concepts failed, the space was converted into a dedicated live music venue.

The programme at John Dee covers rock, metal, punk, indie, pop, hip-hop, electronic music and other genres. Heavy music has been a regular part of the venue’s history, with bands such as Volbeat, Bruce Dickinson, Paradise Lost, Mastodon, Neurosis, HammerFall, Deftones, Clutch and Hanoi Rocks having played there.

John Dee is physically connected to Rockefeller, allowing the two venues to function together for larger events while normally operating as separate stages. It has also become part of the natural progression within Oslo’s live circuit, with some artists moving from John Dee to Rockefeller and later to Sentrum Scene as their audiences grow.

John Dee is one of the main stages used by Inferno Metal Festival, together with Rockefeller upstairs. Its long association with Inferno, combined with year-round rock and metal bookings, has made it one of Oslo’s most important club-sized venues for heavy music.

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ADDRESS:
Mariboes gate 5A, 0183 Oslo, Norway

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