The last time we played Magazine London we set up in the round - a central stage in the middle of the riverside room, the band in a circle facing out, 360 degrees of audience with the Thames and the Canary Wharf skyline through the windows on two sides. It is not a setup every band will take on, because there is no back of the stage to hide and the sound has to work in every direction at once. But in a room built around its views it is the right call: it puts the floor all the way around the band instead of pushing everyone to one end.
The riverside room, and the one next door
Magazine London is a purpose-built events venue on the Greenwich Peninsula, on the south bank of the Thames three minutes from North Greenwich on the Jubilee line, scaling from a few hundred up into the thousands across several internal spaces and a riverside showground. The room we play is the riverside hall - floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides over the river and the Canary Wharf towers, a high ceiling and a polished concrete floor. The windowless hall alongside it tends to run the conference through the day, so guests move across for the reception and the evening and the venue flips a working conference into a party room without anyone leaving the building.
Playing in the round, on the house PA, in from the cloak room
The load-in is simpler than the scale suggests: we drive the van up to the main entrance and bring the kit in through the cloak area straight into the hall, no long service route. The room has a house PA and our own engineer mixes front-of-house on it, which for a band travelling from South Wales is the sensible way to work a London room. The in-the-round setup is the part that takes knowing what you are doing - a central stage means no single front-of-house direction, so the mix and the monitoring have to hold all the way around, and we run in-ears only, never wedges, which is what makes a 360-degree stage workable at all. We plan the stage position and the lighting with the venue in advance because it changes the sightlines for the whole room. A glassy riverside hall on this scale wants a full sound too, so we bring it - we have played here with a horn section on top of the full showband, which is what fills the space and matches the production a London corporate event carries.
How the night runs by the river
The shape is a conference-to-party flip across two rooms: sessions in the windowless hall by day, then drinks and dinner in the riverside room as the light goes down over the Thames, then the band. We play two long sets of around an hour each, blended end to end and loaded with floor-fillers, a DJ around them, and in the round the floor fills from every side at once - a different energy to a room where everyone faces one wall. An awards night runs the presentations first and the band after; a launch or client-hospitality night leans on the river views and the band as the centrepiece. We travel light from South Wales, slot into whatever production company or in-house team is running the room, and are one less thing for a London planner to chase.
The Brotherhood are South Wales’ go-to corporate band, working London regularly. Check our availability for your conference, awards night or gala at Magazine London.
