It was about six months into his ownership of the crumbling Camden Palace that it dawned on Olly Bengough he may have bitten off more than he could chew. “It was a wet, miserable London night in November 2004 and I was standing in the doorway looking at the rain falling in the glistening puddles,” he says. “There was no one on the streets and there were about 10 people on the dance floor. There were literally more staff than customers. At that point I just didn’t know if we were going to make it.”
It was a sobering moment for an entrepreneur who was about to sink £2 million of his own money and bank loans — “a huge amount for us” — into rescuing one of the great historic music venues of the capital. Now, two major refurbishments and more than £70 million later, the Grade II listed building has been reborn as revived public music venue Koko and a new private members’ club, House of Koko. It is celebrating its 125th anniversary as one of the most lauded and successful hospitality and entertainment brands not only in London, but across Europe.
At a time of acute and sustained pressure on margins in the hospitality sector, Koko is profitable and generating revenue that Bengough could only have dreamed of that gloomy night a quarter of a century ago. In 2024, the business turned over more than £27 million, compared with £4 million as recently as 2019.
The Koko of 2026 is certainly a very different beast to the old Camden Palace — also known as the Camden Theatre, the Camden Hippodrome Theatre and the Music Machine over its long and illustrious history.
It is a unique hybrid of grand music venue, smaller performance spaces including a jazz club, DJ stages, private members’ club, restaurants, a plethora of bars, state-of-the-art recording and broadcasting studio and charitable foundation. All under one roof.
Koko and House of Koko’s warren of rooms, vinyl booths, corridors, terraces and balconies — with 300 pieces of art on display — make it one of London’s most intriguing buildings. It hosts more than 1,000 DJ events and 300 live shows a year and the parties rock on deep into the early hours. “We can only do that because we have succeeded as a business,” says Bengough, 51.
That success has also allowed Koko to give £500,000 to its charitable foundation supporting music, arts and the environment, particularly in the Camden area.
For father-of-three Bengough it has been an absorbing, rewarding but often gruelling and exhausting journey marked by the occasional shattering setback, notably the fire in 2020 that toppled Koko’s famous copper dome and came close to destroying the entire building.
Bengough was only 27 — but already a hugely successful promoter — when he got his hands on the Camden Palace. He had helped set up Lovebox festival on Clapham Common through his Mint Group company in 2002, an event that attracted crowds of up to 50,000 and some of the biggest artists in live music.
In 2003 he got a call about this “amazing theatre in Mornington Crescent that’s falling apart” and went to take a look. What he saw was alarming. He recalls: “It was on its last legs, you could see through the floor, there were cracks in the walls and the white paint was yellow from all the years of smoking. This was in the era of old London, the O2 had not yet opened and the Roundhouse was still to be rebuilt. I’m not sure you would come across an opportunity like that now.”
The venue was then owned by nightclub operator Luminar, which effectively handed it to him for nothing, he says, although a figure of £4 million was reported at the time. The venerable theatre was operating as a dance floor — not a very well used one — and there were no live shows.
Bengough, who lives with his family in Pimlico, seized the chance to bring it back to its former glory and the restoration began. The name Koko emerged from a brainstorming session as “something timeless and classic”.
But the first six months were touch and go, with money pouring out of the door and the punters not coming in. However, not long after that bleak autumn night in 2004, Bengough’s luck turned. And he has never looked back.
The saviours, unlikely though it may seem, were Coldplay. The band chose Koko for a live show to launch their album X&Y in June 2005. By chance Madonna was in the audience that night. She had performed her first London gig at the Camden Palace in 1983 and was so impressed she got in touch to say she wanted to make a return for her new album Confessions on a Dance Floor. Not only that, but AOL, then the biggest internet service provider in the world, wanted to livestream the show to its homepage. The transformation from ageing analogue music venue to the Koko of today was well under way.
The third megastar who helped the transformation of the Camden landmark was “one of their own” — Amy Winehouse, who performed an epic concert there in 2006 just after releasing her seminal Back in Black album.
Now established as a “fiercely independent” modernised music venue, Koko was ready for the next stage of its evolution.
Under Bengough’s leadership, Koko became known as a venue that supported and promoted the musical genres and sub-cultures that not everyone would touch. As he recalls: “We broke the grime scene in London, building artists like Stormzy, Skepta and Dizzee Rascal. More recently it’s been the same with the Afrobeats movement.
“And in the last couple of years you’ve seen artists like Raye and Olivia Dean perform before they became big, and Dua Lipa did her first London show with us. So we’ve really been at the forefront of breaking emerging talent in the UK. And some go on to be among the biggest artists in the world.”
In 2017, part two of the Koko reinvention story began. Two buildings to the rear of the theatre — an old piano factory and the former Hope & Anchor pub — came available for sale.
Bengough, never a man to turn down a challenge, brought in architects to work up ideas about joining the three buildings together to make one huge space. By this time “the world had moved on, we needed to redefine what a live music entertainment experience could be at a global level when you are competing against arenas and five star-hotels”.
Work began on a three-year reconstruction programme in 2019, months before the pandemic brought the world to a halt. “So it was a wild time, just extremely difficult to build a 50,000 sq ft building during Covid lockdowns,” he says.
This time the £70 million project could not be funded out of Bengough’s own resources, so he brought in Sister, the TV production company behind Chernobyl and This is Going to Hurt, as investors and partners. Founded by Elisabeth Murdoch— who has been “unwavering in her support” — Jane Featherstone and Stacey Snider, the firm brought not only money but also access to a huge new network of creatives in their own industry that could start to form the lifeblood of a new kind of private members’ club that Bengough had in mind.
Memberships range from £1,650 to £100,000 over 10 years for patrons. Those who have signed up reportedly include Paul Mescal, Phoebe Waller Bridge and Marisa Abela.
Inevitably, the costs of the project overran the original budget as the post-Covid inflation boom started to kick in. The wraps finally came off in April 2022 with a storming show from Arcade Fire, which was livestreamed by Amazon.
“The truth is it was extremely hard and I knew I was going to have to dig in”
It was a sweet moment for Bengough after all the slog and setbacks of the previous three years. “We had expected it to be a big challenge to create something that London had never seen before and London needed,” he says. “But in entertainment you have to be resilient, you have to have stamina and be determined. The truth is it was extremely hard and I knew I was going to have to dig in.
“I was 45 when it started, by that age you’ve got more knowledge and experience, but you still have to be mentally tough, make lots of good decisions and choose a great team.”
The result has been the creation of a venue and club where, in Bengough’s words, “people who come for a night out here will get a great experience if they have £50 in their pocket or £1,000 in their pocket”.
Despite the crisis in the hospitality industry in London, Bengough is excited and confident about the experiential economy where Koko sits. New ventures include glamping pop-ups in the English countryside and a retreat in Ibiza called Casa Koko last summer. He is regularly approached about opening new versions of Koko in other big cities around the world. But for now he is focused on London and the remarkable venue he has created. “We built Koko to last, it will be good for London for another 100 years.”
