It is rare for a band to be billed in the AB Club and then, due to the huge demand for tickets, re-housed to the AB Box. Then to bust out again to the main hall - and this phenomenon, it seems, is the new trend for the autumn.

(Masked man) SBTRKT scores unadulterated ‘hall-busting hat-trick’ at AB.

This year AB has taken a good hard look at the whole post-dubstep generation. Let’s say artists who take much of their inspiration from the (very recent) legacy of Skream, Benga and Burial and inject a shot of pop into the genre. This spring we got to see Mount Kimbie and Jamie Woon and this autumn we are hosting James Blake and SBTRKT.

We saw post-dubstep sensation (and masked man) SBTRKT live at work earlier this year at the Eurosonic showcase festival, where we got a good taste of him. A few months later his debut album appeared and was praised to the skies by all. His club show - planned for Tuesday 11 October – sold out within a couple of weeks and was relocated, due to the huge demand, to the AB Box, which is three times the size. But even that venue turned out to be too small and the concert was moved to the main hall.

It had been a long, long time since a band had scored such an ‘unexpected hall-busting hat-trick’. Only the Irish band The Script had done it before, in February ’09.

More ‘hall-busting concerts’…

Looking at the autumn calendar, however, it suddenly seems to be something of a trend. Both Anna Calvi – who played the AB for the first time last year as the opener for Nick Cave’s Grinderman – and the Apparat Band have had to re-house to the main hall due to the huge demand for tickets.

‘The Belgians’ – for whom we always have a soft spot – are doing really well too. It so happened that the reunion of El Fish – initially planned for the AB Box – struck gold and sold out effortlessly last weekend. And let’s not forget the new band Intergalactic Lovers. Demand for their AB Box concert tickets outstripped supply and they were upgraded to the main hall. But the biggest hall buster of all involved AB artist Gotye (AB as in Australian-Belgian), who had a world hit when the gig was announced and blasted from the AB BOX to the main hall in barely a quarter of an hour (adding another two sell-outs not long after).

Long live the audience! - that’s you! – is what we say! Because every artist wants to get his/her music across to the broadest possible audience...