Ever been on holiday with your parents? Then you’ve most likely experienced the “midweek desperation”, you know, that inevitable desire to get away from your folks and socialize with people of similar age and with similar interests that strikes like clockwork. But where to go? The next time you hit Finland’s capital you will know, because here is the venue guide to Helsinki every traveller should bring, courtesy of guest blogger Eduardo Alonso from Glue.

In my posts I have so far written about the artists and bands, the festivals and the music industry in general, but there is a key element I haven’t mentioned: the venues. There is much live music happening in Helsinki any day of the week, and apart from the well-known international names you might discover and enjoy good bands – and it’ll cost you just a few Euros. Let take a tour around Helsinki to some of the best music venues in town.

This is not a very big city so you will find most of the venues and bars within walking distance in the city center. Let us start with Tavastia, the most famous venue in town that has been in business for four decades and probably the charismatic bouncer at the door has worked there for just as long. For local bands it is a milestone and many outstanding foreign acts (from Tom Waits over Ramones to Alice in Chains) have hit the stage there.

Tavastia holds a bit less than a thousand people and its program includes almost any genre. Since the nineties, the venue has had a little sister: Semifinal. This is a very small room for starting bands with entrance from the backyard of Tavastia. There have been a few hundred of bands performing there and you may check the names of all them on the club’s website.

Just a few hundred meters from Tavastia, you’ll find Bar Loose, which happens to be the trendiest rock bar these days. It used to be a very small place, but since moving to a new location it is a two-story club with a tiny stage in the basement. As you might guess from the name, the bar recreates the infamous fun house inhabited once by The Stooges, so you can guess the type of concerts you will find there. It usually features local or Scandinavian bands and tickets are inexpensive. Ginger and Nicke Hellacopter have spun records there and the crowd is pretty casual.

We must go to the harbor to find the next big club in town. Nosturi sits by the seaside in an old warehouse building surrounded by big cranes. This venue tends to book hard rock and metal acts, but not exclusively. Many shows there might have no age limit, so it’s not rare to see a small and packed separated bar area at the back of the room while a dozen of underaged enjoy plenty of space in front of the stage. Yes, it is a comic situation, but that is the Finnish law. The ground floor of Nosturi also has a restaurant and a bar where local bands play. In a similar way there are other fashionable bars, like Belly, programming indie and pop bands in the weekends and quality lunch on weekdays.

Of course there are some metal bars around the Helsinki city center where you can enjoy the wildest and loudest acts. On The Rocks is a classic spot and even though the street floor might look like a small motorcycle bar, the downstairs floor is a full-blown hard rock club that not only features gigs, but also standup comedy and even metal karaoke. In a completely different end of the spectra, the electronic music aficionados gather in the Redrum club and the tiny mBar, where in addition to the innovative grooves you may see some art on the walls and people working on their MacBook’s.

Far from the city center, the Helsinki nightlife shrinks, but in the hipster neighborhood of Kallio you can enjoy quality live music almost every day of the week at Club Liberté for a minimal entrance fee. Not far from it, Kuudes Linja, with its living room atmosphere, is a stylish club that offers anything that is hip from pop over international DJs to rock to jazz. Sometimes some better known artists, like Oh No Ono or Ben Chasny, perform at this small venue.

Hopefully this quick guide has given you some help in finding some good live music during your next visit to Helsinki. The city has much to offer…