Twenty years is a long time to spend listening. And yet, that’s exactly what Les Docks have done since the day they opened their doors in 2005: listen. To artists, to audiences, to the shifting pulse of a city growing up around them. While the rest of the world has been wrapped in screens, streams, and algorithms, Les Docks have quietly defended something far more fragile and far more powerful: the irreplaceable chaos, intimacy, and electricity of live music.
It’s almost ironic. In an era where culture is increasingly consumed alone -- headphones in, feeds scrolling, notifications buzzing -- Les Docks have doubled down on the opposite. They’ve placed the experience at the centre. Not the spectacle. Not the trending sound. The experience. That human, sensory, unrepeatable moment when a room breathes as one. As Laurence Vinclair, the director and programmer since 2007, says: “Tous les écrans possibles et imaginables ne remplaceront jamais l’expérience sensorielle et sociale vécue en live.” And she’s right. Because if screens are predictable, live music is everything but.
Part of the Docks’ magic is the scale…or rather, the lack of it. There’s a “concert in your living room” quality to the space, a closeness that strips away pretense and lets music feel personal again. You’re never far from the stage, from the sweat, from the sound, from the spark. It’s a venue where even well-known artists feel almost within arm’s reach, and where newcomers don’t have to fight to be heard. And remarkably, it stays affordable. In a world where major tours cost a small fortune and stadium seats feel miles away, a night at Les Docks still feels accessible. Democratic, even. Culture without the velvet rope.
Over two decades, Les Docks have become the institutional heart of Lausanne’s nights without ever becoming institutional. The formula is deceptively simple: pair curiosity with integrity. The results? 1,262 concerts, 734,542 entries, 311 sold-out shows, and a staggering 800+ Swiss artists who’ve found a stage that treats them with the same respect as the internationals. Numbers can’t capture the sweat, the noise, or the goosebumps, but they do paint a clear picture: Lausanne shows up for live music, and Les Docks have made it possible.
And then there’s Proxima: the venue’s artist development program, created long before “supporting the local scene” became a marketing line. For the past decade, Proxima has quietly shaped the Swiss musical landscape: thirty-seven emerging artists mentored, coached, pushed, supported. Some became names you know; others haven’t yet. But all of them benefited from a rare thing in this industry: a structure that doesn’t treat early-stage talent as a gamble, but as an investment in the cultural fabric of the city. It’s not just programming; it’s stewardship.
And that ethos shows up in the lineups too. Les Docks are known for their opening acts -- often young, new, or just-barely-breaking artists who end up stealing the show, earning lifelong fans, or returning years later as headliners. It’s a place where future stars get their first real applause, where Lausannois witness a before-they-were-big moment without even realising it.
Look through Les Docks’ photo archive and you can trace 20 years of cultural memory in a single gaze: Moby’s melancholy in 2009. Patti Smith’s fire in 2014. Foals shaking the rafters in 2019. NNAVY, radiant on her home turf in 2022. King Krule’s shadows crawling over the stage in 2023. Each moment, each year, a little time capsule. The kind you don’t realise you’re collecting until you look back and see the thread they’ve woven.
What Les Docks remind us -- insistently, lovingly, stubbornly -- is that live music is not a luxury or a nostalgic relic. It’s a public service. A communal ritual. A way for a city to meet itself in the dark and feel something collectively before the lights come back up. Lausanne doesn’t just need places like Les Docks; it’s shaped by them.
As the venue celebrates its twentieth year, it feels like a quiet triumph. Not because they’ve survived the storms of the music industry, the pandemic, the cultural shifts (though they have). But because they’ve held their line with unwavering clarity. Music first. Artists respected. Audiences welcomed. Community nurtured.
In the end, this anniversary isn’t really about the venue at all. It’s about the people who filled it; the staff stitching buttons backstage minutes before a show, the security team remembering familiar faces, the 19-year-olds experiencing their first concert without their parents, the 40-year-olds rediscovering themselves in a guitar riff (hi, it’s us).
It’s about Lausanne choosing, again and again, to show up.
And that’s the real lesson of these 20 years: as long as there’s a stage, a room, a heartbeat, and a crowd willing to gather, live music will matter. Les Docks have spent two decades proving it.
Here’s to the next twenty years of turning up the volume.
Discover the full program of Les Docks here.
