CityLife

Camden Crawl: Day Three

BLONDE AMBITION: The Joy Formidable

HELLO all. It’s now Sunday and the Crawl is over, but while I nurse a sore head, a mosquito-ravaged arm and a suspiciously swollen tonsil, let me recount all of yesterday’s comings and goings down in Camden.  

Contingency planning was the order of the day, and owing to the fact that Saturday morning saw another fifty or so coach-loads of Crawlers roll into London-town, there was ample opportunity to engage in that quintessential of British traditions: Queuing.   

Tickets for the Roundhouse headliners, only obtainable at the front of a snaking two-mile long queue, were the first casualty of the day, leaving a suspiciously Little Boots-shaped hole in my Saturday itinerary.   

And there was little in the way of compensation over at The Dublin Castle; where Irish exports Fight Like Apes were set to play for Steve Lamacq.  

Flawed logistics

Clearly, the flawed logistics behind fitting one band, one Radio 1 sound crew, and 150 Crawlers into a bar-space the size of postage stamp had been lost on the festival organisers.

The queue didn’t move, so undeterred, we did. A mighty (for Camden) trek, and our first gig of the day came in the form of Josh Weller, a London-based singer songwriter type with vertical hair, Buddy Holly specs and a completely unnecessary umbrella. It was geek-chic down to an art form.  

And while he’s a very different musical prospect to Little Boots’ sugary pop sensibilities and Fight Like Apes’ propensity for the lyrically bizarre, there’s still plenty to enjoy in a performance which looks and sounds like a Morrissey tribute night, courtesy of The IT Crowd.  

Opting to stay rooted to the spot, rather than risk another queue, the next musical offering is a semi-controlled garage-art-punk explosion, in the form of London-based quartet The KASMs.  

Picture that pink haired drongo from Lazy Town, but a few years older and wiser when she’s stopped hanging around with her foam-faced friends and got well into her Siouxsie Sioux.  

Aztec jaguar spirit  

That’s vocalist Rachel Mary Callaghan, who tears about the Bullet Bar like a crystal meth-head all-consumed by the spirit of an epileptic Aztec jaguar spirit; over-turning tables, flooring punters and ending the set in a heap of twisted metal that was once a drum kit.  

With both The Joy Formidable and The Fall attracting lengthy queues that pan down Camden High Street from the Electric Ballroom, we again take on the organisers’ advice and resort to a bit more contingency planning.     

So, it’s back into the Stables Market just up the road and to Cuban Bar, where dance-pop two-piece The Cordelier Club are holding the fort.  

And while there was nothing revolutionary about the duo besides their pseudonym, it was great to see a brother-sister collaboration that was more The Knife than it was the Same Difference, with echoes of Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem.     

And so, what had originally been a weekend planned to close with Mark E Smith and The Fall, actually ended a hundred or so meters away, upstairs at the Barfly where it had all started with The Jim Jones Revue on Friday.  

Dark garage epics  

 Flanked by some of the bands we’d caught earlier in the evening, including the then somewhat more subdued KASMs, were Ipso Facto, a monochrome female four-piece resplendent at the helm of an orchestra of dark garage-epics.  

And so, that draws a thick red line under yet another fantastic Camden Crawl.    

The music and the weather has been immense, and I didn’t even make it to the Roundhouse, which pretty much shows that the size of the venue set aside for the bands is usually more a testament to their egos than their talents.  

Home-turf  

Cheers for tuning in to my blogs, and keep your eyes peeled for those that’ve shone  in Camden playing Manchester in the coming weeks and months.  

I know for a fact that the Joy Formidable will be joining our boys It’s A Buffalo at The Ruby Lounge in a couple of weeks, Marina and the Diamonds is at The Deaf Institute on Thursday and The Whip will be back on home-turf, with a DJ Set at Sankeys on May 3.  

And you want to get involved with that last one. Believe me.