Crawling It: The Camden Crawl 2008

Some geezer’s faux-busking in The Camden Eye, what a crock of shit. Faux-busking? As in organised busking? Inside? It’s all in a name but it’s got my goat. I gravitate back towards The World’s End to witness the last bits of LR Rockets’ set – the singer’s halfway into the audience by now and the rest of the band seem intent on following suit. That trick’s been pulled before but the stench of perspiration suggests they mean it. The music fared far better than the smell – a glam Young Knives. I could’ve stayed but the drizzled pathway to the Roundhouse glared at me oh-so-temptingly. On the way I ran into an impromptu, never-ending set on a street corner from Chalou St Jude. It was about the fiftieth time I’d heard that post-’12:51’ background riff, and to further detract, featured possibly the only vocalist ever to intentionally mimic Johnny Borrell and at the same time try to score cool points for putting on a guerrilla gig. High praise indeed.

In a battle with myself, my more tasteful persona won and entered the plush surroundings of The Roundhouse for the first time for Joana and The Wolf’s set as part of the fringe event, Futureshorts. Can’t get more pretentious (or precocious, as it turned out) than the rescoring of a series of short films in a dark room of people sitting down on carpet almost in rows with a huge plasma screen on the stage and the band containing themselves either side of it to showcase their ‘study’. And oh me, oh my – it happens to be the most intense, grandiose, piercing, all-consuming performance this side of the Northern line. Elements of Chan Marshall’s ferocity hit at first, the aftermath bringing with it the realisation that this is the first band I’ve ever seen who recall Life Without Buildings. That is really something. It’s really all about the vocals, but the band is fine too- Shoegazey guitars, cascading and sinewy bass, punchy and thumping drums – it’s worth £49.50 alone. The shrillness is mesmeric, boundless and schizoid. It’s not a sound for the faint hearted, but who cares for the weak anyway. Must say, plaudits to the sound engineers too – it’s a top notch setting.

I draw myself away, buzzing, and hap upon One Night Only in a record store. I can’t see them from the back, nor do I care to. And there’s a time when no words are necessary, although I’ve defeated my purpose by saying that. These are words just to sketch around the point, rather than to dance upon it. I briefly stare at a pub by the name of Tommy Flynn’s before entering to find quite excellent Stockton-on-Tees four-piece The Chapman Family. Think Futureheads or original post-punkers Wire or Gang of Four; they’re a snapshot of raucous, crotchety, call-to-arms guitar pop. A pleasant interlude.

Too peripheral and chocka for longer than one set all the same, I’m quickly off to a packed-out Koko for Los Campesinos!; it’s a marvel that “decorating envelopes for foreplay” has managed to fill the Crawl’s largest venue. From Architecture In Helsinki comparisons to string-led beauty, it’s always a cacophony. Gareth manages to break the band’s £55 keyboard somewhere along the line but songs like ‘International Tweexcore Underground’ and ‘You! Me! Dancing’ still sound on top form. Their idiosyncrasies are slightly lost in the large arena, all the same.

Official Secrets Act take to the stage across the road at the Purple Turtle with four-part harmonies, homo-erotic jostling (perhaps I read that bit in), and more to the point ridiculously tight, taut and stern-faced rhythms. ‘The Girl from the BBC’ is the highlight, if you like your guitar-pop somewhere between XTC’s stop-start, Good Shoes’ intonation, Maxïmo Park’s exultant organ chords and Placebo’s foreboding. Faith has been restored amidst a stream-of-consciousness featuring concerns such as: (a) why The Fratellis are headlining; (b) why so many people like them; (c) why listeners don’t, in the majority, want more than a carbon copy of something that was never great in the first place; (d) whatever happened to the notion of a varied repertoire, and (e) why The Fratellis are headlining. Not that anything today brought that thought process on, mind.

What tense am I in? Past, now. It’s only because Ipso Facto weren’t great that they’re recalled as a distant memory. Four Karen O bowlcuts dourly repeating two bars of ‘Tainted Love’. Ouch? Yes, especially as on record it’s less knowing. I stayed two songs and drifted towards Pull Tiger Tail mid-set, because I could. Yup they’re still gigging, whiney vocals an’ all. Time for some respite and the nearest toilet happened to be in the Electric Ballroom, where White Lies were about to begin. Press passes don’t allow for WC queue-jumping apparently (nor at bars) (and yes, back to present tense and happier again), so I only had time to see one less-than-astonishing song. It situated itself somewhere between Simple Minds and The Kooks, for convenience’s sake.

Wild Beasts are a funnier bunch, far more exciting. All of this “like x fronting y“ nonsense above is just a way of demarcating potential listeners really, except when I’m being deadly serious like now. So here it comes, no more hyping up apart from the punchline: they are Freddie Mercury fronting a C86 band, ‘tache included. A band like Kendal’s Wild Beasts only comes around once in a lifetime, and it’s a huge surprise that their falsetto/baritone/tenor triple-vocalled jangle-pop hasn’t attracted them more acclaim just yet. It’s a strangely refined catcall with epic highs and lows within each song. ‘Assembly’ and ‘Through Dark Night’ are stark, polarising and more to the point – simply magnificent.

It’s almost the end of the billed entertainment and who can provide a better conclusion than Crystal Castles. Sure enough they’ve not a clue what the heck they’re doing, and there is that one “rarrrrrrh” sound running through the whole repertoire but it’s a damn good sound. Alice Glass is being touched up by hoards of today’s inebriated youth and the regular world is way more than a thought away as every orifice/wall/limb shakes involuntarily to the blips and beats of ‘Crimewave’ and ‘Alice Practice’. It’s an indomitable attack upon the surrounding arena, a pulsating quasi-rave to the point of exhaustion.

And the rest of the night scales into a mess of indie celebrity spotting and too much Red Stripe. That’s the way to do it. Thanks Camden, I’ll surely be back soon.