Camden Crawl – London, 24-25/04/09

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The Camden Crawl is an annual event in London that involves a lot of gigs and drinking in an area that has a particularly high number of pubs, bars and music venues and normally is a center for gigs and drinking. It takes place during the day and into the evening, for two days. Ticket holders are issued with a wristband (and this year, another one for the extra special shows at the Roundhouse(!)), a map and timetable crammed with a bewilderingly massive line-up of live music/comedy acts/jugglers/bookslams/activities of many varieties. For many North London residents, the idea of catching the tube to Camden to stumble in an out of seven or eight pubs and into a gig is nothing particularly new, the Crawl seems to settle into the live music infrastructure of Camden Town and ramp up the action a little, putting on more events in more places that even the most rampantly enthusiastic music fan/self destructive alcoholic wouldn’t manage to cover in one night. The event also manages to fill the town with more people than anyone could ever hope to fit on the pavements, let alone into some of the venues. If you own a bar or café or snack bar in the area, it’s basically Christmas.

Some music festivals are tiring because you have to sleep in a tent and can’t wash and you stay up late are constantly aware of the possibility you might be about to get sexually abused/mugged. Thankfully only some of these concerns are applicable to day and a night out in Camden, and what with the Crawl stretching from Mornington Crescent to Chalk Farm and all the way up Parkway, the price of a ticket also includes a refreshing weekend of urban hiking, that may or may not add a complimentary dose of shin splints to your monday morning hang-over.

In all probability, the events that you fancy are scattered across the whole of a town. The ordeal of having to ease past a dozen people back to your spot in a crowded venue seems like nothing next to the Lord of the Rings-esque trek from Koko to The Dublin Castle to the Roundhouse, which is only exacerbated by the general public, tour buses full of Spanish tourists and everyday Saturday Camden Market crowd who stubbornly, selfishly seem to insist upon trying to go about their own business while the crawlers maraud between venues. One does simply crawl into the Roundhouse.

This year, spring-like weather smiles upon the crawl. Camden is warm and hazy, as ever the high street air is heavy with the smells of nag champa, fried food and the occasional whiff of skunk, the traffic crawls over the bridge and young people lounge by the lock, leaning on the railings, sipping from cans of Red Stripe, supermarket-bought picnics laid out on carrier bags, skinny arms and legs dangling from the bridge and towpath. The crowd, it seems, owes much of it’s bulk to the to the ‘casual’ indie gig goer, the draw of The Enemy, The Maccabees and Kasabian has predictably (and probably deliberately) drawn a bulk of the Radio One listening, easy going, money spending, semi-mainstream crowd out in force.

That’s not to say that there aren’t one or two little gems to be unearthed. With such a vast array of events slathered so liberally across the town, this year in particular offers an opportunity to explore some fresher treats. In the packed-out Camden Eye, The Matthew Bennett Band produce a stirring semi-acoustic performance, climaxing in rousing rendition of flagship track and folky foot-stomper ‘Kill Me’. ‘Surprise’ performances such as this aren’t even billed on the timetable and are mostly stumbled into by happy accident, which, given the sheer size of the crowd in attendance isn’t quite the inconvenience that it might seem.

It seems that almost every venue or pub on the crawl is participating in some way, even performances that aren’t strictly on the line-up are listed as ‘fringe’ events; Alessi Laurent-Marke plays a solo show at the Good Mixer on Inverness St for example, before she relocates down the road for her full-band performance with Alessi’s Ark at the Jazz Café.

Indeed, while Camden town locals and warped hip-hop funsters Man Like Me contribute a bizarre but enjoyable performance, also at the Jazz Café, Alessi’s Ark turn out to be one of the stand-out appearances of the weekend. Alessi’s gentle presence charms audiences effortlessly, her performance at once passionate and informal and her appealingly eccentric pieces of anti-folk inflected pop deservedly received by a rapturous audience. Her growing fanbase are enthusiastic to say the least, the audiences on both evenings give off a palpable sense of their personal adoration for her – even the most astute PR mind in the land would have had a hard time dreaming up something as fluent and sincere as Alessi and her Ark.

As with any festival, there are inherent limits on exactly how much one can expect to see in one evening. These limits are, for the most part simply borne of perfectly acceptable practical considerations. They are however not helped by the last minute cancellations and queues that are at times only really adequately described as epic. To make any sort of firm decisions about what bands to see is to immediately forsake a large amount of the other performances. Which is, especially in the case of The (cancelled) Joy Formidable, which promised to be a Friday night highlight, most unfortunate.

On a more positive note, another fantastic yet slightly below-the-radar treat at this year’s crawl is an intimate performance from Banjo or Freakout upstairs at The Monarch. It would be possible to torture a clichéd simile in order to make a lazy approximation of the sound that London-based Italian Alessio Natalizia’s side project creates by describing it as Animal Collective beating the shit out of Battles with a pair of Roland SP 555′s strapped to each fist. But that’s not going to happen. Suffice to say that his live performance is inventive, engrossing and thoroughly fantastic, a wonderful showcase from a truly ahead-of-the-curve yet genuinely entertaining performer.

Another year, another Camden Crawl. A booze soaked live music trek across Camden, much like one in every three weekends but with a better line up and way more people. Festival season 09 is officially underway.