Camden Crawl – Various Venues, London April 30 / May 1 2011

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All photographs by Sebastien Dehesdin

When Father Christmas wrote the bible (it was him, wasn’t it?), I suspect that he took Camden as the inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah. The experience of walking through NW1 during a bank holiday weekend is, I imagine, pretty similar to that of taking a stroll around those iniquitous dens of horror. Disgusting over-consumption abounds, and kids with too much money and too few problems self-consciously stumble out of whichever over-priced, sticky-floored excuse for a pub happens to be on the corner of whichever heartwrenchingly fucking desolate street you happen to be on.

What a perfect place for a festival.

Really though, going to Camden Crawl and whingeing about Camden is a bit like going to America and moaning that there are quite a few people there who still think the earth is flat; it’s true, and it’s irritating, but it’s not the reason you visit.

So I’m not going to complain about the setting. If you’ve been to Camden, you know how soul-crushingly appalling it is. If you haven’t, feel free to go and judge for yourself. Consider it a study in anthropology.

Becoming Real

Saturday

Our weekend began in slightly odd fashion, with Becoming Real at Koko. An empty venue at half six on a sunny evening is not the producer’s natural habitat, but his particularly creepy brand of aggressive yet mercurial grime quickly made Koko feel more like an SE23 dive than a Camden music hall.

Heading back out into the light, we wandered up Parkway to the (ludicrously over-priced) Jazz Café for Big Dada man-of-the-moment DELS. The rapper seemed more at home here than at his headline show in Hoxton a couple of weeks ago; he was more rhythmic, his lyrics somehow more resonant. DELS is at his best when he is at his most daring. When he abandons the strict rhythmic structure that dominates some of his verses, and instead allows lines to skip into each other, he really is captivating.

http://vimeo.com/23274921

Meanwhile at the Electric Ballroom, S.C.U.M. were conjuring the spirit of East Berlin. You would be hard pushed to find a more affected band than this. The name should be a clue, I suppose. Frontman Thomas Cohen flounced about in a goth-meets-high-camp way, oscillating between compelling and irritating. The sound was more visceral than sensuous, with a kick drum that felt like it was about to break my knees, but at the same time there was enough melody to hold a first-time listener. Just about enough to make up for the affectations.

Later, the Black Cap (one of the few decent pubs in Camden, incidentally) played host to Visions of Trees. The Crawl is a good opportunity to see some bands that have, like VoT, passed you by over the previous few months. In this case, I needn’t have bothered; moments of relatively interesting production were completely overshadowed by the fact that, for the most part, this duo sounds like a long-forgotten ‘90s Eurovision entrant.

Visions Of Trees

And so to Dingwalls, for Kong – who, within seconds, became one of the bands of the weekend. Seldom have three podgy, y-front-clad men made such an almighty noise. One of the tightest, loudest bands I have ever seen, Kong provided half an hour of blissful destruction. Furious, inventive, and terrifying, theirs was a set that frequently approached perfection, and sometimes achieved it.

Then, what seems like nine miles up the road at faux-Louis XIV bar Annies, we found Those Dancing Days. And what a wonderful surprise they were. The Swedophilia with which so many people seem to have come down recently has more or less passed me by, and twee pop is anathema to me. My hopes were not, therefore, high. As it happens, though, Those Dancing Days are a delight. Bittersweet, heartbroken fun from start to finish, their forty minute set was one of the busiest of the weekend, and amongst the most enjoyable. It is to their credit that they could make a festival set in a tiny bar feel like a glorious homecoming, with what seemed like everyone in the room belting back every word. A marvellous surprise, and a true ‘new favourite band’ moment.

Those Dancing Days

Sunday

Sunday was all about one acronym. Say what you like about OFWGKTA, they have an almost peerless ability to piss people off. I lost count of the number of people who either proudly announced that they were going to purposefully avoid them, or who said that they were going just to prove to themselves that the hype wasn’t deserved.

But how wrong they were. First things first, Odd Future really are fantastic live – and they are fantastic simply because they want to destroy everything. Here is an act that understands the potential of violence. They hopscotched over the line that separates performance from brawl, goading the over-zealous security and (needlessly) threatening photographers. There is no affectation here, just anger, aggression, and fun – particularly from Tyler, who is possessed of a truly uncommon intensity.

If this attitude of constant conflict, of fuck-everything opposition, was all Odd Future had to offer, they would still be more important than all of the bearded middle class white kids with acoustic guitars who were playing assorted venues round Camden that weekend. But Odd Future are such an exciting prospect because they actually have the songs to back it up. Tyler’s Bastard (and, incidentally, the elusive Earl’s self-titled album), while often clearly a work of juvenilia, has lyrical touches deft and frequent enough to more than justify the gushing press – although, admittedly, they are never quite sufficient to make you forget the lazy homophobia and misogyny that they still seem to peddle.

Marques Toliver

Next up was Giggs, another XL-signed hip hop act. Peckham’s prodigal son presided over a reverent crowd at the Electric Ballroom, which had played host to S.C.U.M. the previous day – and again, the bass was almost enough to cause a haemorrhage. Sadly, though, for all Giggs’ undeniable lyrical ability, having just seen Hodgy jump off a 30 foot speaker stack, the sight of a man stalking around on a darkened stage somehow didn’t quite cut it.

http://vimeo.com/23271597

Back up in Kentish Town (via fish and chips with the delightfully inebriated svengalis behind Good Tape and Brainlove), Dutch Uncles caused a mini roadblock at the Bull & Gate. It was impossible to get much further than the door, and rightfully so. Their Talking Heads-indebted pop was fresh, rhythmically innovative, and effortlessly well presented.

Straight afterwards, Young Legionnaire demonstrated the benefits of their respective backgrounds; several years playing music for a living has meant that even their newest songs sound as tight as any I heard over the weekend. Closer ‘Chapter/Verse’ was perhaps their highest point; a thundering, fists-in-the-air track that puts Paul Mullen’s melodic abilities front and centre.

Back down the road (it’s less a Crawl, more a half marathon), Banjo or Freakout recast his album as a gripping ensemble piece. These are, it turns out, songs that make significantly more sense live than on record; hypnotic, abrasive, and beautiful.

Banjo or Freakout

And then, at that most unlikely of venues the Dublin Castle, we saw the band of the weekend. French three-piece (normally a four-piece but sadly depleted due to their drummer falling out with immigration) Paris Suit Yourself were genuinely extraordinary. Experimental in the truest sense of the word, they took elements of dub, electro and afrobeat, and played them through a prism of surrealism, race politics, and pop. They pretty much cleared the room during the course of their rambling, shamanistic half hour set – and yet they were as thrilling a band as I have seen in many months.

After that, everything else was going to struggle. PVT were surprisingly scrappy for a band that seems to be primarily about technical ability, while Johnny Foreigner managed to be simultaneously wrist-slittingly fey and somehow pretty entertaining.

Gallops, however, were another nice surprise; they were as breathtakingly competent as PVT should have been, and melodically far more interesting. Give them a few years and they could well be potential new entrants into the pantheon of so-good-all-you-can-do-is-laugh instrumental bands.

PVT

Camden Crawl, then. Half a dozen very exciting new bands, floating around amongst a fair amount of dross – and all stuck in the middle of London’s most vomit-inducing area. It’s certainly not the perfect festival, but anything that offers the opportunity to see Tyler have a fight with a security guard, Those Dancing Days bring several members of a crowd to tears, and Paris Suit Yourself terrify the Dublin Castle into submission, all in the space of 48 hours, is certainly not to be sniffed at.