On Thursday, we joined a few thousand other indie kids in Camden for this year’s the Camden Crawl. It’s a great idea: £20 buys you a wrist band that admits you to a bunch of different venues across the Camden area over the course of the evening, allowing you to plan your very own mini festival.
Being as out of touch as I am these days, I knew before we even booked tickets that I would hardly know any of the bands (with the exception, it turned out, of the three “secret” headliners, Supergrass, The Futureheads, and Dirty Pretty Things), but that hardly mattered, and even though the queues outside a few venues deterred us from a couple of our choices, we had fun simply picking bands at random and taking a punt: we enjoyed The Maccabees, at the Camden Lock, and a young Scottish chap called Paolo Nutini at an awfully crowded G-Lounge (Londonist: “Very pleasant, indeed – you get the impression he’ll be massive within months, but also that it’ll be OK to like him. For a while.”), and were rather disappointed by Larrikin Love at the Electric Ballroom, and the utterly awful V Formation at Koko.
We opted for The Futureheads for our headliner, rightly assuming that we would easily get into the massive Koko for that, which was probably preferable to queueing outside The Dublin Castle and failing to see Supergrass. After the main band had finished, a woman Djed for a while in the booth just below where we were standing. Apparently DJing in the 21st century involves plugging your laptop into the sound system and hitting “Enter” at the right moment to change tracks, (you’d think you could just program in a playlist and wouldn’t even need to turn up…) but when she had finished doing that, she was replaced by a familiar looking chap, that I briefly couldn’t place. Oh yeah, we realised, as a small crowd assembled to take cameraphone photos, it was Mani, off of the Stone Roses. At one point he even turned around to us, and asked Sal if she had a light. Mani, off of the Stone Roses, asked Sal for a light… Cool…
5 replies on “The Camden Crawl: Indie Russian Roulette”
Perhaps you should start carrying around a lighter just in case an aging semi-icon needs a light. This would, of course, be a bit stanhopian.
V Formation were bad, but not as bad as the band booed off after the Futureheads. Do we know who they were?
Oh yeah. I had totally forgotten about that. I have no idea…
Cracking evening. Have to say that I thought V Formation were average rather than dreadful, but then perhaps I had drunk more than I thought by that stage. Anyone pick up a hoodie at the Futureheads? If so it was my favourite, and I’d love to have it back! Top stuff – I’ll be back next year.
V//Formation were awful? Maybe they had a bad night but its the first bad review Ive heard of them yet.
I dunno, maybe it was the sound in Koko, but we weren’t very impressed.
Having said that, these kinds of things have a habit of coming back to haunt me. In 6 months when they’re the biggest band in the world I’ll probably love them…