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Published: 5 May, 2011
by ROISIN GADELRAB, RORY O’KEEFFE, ALAN STAFFORD and MAIRI MacDONALD

It’s over for another year. We ran a million miles, elbowed through crowds to get our pictures and at one point ended up crawling under the feet of a riotous mass as Odd Future incited chaos.

The Camden Crawl’s Bank Holiday festival was all we wanted it to be – and it didn’t rain.

There were mixed feelings about the decision to incorporate Kentish Town into this year’s event. It meant a lot more time wasted running between venues, many more blisters, more souls flaking out early from exhaustion and a number of Crawlers giving up the crawl element altogether to camp out in the Forum for the night.

But it also eliminated long queues (almost), allowed for space to appreciate the headliners and gave the Crawl a less frantic, more amiable vibe.

The question is – can a happy medium be found for next year? How about a free shuttle bus?

Highlights this year included The Lemonheads featuring Evan Dando’s gorgeous drippy hair and Graham Coxon doing a real guitarist’s set at Proud’s Levi’s Craft of Music stage, bringing on The Noisettes’ Shingai.

Top acts of the festival turned out to be The Phantom Band, who set Twitter abuzz as Crawlers raced to reach one of their three appearances, and Those Dancing Days, an alluring Swedish all-female five-piece who packed out Annies Bar.

But the biggest story of the Crawl has to be tearaway anarchic hooligan skater boys Odd Future or OFWGKTA – a rap collective who are collecting a cult following here and in the US.

Theirs was probably the most rammed set with hundreds piling into Hawley Crescent for a glimpse of the madness on the outdoor stage – and they lived down to their reputation.

This charming young group began by threatening serious harm to the equipment of the pit photographers before riling the “Wolf-Gang” chanting crowd into breaking down the barriers, ending in a crippling crowd surge, so strong   a whole row of girl fans fell like dominoes under the feet of the moshing hordes.

Security railings gave way and Odd Future, secure in the chaos they had created, melted away under the glare of the security they so consistently abused. Not one for delicate ears, but they achieved what they set out to do and hypnotised the masses before them.

Check out our picture of Hodgy Beats leaping into the crowd from the speakers above – he lost his shoe to reveal cannabis leaf socks.

Not long after, Giggs played the Electric Ballroom. So much smilier than his menacing gangsta persona usually projects, he came off as a delightful, polite young man in the wake of OFWGKTA’s whirlwind of disrespect.

Rizzle Kicks threatened a repeat of the great wobbly ceiling incident caused by enthusiastic Los Campesinos fans at The Enterprise some years back, with some bubbly beats, a Jessie J cover and some seriously bouncing crowds, a joy to dance to.

Villagers were more stunning than expected, a huge voice for a little man and some genuinely affecting moments of breathless purity, while Akala’s Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company was a hit at the Roundhouse as they went to great lengths to put on a genius show that began by testing the minds of the willing audience with the rapper versus Shakespeare quiz, and went on to merge the Bard with modern beats for an unforgettable hour.

Steve Lamacq set up home at The Dublin Castle, bringing out a stream of unfailing talent – Various Cruelties, Team Ghost and Little Comets – and making it difficult for reviewers to move on, while formidable female duo Bleech transfixed a hardened crowd at The Monarch.

Frankie and the Heartstrings at the Forum were just so well dressed and eager to please, one of the few bands to have girls screaming for them at the front, a nod to their slightly more pop appeal, while at Heroes bar some slightly freaky performance featuring a waif-like singer apparently having an episode with some green body paint onstage, detracted from any ability to review the music of her band Dog Bones.

Miles Kane was the big rock persona of day one. One of The Wirral’s most talented, creative musicians, Kane was all swagger and rock ’n’ roll poses, managing to carry off an alarming pair of red drainpipe jeans and still appear masculine. His solo work didn’t sound quite as strong as when he was in The Rascals or The Last Shadow Puppets but his cover of The Beatles’ Hey Bulldog won’t be easily forgotten.

The Guillemots, while skilled, energetic and so watchable, just didn’t seem to have the songs to back it up. On paper they should have worked but, as the Mayor of Camden tweeted: “Meh”. However, multi-instrumented one-man soulful genius Marques Toliver enchanted Proud, at his finest when clutching a violin and Ghostpoet’s lyrical skills and electronic prowess set a mellow, intellectual and dynamic close to the show at Barfly.

Our team of reviewers did their best to cover as many of the Crawl’s bands as possible but such was the expansive nature of the line-up, we couldn’t do it all. So a quick mention to the best of the rest.

We hear Mark Ronson jumped onstage during the MNDR set at the Jazz Cafe. Kill it Kid, a Grooves favourite, tore up the Blues Kitchen, a regrettable miss, and Dog is Dead won much love at the Roundhouse Terrace – their set was so strong we could hear them from the street sounding excellent.

And if Grandmaster Flash had been within an hour of his allocated time, we might just have had a picture to share with you, but as he wasn’t, we went home.

HERE’S what we made of the rest:

THE PHANTOM BAND (Proud Camden)

PROTO robo-folk may not sound like everyone’s – or indeed anyone’s – cup of tea, but in the second of their three Crawl gigs this year, The Phantom Band proved there’s nothing much in a name.

The Glaswegian sextet played to a packed Proud Camden, displaying the Beta Band-meets-Krautrock sound which has slowly won over the alternative scene since their first album, 2009’s Checkmate Savage.

Highlights included Crocodile from that album, and Into The Corn from last year’s follow-up The Wants, but the set as a whole confirmed the band’s ability to translate the darkness, harmony and intelligence from their studio CDs to a live setting.

They left to race across Camden for their final show of the weekend, but in a gallery where images of the greats of rock music hang from the walls, The Phantom Band won yet more hearts and minds in the capital.

FEVER FEVER (open air stage)

POLY Styrene is sadly no longer with us, but she would surely have liked girl-fronted punk three-piece Fever Fever, who dedicated a song to her at the outdoor arena.

The band launched into raw aggressive songs teeming with visceral ferocity, putting a swift end to anyone’s hopes of a soothing soundtrack to a quiet pint in the sun.

Songs like Teeth were great snarky, angry stuff – like early Be Your Own Pet, only hailing from Norwich instead of Nashville.

THE RUSSIAN FUTURISTS (The Black Heart)

THE Russian Futurists actually come from Ontario, and brought with them a blend of cheery and melodic indie that would brighten the bleakest Canadian winter.

Their synthy, slightly twee sound came over on songs like Paul Simon, which according to frontman Matthew Adam Hart was “number one in 43 countries, none of which were the UK.”.

Perhaps it was the boy/girl vocals and general warmth but one or two songs had a strange similarity to one-hit wonders Len – remember Steal My Sunshine? No offence.

TEAM GHOST (The Dublin Castle)

FRENCH five-piece Team Ghost fronted by Nicolas Fromageau, formerly of M83, wove together a set of elegiac, hypnotic songs at the Steve Lamacq-curated Dublin Castle.

Last year’s EP You Never Did Anything Wrong To Me was electronic with a sparse feel, but live with three guitars theirs was a bigger sound reminiscent at times even of U2.

The music however, still had its sense of shimmering darkness, with Mogwai-esque loud-quiet moments as the music swelled and then ebbed away.

KONG (Dingwalls)

FEROCIOUSLY loud hardcore played by semi-naked men wearing Sellotape face masks. If that’s what you’ve been searching for, look no further. Kong is here.

The band waged total aural blitzkrieg on Dingwalls, playing killer riffs at volumes that threatened to start rupturing internal organs among audience members.

An awe-inspiring display of hardcore firepower, topped off by a slightly chunky bassist dressed only in a pair of red pants, an image that stays a long time afterwards. Like the ringing in the ears.

KILLING JOKE (Electric Ballroom)

IN their 33 years Killing Joke have influenced many bands that have gone on to be more famous and sell more records, and this blinding Electric Ballroom set showed why. 

The doom-laced sound which spawned industrial rock has lost none of its energy and power to shock and awe, and turned the faithful at the front into a writhing mass.

Frontman Jaz Coleman dressed in camouflage get-up and cavorted like a demented dictator amid wreathes of dry ice and machine-gun strobes.

Throughout there were glimpses of the sounds that have influenced everyone from Metallica to Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails.

Sadly, but perhaps appropriately given the band’s mixed commercial success, the Electric Ballroom was half full at best. A month ago The Vaccines sold it out twice, but Killing Joke could only manage a fraction of that.

Still it was everyone else’s loss, especially as the band encored with Eighties, the song which famously sounds very suspiciously like the one in Nirvana’s (much later) hit Come As You Are.

NERINA PALLOT (Spread Eagle)

THE best thing about the Crawl isn’t queuing to squeeze in to see a big name, it’s finding something unexpectedly good in a pub front room.

And such a thing was Nerina Pallot at former Food Records boss Andy Ross’s musical showcase at the Spread Eagle, before the main acts began on Sunday.

The Brit-nominated singer-songwriter and Camden resident had sad-and-beautiful songs, a wry cover of Crazy Like You and best of all, lacerating humour.

Asking what people wanted, she offered “a sad song with hopefulness – or another sad song with hopefulness?” Explaining Sophia has become a favourite at weddings, she said: “More people had it at their wedding than actually bought the f*****g thing.” 

A delight.

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Crawl? It was more a mad dash!

by MAIRI MacDONALD

WITH the ever-expanding number of venues and three of the biggest venues in the Roundhouse, Forum and Koko at its extremities it seems that each the year the weekend becomes less of a crawl than a mad dash.

The alternative is picking out a few must-sees and taking in whatever else comes along.

LuLu and the Lampshades cashed in on this by playing the relatively plum spot in the late afternoon sun on the stage of the Roundhouse Terrace – where their chirpy folk-pop went down well with the contented crowd relaxing with a beer in hand and the sun on their backs.

If the Lampshades’ combination of guitars, glockenspiel, fiddle and percussion belonged to an indeterminate point in the last four decades, Bleech’s thrashing guitar sounds were firmly from the nineties. While compared to the Pixies, their sound in part of the set I caught at the Monarch was situated somewhere between Hole and Elastica.

Returnees to the Crawl, the O’Neill sisters skilfully worked their tight but enamoured crowd with skill.

If it were still the days when magic mushrooms were freely available in Camden Town, James Lavelle’s Daydreaming Mass in St Michael’s Church would have been a weekend winner.

As it was, the ambient installation with its melting visuals attracted a sparse but steady inflow of curious passers-by.

Undoubtedly an absorbing creation, it brought the added advantage of giving some new visitors a chance to see inside a beautiful building often unnoticed despite being in the heart of the town.

Maverick Sabre was a definite highlight of the festival despite a disappointingly short set from the Irish Londoner.

Apparently the Hackney dweller was suffering from food poisoning and jetlag having just flown back from the States.

But it’s unlikely that anyone would have noticed if he hadn’t apologised for his croaky voice; his distinct sound, which draws inevitable comparisons with Finley Quaye, sounded great in what turned out to be quite an intimate gig at Koko.

From Give Me a Reason through to I Used To Have It All, backed up by a silky female vocalist, the set might have only lasted half an hour but it was a real treat from one who looks sure to go places.

Alice Gold used her set at Koko to perform some new material that seemed to go down well with her fans who drew the line in joining her in some Timotei ad-inspired moshing. 

Old timers St Etienne rounded up Koko’s live music on Saturday night and kicked off their set with 1993 single You’re In A Bad Way then bravely digressed from the back-catalogue to play some new material – Tonight – which, while very much in the same disco-inspired vein, received a predictably lukewarm response. It was then back to the classics including Who Do You Think You Are?, Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart and finishing with He’s On The Phone for which singer Sarah Cracknell got hold of the obligatory feather boa. Apart from a couple of new songs, there was nothing you won’t have seen before from them in the last 18 years, but for that their fans were glad. A grateful Cracknell said she had enjoyed the gig more than she had expected although it didn’t look like any of the hugging late-30 and 40-something blokes in the crowd had come with any doubt that they would be charmed all over again by the consistent crowd-pleasers.

No surprise that Graham Coxon’s performance at Levi's Craft of Music stage at Proud drew the longest queue, the biggest cheers and one of the best performances.

It was a well-balanced combination of old favourites and new stuff from his upcoming album, provisionally named A&E although the chatty frontman invited any better suggestions from the crowd. Coxon is a master at building a rapport and his casual conversation gets no better a response than on his home turf.

So much so that even when he requested some heckles to fill the void when the sound temporarily screwed up half way through the set, the best the crowd could come up with was some requests for more tunes.

There was no need for gimmicks during the generously long set, although the appearance of The Noisettes’ stunning Shingai Shoniwa on stage for one quick song only left the audience craving a bit more of the double act.