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Ed McFarlane of the Friendly Fires |
Crawling for quality kicks
THURSDAY
THE queue was massive. It stretched from one side of Kentish Town Road all the way to the Electric Ballroom in Camden High Street, past the Tube station and First Choice kebabs.
That was Thursday, the sun was out, and indie kids from across the land had pilgrimmaged to Camden Town for the two-day music festival, Camden Crawl.
What a difference a few months make. At an anonymous industry pre-release show in Bar Solo in September, Amy tentatively previewed an unknown Back To Black album.
There was free food and drink, and lots of talking. My Dad told everyone to ‘shut up’ because they were blathering over her. Last week at the Dublin Castle for her homecoming gig on the Bugbear stage, her album a massive success and a Best Female Brit under her belt, Amy was a different fish.
Boisterous and self-assured, she promised kisses for those who brought her tequila, drank it onstage, and warned anyone not from Camden to ‘get out’. Even David Schwimmer and Suggs didn’t want to miss it.
Now don’t say you weren’t warned by Grooves about attractive girls and guitars at the Crawl. Case in point: Laura Marling at the Fandango stage in Dingwalls, who was an island in a sea of indie madness.
Hauntingly beautiful songs and girl. Jack Penate: don’t believe the hype.
FRIDAY
ARRIVING in Camden early on Friday evening, I couldn’t help but feel a little left out: the streets were full of revellers showing the signs of a hard Thursday night out Crawling, and judging by some of the behaviour on display when we arrived at the Worlds End, Friday had already started in earnest.
Keen to catch up, we made our way to see Tuung at Bullett Bar. With barely a trilby hat in sight, their hazy, electronicy folk makes them a fairly atypical crawl band, but proved a pleasant – if low key – start to the evening.
We moved on to see Kila Kela making all the indie kids pull hip hop moves at the Electric Ballroom, but were then struck by the ‘Curse of the Crawl’, as huge queues caused us to miss Blood Red Shoes at Earl Of Camden and Shout Out Louds at Dingwalls.
We got to Koko and joined a crowd collectively in need of a new liver, with Tom McRae valiantly battling to be heard over them.
He was followed by The Charlatans, who were greeted like returning deities. They reward their following with a no-nonsense greatest hits set spanning their 20 year career.
We stayed on to dance, but left just after 15 people clad head-to-toe in alien-esque silver chain mail took to the stage. We hit the after-party in search of rubbish indie celebrities to harass but only found one of the Travis lads drinking free cans of Red Stripe.
So, bruised, battered and kebab in hand, it was night bus and bed for me.
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