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Crowds and queues are all part of the Crawl experience |
Festival? What festival?
REVIEW CAMDEN CRAWL
Various venues
WE sat in Quinn’s pub, in Kentish Town, engaged in a conference of sorts. So many options and very little time to organise it all.
A big part of the Crawl’s appeal is discovering new bands, and with that in mind we turned for guidance to the band profiles in the Crawl pack.
Within minutes we’d obliterated a sizeable chunk of the schedule without actually deciding on anything we wanted to see. The girls were getting fidgety and tottered off to the Black Cap in Camden High Street.
We were still in Quinn’s when they came back, giddy as a bag of fish from their first band of the evening: Agaskodo Teliverek from Hungary.
Then they headed to The Shortwave Set in Barfly – “Devoid of fun” – while our target was Bar Monsta.
On stage were Blackhole, an amiable if utterly pointless young metal band who did their best to bring some intensity to proceedings, but set at ear-bleed-inducing volume.
We turned heel and left (with the singer literally swinging from the rafters) and headed to the Monarch in Chalk Farm. With all pretence of a plan already abandoned, we watched Fanfarlo, who were dull but pleasant.
Surprisingly, the queues were non-existent, probably because we’d steered clear of the main venues and stuck to the fringes.
Then we crossed to the Roundhouse: queues, rotten atmosphere, woeful organisation, mysteriously aggressive door staff and a general sense that things, at any given moment, could go horribly, horribly wrong.
Oh, and Noah and the Whale, who were excellent.
I love music and in eight hours I hardly saw a thing because the whole festival is held across a string of pubs.
And that’s what’s wrong with the Crawl. We’d bounced from venue to venue all night and come close to a festival experience, but sitting alone in the Marathon bar sometime after 1am I found myself longing for a campsite to return to.
Sadly, this was just Camden on a Friday night, so my only option was to stagger up Prince of Wales Road and wait for the 134.
TONY KIELY
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