Credit: Found On Internet

Ahh, the Camden Crawl. Last year it was 12 hours of non-stop chaos, from the mooning of Kaiser Chiefs at 4pm, fighting with the Towers of London at 9pm, topped by some questionable dancing at KOKO at 3am. And then there were some bands thrown in there for good measure. This year the promoters have taken the bold step of doubling the event to two days. Who will survive, and more importantly, what will be left of them?

Thursday 19 April 2007

So Music Towers kicked off this year’s Crawl with I Am Kloot, who were performing an early evening set at KOKO. The band’s dynamic is best illustrated by the fact that at any given time, four of the five band members are sitting down. It’s like The Supernaturals covering The Magic Numbers, and is just as sedentary as that sounds. While it’s a gentle way to break into the gluttony of rock’n’roll we’ve set ourselves in for over the next two nights…okay, if they were anything other than the first band on, we’d be greeting them with an almighty sigh of nonchalance.

Word round the campfire had marked out These New Puritans as one of the must-see acts, so it was a bit of a trek to the Earl of Camden – where we were met with an empty stage and someone playing the soundtrack to The Crow over the PA. Out of the blue, Steve Lamacq, who was allegedly ‘hosting’ the run of events at the Earl, approached us to ask if we knew who was supposed to be onstage at the moment and if we knew why the stage was empty. This didn’t look good.

What Music Towers did discuss with Lamacq was the stretching of the Crawl’s line-up. With the Crawl expanding horizontally (with 15 venues this year, up from 2006’s 12), it seems to have been squeezed vertically – even though there are the same number of bands playing each venue. With the top acts spread more thinly amongst the venues than a year ago, I guess it’s the scheduling equivalent of an optical illusion. And that’s not even taking the extra day of this year's Crawl into account.