Credit: Cazals

Picture the scene – it's early in the afternoon on a Thursday, outside the Hog's Head pub in Camden. Popular indie tunesters, the Kaiser Chiefs, are sitting down outside to enjoy a quiet pint in the April sunshine.

Suddenly, on the other side of the glass a mere six inches from singer Ricky's face, a pair of pink bum cheeks are splayed. And there they remain, until the errant too-popular-for-the-Camden-types band beat a hasty retreat.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fifth Camden Crawl is upon us. 50 bands, across 12 venues, over 12 hours, stretching from the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town, down to Koko and the Purple Turtle at Mornington Crescent. It’s not even officially started yet and the mayhem has already spread to pubs not even officially part of the Crawl.

It appears that popular indie-beat combos are not invited.

At 7:15 sharp, The Delilahs crept on to the stage of the Dublin Castle like the Swiss clock mice they are. The optimist would note that the packed venue was because no matter how thin you spread the Camden Crawl crowd, a venue as cramped, as the Dublin Castle will always be packed. A cynic would say that the full house was as much to do with the bands' feminine charms. Like their biblical namesake, there's a fair few boys down at the front under their spell.

Guitarist Isabella Eder is almost corpselike in terms of live performance, but vocalist Muriel Rhyner has a purring husk of a voice that is more warm whiskey than rough cigarette smoke, especially on debut single "This Is It". But overall there’s just too much flicking of hair, not enough rock spirit. The songs just blended into one long thrumming drone, and while it's no worse than, it's also no better than a thousand other bands hustling at a thousand other pubs up and down the country

Moving on into the centre of Camden, Lock 17 isn't a great venue at the best of times, what with tables screwed the floor and pillars everywhere. But It's somewhat of a mixed blessing for a band like The Maccabees. A bit like Razorlight if they were caught-in-the-headlights, the static nature of the venue, combined with the fact that they're likely to get a sixth of the entire crawl on statistics alone, means that they benefited from a fairly captive audience.