Everyone coming to London at some point will have an infatuation with the idea of Camden.
Cradle of punk music turned touristic attraction, the one thing it does not lack are music venues: they can disappear for a while or change names (if you miss the Wheelbarrow on Camden High Street know that now it’s just called The Beatrice) but they will still feature a stage. And if you pull them all together for a Saturday afternoon in May you will get the hard version of the longer established Camden Crawl: The Camden Rocks.
On for its second year and put together by Chris McCormack, the man behind the Barfly’s Friday late nights under the Jubilee logo, the lineup at the Camden Rocks provides just what it says on the tin and will present you with twelve hours of rock music scattered around venues from Mornington Crescent up till Chalk Farm featuring the likes of The Subways, Reverend and The Makers and Blitz Kids amongst others this year, basically previewing in a cozy environment what will be going on in the next month or so with the big rock festivals such as Sonisphere and Download.
Earlier in the afternoon you might catch softer, acoustic sets (as they were on at The Forge this year) as the gigs grow bigger and bigger as the sun goes down, with Blitz Kids filling up The Electric Ballroom and Reverend and The Makers becoming the final cherry on top beginning the shift to club night at the Proud Galleries.
With just one wristband you can basically get in and out of every venue at your leisure and, being still technically at the beginning of its history, you are never to be turned away from a venue or queue for more than five minutes. And just as the name suggest, if you’re into Rock you can rest assured any venue you stop by will let you find and possibly discover a new favourite band to keep your ears on: just ask everyone who was by the canalside Dingwalls in the last afternoon who got a chance to catch and likely fall for The Dirty Truth: the one rock band to feature a brass section.
The only thing you must not get much deluded into is the promise for afterparties, cause although there were supposedly two going on at The Underworld and The Barfly your wristband was supposed to get you in, being still a Saturday in Camden, everything goes back to having a certain cost after Midnight, despite the promise for the party to go on until at least 2am.
So although I can’t tell you about the end of the night, I can still vouch for the good music which, for one Saturday, takes Camden from tourists and give it back to its own true crowd: music fans.
