Oft previously dubbed "Camden Queue", it takes until Sunday evening for anything of the sort to snake through the 'Town's cracks and cobbles. A rather greater few seem to prefer to – at least figuratively – belatedly wake up, rather than shack up for the night with
Baxter Dury although whether he and his band have indulged in even so much as a second's shuteye remains inconclusive. Enrobed in the exact same clothes as they were the night before, Dury contrives to tailor the exact same setlist too.
In vain attempt of some vaguely redundant compare and contrast, the lighting in Dingwalls (a so-called "cathedral for dirty music for dirty old men") is better; brighter; brilliantly suited to his choreographed posturing yet on this most subdued of Sundays the show is found lacking in correlation. It may be due to our lower level of intoxication; it may conversely be down to his – he's hitting the Carling gingerly this time around. However whichever way the Cocaine Man crumbles, suddenly the setting up of proverbial shop within The Abbey Tavern seems a genuinely astute booking. Must have been the whisky loosening him right up...
Reiterating that lugubrious feeling aforementioned, the far-flung ubication of The Enterprise ensures Fanzine are missed out on by an instant or two, bluesy swing stylings instead pervading the air. However it's but a brief loll before the ethnic phonetics of Bristol's bestest,
Zun Zun Egui overhaul any lingering ennui. A flagrant subversion to the usual frivolousness of the inexcusably contemporary (amounts of which are this weekend copious), the Bella Union extroverts come across as a steroidal Dengue Fever at times and an incomparable amalgam of fizzy and hypnotic tribalisms at others.
Consequently, theirs is a set both fluid and celebratory that pertains to certain freeform tendencies as it slithers down intricate openings of groove like valuables improbably plunging into the indeterminate muck beneath every rain grill, Fandango Fresh its effervescent centrepiece. It sees prog bubbled through the profusely Afrobeat as Kushal Gaya gurgles of sexy worms and stomps vigorously on a mess of pedalboard amidst constructions eccentric and wildly idiosyncratic that are tighter than the spank of elastane twang. Indeed such is Gaya's fervour that he at one point stumbles into the front few rows from where he freaks out another jittering solo. The whole thing's percussively extravagant meanwhile and ideally so; the band seeming a way of, rather than a means to, life.
By comparison, Shaun Hencher's
Virals sound like pure, simple and puerilely grungy, garage-y/laddy gunk tarted up as Dalston junk. Wasted is largely indiscernible as it slurs through speakers, whilst Comes The Night sounds like a turgid Thin Lizzy jam. Lamentably Virals kill us off long before
Magic Happens although The Camden Crawl lives on to see out another year. An ever evolving beast, it may yet acquire immunity to the plague currently contaminating our beloved festival circuit although it has quite evidently shrivelled slightly with the withering of time...
