Camden Rocks: beat shopping with music in Camden

Camden Rocks 2015

Saturday 30th May 2015
various venues, Camden, Greater London, NW1 8AN, England MAP
£30

Daily capacity: 4,000

Camden Rocks is a one-day music festival running from noon to (almost) midnight, encompassing over 20 established venues in London’s iconic Camden Town. Music has played a vital role in Camden for a long time, with some venues like Dingwalls and the Electric Ballroom going strong since the 1970's. From rock’n’roll, to punk and Britpop: everything passed through here. So it is good to have a festival bringing so much live music in an affordable package; balances out the amount of rubbish shops selling foolish souvenirs and copy-cat merchandising.

Camden Rocks was sold out, with many venues filling up quickly to the point where it was impossible to get in unless you got there early. Punctuality was great for most gigs so it was easy to plan in advance, get into the venue in-between bands, seeing your favourite band and then move on to the next venue. Crowd control at the door was excellent in our experience. Most gigs were played simultaneously so, despite the big choice it was literally impossible to watch more than six or seven bands during the day.

The majority of the venues had a very generic look, without much character, either pubs or clubs. The Stillery has got an interesting minimalistic look.. including its bar with literally one bottle of gin and one box of beer.

Most of the bands at the festival seemed to play the sort of classic genres of rock without many surprises, including screamo, heavy metal and punk. We saw the female fronted band Skarlett Riot, which was fun and energetic. Modestep played an extremely vigorous set. It was an almost schizophrenic mix of heavy electronic/dubstep/metal contrasted with softly sung lyrics. The audience loved it and danced with uncontrolled enthusiasm. Menswear was probably the only Britpop band, their set was lovely and most of the audience was singing along, not sure that the Latin American style of the venue created the right atmosphere for them though.

I was looking for more imaginative and bold bands, for me only Astroid Boys brought some fresh air with their crossover of wild rap, crazy grime/dubstep, punk attitude and sense of humour. The crowd got very excited and the mosh pit was pretty wild. I smashed my knee against one of the speakers …but that didn’t stop me. It was the best act of the day for me. They closed their set with BADA$$, which was sweet!

Camden Rocks is set indoor, standard British weather was not a problem, but socialising with other festival goers could be a bit tough compared with outdoor festivals. Being spread over so many locations with festival goers sprawling through the streets along with shoppers and tourists makes friends hard to spot. The venues are too loud with music to talk with people, and without a large outdoor or quiet areas it was hard to find a place where people could just hang around and chat without yelling. As a whole; Camden Rocks is a nice antidote to the commercial vibe of the Saturday afternoon in Camden Town... but personally I think it could surprise us a bit more by offering more daring and ground breaking rock bands.