Camden Crawl - Day One

Camden, known for being one of the most celebratory esoteric territories in the country, opened its doors this May bank holiday for all to revel in the glory that is Camden Crawl. Having read a lot of negative press about how the British “urban festival” is an institution that should be left to the Americans and their phenomenal SXSW, we were a little apprehensive to say the least. Horror stories of horrendous non-moving queues, expensive beer and unimaginative line-ups built up a pretty nightmarish scene to anyone who hadn’t forked out the extra £70 for a “VIP upgrade” – giving queue jump to all venues. Dazed Digital went along to join the throngs of skinny jeaned merry-makers, who braved the rain and the crowds to celebrate the start of the British festival season. With the sun briefly beating down on Camden, and wristbands safely attached, Dazed headed straight to KOKO to catch Stornoway’s Brian Briggs and Jonathon Ouin and talk about the band’s name and the hype surrounding their forthcoming album 'Beachcomber’s Windowsill'.

Dazed Digital: Why did you choose Stornoway as your name?
Brian Briggs: It’s strange because we’d never actually been there until last month when we played a gig. The band naming process took about two years, that’s probably a slight exaggeration, but we had pages and pages of ideas.
Jonathon Ouin: Most of them were knots actually, sailing knots.
Brian Briggs: Yeah, the one criteria we had was that it had to sound slightly nautical. But around this time I went on a sailing trip with a friend from college and the location that we were going to end up in was Stornoway but we just couldn’t – we had extreme gales everyday and we just inched our way around the Hebrides, getting dragged off our anchor and getting quite close but never actually making it. It became this name that we had to use.

DD: What was your ‘homecoming’ like?
Brian Briggs: It lived up to the hype actually – from the moment we decided on the name we knew we had to go there someday.  From the Scottish perspective we’re pansy southerners who’ve stolen their town’s name and so had to be good basically. That’s how I imagined it. But we’d brought up about three litres of whiskey and gave everyone in the venue a shot to try and buy their friendship – it worked really well and we had a really good gig. I loved it.

DD: What does the album name, Beachcomber’s Windowsill, mean?
Jonathon Ouin: In a way it’s a nod toward the slightly magpie aspect of what we’re about but it’s also apposite because the content is, in its way, a bit of a hotchpotch of different stylistic factors
Brian Briggs: It’s our favourite songs that we’ve collected over the last few years because we’ve been recording everything at home in our bedroom it seemed to match this mixed collection of bits and bobs that we’d gathered. We spent a hell of a long time trying to work out which order to put them in and how best to master them so that they fit together and make sense as a journey. So hopefully not everyone will just buy the single from iTunes but we’ll see.

Beachcomber’s Windowsill is out on 24th May 2010.

With the interview under our belts, and Stornoway turning off KOKO’s backstage xbox, we thought it best to hit the streets again and meet London’s own Summer Camp, comprising of duo Jeremy Warnsley and Elizabeth Sankey.  Despite having officially only played one show before Camden Crawl, they’ve already got the tails of bloggers, music heads and industry bods wagging. We caught them in Lock 17, having just played the Barfly as part of “John Kennedy’s Xposure Live”.

Dazed Digital: How old is the band?
Elizabeth Sankey: We’ve been together since October?
Jeremy Warnsley: Yeah, I’d say it’s been about six months

DD: It’s been a rapid growth then…
Elizabeth Sankey: It has been fast; it started as just a covering the Flamingos tune, I Only Have Eyes For You, and putting it on MySpace – which was then found by a music blog - Transparent. Then that started to get more and more attention and so we thought we’d do one of our own and it kind of just got bigger and bigger and it hasn’t really stopped.
Jeremy Warnsley: It’s really snowballed.

DD: How would you describe your sound?
Jeremy Warnsley: The music is very nostalgic; it’s like watching an 80’s teen film. I wanted something that evokes America, teenagers and snogging in bushes and ‘Summer Camp’ seems to sum that up. I guess we could have been called American Teenagers Snogging in Bushes but…
Elizabeth Sankey: That was already taken.

DD: What are your influences?
Jeremy Warnsley: I think it’s fair to say that there is an 80’s pop influence in there - stuff like Cocteu Twins, XTC, Talking Heads – anything with a really digital sounding snare and female vocals. I don’t want people to think that we’re a solely 80’s revivalist band though.
Elizabeth Sankey:  Don’t you? I really want people to think that.

You can view Summer Camp’s MySpcace HERE

As the first “day session” draws to a close, the late night antics begin with the The Drums being the hottest ticket in town. A crowd of about 70 people spills out of Blues Kitchen and queues down the road – it wont move for their entire set - despite the torrential rain. The gig never quite lives up to the hype, but then again it was never going to – a breed of “scene pop” that was always a little too formulaic for a drenched Camden crowd. What did turn out to be the gig of the night though was Summer Camp’s closing set at the Jazz Café (we’re not just saying that because we got the interview, check out other reviews if you don’t believe us). Mixing in debut material with songs that are already established crowd favourites is all the more remarkable for realising that it’s only their third live show. Discovery of the Crawl? Very possibly.

 Camden Crawl: Part Two will follow shortly