“Camden is a Mecca for misfits,” says Carl Barat from The Libertines, “it was like living in a subculture, but in the middle of London.”
“You could play around with your identity and it was all Camden’s fault,” adds Boy George, as the opening medley of talking heads continues. “It was just the best place to be,” chips in Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, “It’s basically derelict, very intense, but it has this energy to it.”
“It’s got a heartbeat, it’s got a vibe, it’s got an energy to it,” confirms Noel Gallagher, as Janie Jones by The Clash plays in the background. By this point, 30 seconds in, I was already fully on board with this documentary.
Fevered flashbacks to my old life were coming thick and fast: of tiny leather jackets, dyed black hair and a desperate look in the eye, fond/chilling memories as a hanger-on to the scene in the early 2000s, a very scared person hoping to pick up some of the cool simply by breathing in the same air as actual cool people, or at least those who I thought were cool because they smoked crack and didn’t wash their clothes.
And then... “I bought a leather jacket from the stall here once… oh, and look at the punks! I asked them once how they get their hair to stick up – they use soap!” says a wide-eyed Dua Lipa as she takes a cab back down High Street, staring out at those loveable punk rapscallions on the Lock, as if they’re Camden’s equivalent of the jolly staff blowing bubbles at the entrance to Hamley’s.
Seriously, I would not recommend anyone going up to them and asking them about their hair, unless you are also proffering a large bag of speed while simultaneously running away.
Now, I don’t know about you, but Dua Lipa is hardly the first name that springs to mind when I think of Camden. Executive producer of the series she may be, but should she have so much prominence in Disney+’s new four-part series about this none-more-shabby music hub in north London?
Well, actually, probably yes, as it turns out.
This is a show that delivers on exciting indie rock debauchery, that provides an inspiring look at grotty London music scenes for old Barfly veterans like me, while also showcasing just how much of an ‘incubator’ Camden has been for a wide variety of acts and genres beyond the rock ‘n’ rollers.
Its starting point is Madness talking their way into a residency at the Dublin Castle in the late Seventies as punk ripped the superstar rule book of the day and established the idea that anyone could make it big.
We see the likes of Coldplay and The Libertines then using a similar template, using cheap Camden as a base, and its proliferation of small venues as a training ground to develop their music and industry word-of-mouth in the run up to be signed.
There’s plenty of good stuff for indie fans in this manner with tales of drunken mayhem and the Britpop explosion: Lauren Laverne not having a clue about the charts or giving a shit about fame in Kenickie and Noel Gallagher very much giving a shit about the charts and fame with Oasis, swiftly ditching his Camden flat for Supernova Heights up the road in Primrose Hill.
But things get really good in this series with episodes three and four, which concentrate more on the rise of dance music in the area, and how a few key figures became hugely influential to American artists and truly went around the globe.
We have Jazzie B recalling his early days running a stall on Camden market “in the vapours of punk in the Eighties” which paid for his sound system and the development of Soul II Soul, who went on to truly take America by storm.
In a separate interview he told me, “Watching the show gave me goosebumps. We’ve lost so many elevated spaces like this in London. Various governments have misunderstood how valuable a place like this is. It’s a shopping window for the rest of the world. And its been like that since time immemorial.”
We also have Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson, talking about the development of house music and its myriad offshoots, years before the Britpoppers thronged The Good Mixer.
Then we have the formidably charismatic Questlove, from The Roots, talking about visiting the area years later, being hit in the face by jungle music, and becoming highly involved in the scene both as a musician, and due to his friendship with Amy Winehouse.
Overseen by series director Asif Kapadia, who was behind the acclaimed Amy documentary, the series returns again and again to Winehouse’s story. Her statue in Stables Market is a marker for the effect she has had on Camden, both as a colossal talent but also somehow as someone who embodies the area. Fiercely talented, driven, chaotic, damaged, artistic and much warmer than you’d think, carrying a belief that music can save us all.
But the most interesting comment we have in those parts comes from her first manager, Nick Shymansky, who says, “Maybe the first record [Frank] hadn’t fulfilled her. And that was the moment this void opened up and as an artist I think she wanted to be seen as a little bit more exciting and edgy. Camden at that point was probably a dangerous place for someone like her at that moment in time to live. She started to go out to the pubs, the drink turned into a line, the ‘I can drink anyone under the table’, ‘I can do more drugs’, ‘I can be more wild’ ‘I can be more dangerous’. She got lost in it.”
And this is one aspect the show misses – the damage that can be done in Camden. For it wasn’t purely about individuals finding themselves, as the likes of Yungblud pitch it continually in the show, it was also about young people trying to fit into the myth of the scene.
Many a musician has fallen to the lure of excess that is demanded of the area, and many kids have been drawn in by the lure of art, fame, fortune, glory, obliteration. There’s a dark glamour to Camden, a grotty appeal, which is addictive but the show could have done with a sense of people, not just the bands, and how heroin, say, repeatedly took hold of the various scenes and attendant communities.
Indeed by omitting so much history in its four episode race to cram everything in, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to look at the interplay of class in the region, the role of immigration, poverty, and the way artists from Charles Dickens to Bruce ‘Withnail and I’ Robinson lived here and drew on their experiences in their work. And then there’s a lot of crucial musical history missing too, no look at the Sixties acid trips at the Roundhouse, or pivotal gigs by Hendrix or The Ramones.
It means the series has a tendency to veer into a hagiography of Camden and misses out on hitting truly classic documentary territory.
That said, it is a very entertaining ride through the living memory of the area. And yes, Dua Lipa did indeed live here after being uprooted from Kosovo; her early YouTube videos were recorded in a nearby flat and she has returned to Koko plenty of times to mark the importance of a place that clearly remains an inspiration to her.
And this old indie fan must concede that she has had a bit more of an effect on audiences around the world than Johnny Borrell. Who’d have thought it?
