Gone are the hedonistic days of Camden being an indie music hub. Ten years ago the North London town was the epicentre of everything relating to guitar music in the UK and the Camden Crawl was an annual pilgrimage for disciples of the genre.

Whilst this festival no longer exists, Camden Rocks is its natural successor, with 250 bands performing across 25 venues for one day each year. The 2017 version also featured a host of bands which reached their peak during the mid-noughties but still possess a loyal and passionate fan base.

Carl Barât and The Jackals fit this profile perfectly, with the local drawing a big crowd in the late afternoon for his brand of punky swagger, which appears to be acting as a seamless placeholder for the next Libertines record. For a band he recruited via Twitter auditions, they have a natural chemistry on stage. “Don’t touch me, you’re a marked man now/ You can say goodbye to the last gang in town,” shouts Barât on ‘Glory Days’ as he reignites his original band’s notion of groups being tribal.

Talking of gangs, Reverend and The Makers were next up as the crowd remained to worship the Sheffield hero. Whilst Jon McClure’s recent records have not reached the chart heights of early releases, he and his accomplished band have enough tried and tested compositions to guarantee a blast. Always carrying political undertones, the current governmental landscape in the UK may be the catalyst that reignites them into the public consciousness.

Across the road, in one of the smaller pub venues, I managed to catch Brighton natives White Room. The five-piece brilliantly channel A Storm in Heaven-era Verve along with the psych freak-outs witnessed in The Stone Roses. They carry all of the positive characteristics of UK alternative rock, without any of the testosterone-filled pretentiousness associated with the genre. Single ‘Too Much' is the band's most psychedelic number to date and the Britpop-esque ‘Back Again’ drew a big reaction with its hazy guitars and thumping rhythmic core.

Before making my way down to the other end of town I managed to catch some of The Coral’s set. After a five-year hiatus, the Liverpool-rockers are still a ridiculously tight live band. Highlights included recent dark-psych track ‘Distance Inbetween’ as well as old favourites such as ‘Dreaming of You’, ‘In the Morning’ and ‘Pass It On’ as the band strategically placed the ‘hits’ in sporadic positions throughout the set list to keep the crowd on board.

Taking to the Dingwalls stage to chants of their name, Milburn’s reunion has gone much better than the band could have possibly imagined. Fresh from a sold out mini-stadium show the night before in their native Sheffield, the four-piece looked in great spirits as they played a set made up of the two albums and a host of new recordings. The band, who were continually labelled a ‘poor man’s Arctic Monkeys’ earlier in their career, have reformed at the perfect time, with a gap in the market for hook-laden indie bands. With groups such as The 1975 distorting the boundaries between rock and pop, Milburn have a solid fan base to work from now as they head towards the release of their Bill Ryder-Jones-produced third record.

Hot on their heels came London-natives The Rifles to deliver their energetic version of mod-rock. With a solid back catalogue to fall back on and a devoted Fred Perry-laden fan base always willing to attend their shows, you feel they will always stand the test of time, regardless of their sonic output and were the perfect end to a nostalgia-infused day of solid guitar music.
Paul Hill