It is 11pm in a north London pub and Amy Winehouse - plus vertiginous beehive and eight-piece soul band - are squished on to a stage the size of a king-size bed. She is in what a PR would describe as "high spirits", offering to swap kisses for refills and rambling like a bag lady who has lost a carrier. But just when you think the grand dame of this year's Camden Crawl is going to disgrace herself, the trumpets kick in and all is forgiven as she runs through most of Back to Black without slurring a note.
The best thing about Camden's two-day gigathon, however, is not seeing stadium-fillers at such close quarters you can almost smell the booze on their breath; it is the serendipity of catching a band you had never heard of and had no intention of seeing, only to discover music so astonishing you wish everyone you loved were in the room so you could squeeze their arms to check they are feeling it too.
This year's jawdroppers turn out to be the Kissaway Trail, five boys from Denmark who produce something so beautiful and intense with four guitars and a drum kit that everyone with a heart rushes to buy their self-titled album afterwards. The band aren't reinventing the wheel - you can hear very clear shades of the Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse and Mogwai in their ambitious arrangements and aching melodies - but they play with such conviction and emotion you believe in them totally. A single wavering note in one song, It's Close Up Far Away, hits you so hard you feel as though the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.
There are other good, if less flooring, newcomers. Manchester four-piece Fear of Music have a singer dressed like Woody from Toy Story, look to have a combined age of no more than 50 and sound like Sonic Youth mixed with Muse. Hotly tipped Hadouken! proffer synth-heavy raps about musical tribes ("that girl's an indie Sindy") and people who think they're too cool to dance at gigs - very few of whom, incidentally, are at the packed-out Koko or at Pull Tiger Tail's frenetic show at the Tup later on. Sweden's Loney, Dear make lovely, fragile music in the Postal Service mould, but the singers' falsetto is that little bit too quiet to rise above the rowdy pub crowd. But it is the Camden Crawl, it doesn't matter. If you don't like it, can't hear it, can't get in: go on to the next.
