Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Camden’ On Hulu, Where Music Megastars Talk About The Decades-Long Influence Of The North London Neighborhood

Camden is a four-part docuseries that focuses on the musical influence of the North London neighborhood known as Camden Town, which locals simply call “Camden.” It has been one of London’s creative hubs for decades, especially when it comes to music. For close to 50 years, acts that have played the various pubs and clubs in the neighborhood have gone on to well-regarded careers. Some acts, as we see, went on to become megastars.

CAMDEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Camden seems like the center of all things,” says Chris Martin. Then we see Dua Lipa walking through the streets of the North London neighborhood.

The Gist: Two of megastars that came out of the Camden music scene are Dua Lipa, who is one of the series’ executive producers, and Chris Martin. They are both interviewed in the first episode; they took two different routes to where they are now, but both routes went through Camden. Dua Lipa grew up there, with her parents settling in the neighborhood after migrating from Kosovo a few years before she was born.

Because her father is a musician, she knows the history of the clubs there and the acts that came through, whether they were local bands or American acts like Blondie, Prince, and others at the stages of their careers where they still played clubs. When she and her family moved back to Kosovo, she knew she’d return, and when she came back at 15, she started making music and posting it to YouTube.

Chris Martin grew up in Exeter, and when he saw a James concert in Camden in 1997, he realized that he could be up on that stage, too. The band that he joined played their first show as Coldplay at The Dublin Castle, a pub that had become renowned for breaking bands, going back to when Madness played there in 1979. What Martin was amazed at was that by the time their first album, Parachutes came out in 2000, they had played increasingly larger venues in the neighborhood, and while the elapsed time wasn’t very long, it felt like they made the climb.

Also interviewed in the first episode is Graham “Suggs” McPherson from Madness, as well as the owners of the Dublin Castle. In the final section of the episode, Little Simz talks about how integral the Roundhouse, one of the largest venues in Camden, was to her development as a musician, and when she finally got to play the main stage in 2017.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Camden had a similar vibe to the recent docuseries LOLLA: The Story Of Lollapalooza.

Our Take: We don’t think that the producers of Camden are trying to give a comprehensive history of the neighborhood’s music scene, and we sure as hell don’t think they’re trying to tell a linear history. We get what they’re trying to do; through various stories by people whose careers were significantly impacted by living in and/or being a part of that scene, we’re supposed to get a picture of just how influential Camden was and is.

But we wonder why the show started with Dua Lipa. Don’t get us wrong; we’re fans of hers, and we do get that she’s an executive producer of the show. But she’s 28 years old, and her career didn’t really start until around 2010. As much as she knows about the history of the venues and the acts that played there, her personal interaction with the music scene there likely only reaches back to her early 2000s childhood, if we’re being generous. There is more than 20 years of history that came before that, and she has no personal perspective on it.

She is a good illustration of how different someone of her age group — millennial on the cusp of Gen Z — built a career versus someone like Martin. While Coldplay’s ascendance was pretty rapid, the band still had to play all the tiny clubs and try to get noticed by A&R people showing up at shows where they were playing with other bands. In fact, an A&R rep for a label that didn’t sign Coldplay was interviewed, and he talked about what he saw in Martin and the band and why he ultimately didn’t sign them. Dua Lipa, on the other hand, likely built her following via YouTube and social media. Again, sign of the times, but it was interesting to hear that contrast.

Where the doc really shines is when we hear from people like Suggs from Madness, who was the first band to make a name for themselves while playing The Dublin Castle. His perspective of what Camden was like in the late ’70s was fascinating to hear, and we wanted more of that. Peggy Conlon and her son Henry knew the history of the scene and of their pub’s role in it, and we were a bit disappointed we didn’t hear from them more.

If each episode goes back and forth between older and newer acts, that might be OK, because it shows how the newer acts are influenced by the ones that came before them. But there just seems to be a recency bias that doesn’t do the history of the neighborhood justice.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After we see Little Simz play the Roundhouse, we go back to Dua Lipa, who talks about another large Camden venue, Koko, and we see footage of her playing there.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Nick Shymansky, Amy Winehouse’s first manager. He talks about her early days, when she was a teenager playing gigs in Camden, and he gets wistful when he talks about how she descended into addiction after her first album didn’t do well. “She just got lost in it,” he says, “it” being the darker side of the Camden scene.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure why Chris Martin smiled at the end of every sentence during his interview. Has he always done that and this is the first time we’re noticing it or is this something new? Either way, it was strangely off-putting.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite our misgivings, we still enjoyed Camden. We just wish that we got a more historical perspective on the neighborhood before we heard about more modern artists.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.