No punks? The star-stuffed 'Camden' misses the point

Dua Lipa calls up the biggest names in her contacts for a documentary about London’s music hub pity that few have anything to do with the borough

- Mark Beaumont

The first question any potential producer of a docuseries about Camden should ask themselves is: will Graham Coxon do it? If the answer is, “No, but Dua Lipa is involved,” they should immediately shut down production and funnel the budget towards a Dua Lipa tour movie instead.

Not so the new Disney+ series Camden. For much of the 1990s, Blur guitarist Coxon was basically Camden incarnate, holding court from his permanent corner of the Good Mixer pub, the bespectacled fulcrum around which London’s entire Britpop scene revolved. Over four 45-minute episodes, however, he appears for just one second, and only in static photo form. Hilariously, it arrives during a lengthy section that tries to make out that this borough’s Britpop era was pretty much all about Oasis because Noel Gallagher (who did agree to take part) had a flat there for a bit.

Therein lies the folly of a series with its heart almost in the right place: ie the swanky new Koko members bar rather than the back room of the Marathon. Lipa, one of the series’ executive producers, spent several years living here as a child and recorded her first YouTube songs in a Camden flat aged 15, but – such is the major pop star mindset – she seems far more concerned with lauding the biggest names that lived and played here than getting under the gritty fingernails of the place.