Saturday 27/09/08 Micachu, Clinic, thecocknbullkid @ Nail The Cross, London

Pub crawls are a peculiar tradition that involve large groups of people walking, swaggering, swaying, staggering and finally falling from bar to bar, with the manner of transport correlating to the level of drunkenness. Nail The Cross is pretty much this, with added bands. What starts of as a rather well turned out crowd listening to rock music of the utmost calibre slowly turns into average night out fare, then becomes interestingly weird, before ending up a rather glorious mess. This, though not really a festival, makes for a decent night out. Maybe more pub crawls should be like it.

Upon arrival at New Cross' hallowed high street, The Hobgoblin is the first port of call and is alive with youthful activity, gig-goers spilling into the canopied garden to pick up passes and strangers, glasses toppling off tables already. A swift turn around the corner and the renowned Goldsmiths Student Union is filling with eager-eyed youngsters – it is the end of Fresher's Week here – awaiting the Archie Bronson Outfit's much-travelled rock fare. Despite being quite a modest crowd for one of the festival's biggest acts, the band brings the evening to an early peak it never quite repeats. This isn't a criticism, the Archie Bronson Outfit just happen to put in a stunning shift, looking utterly out of place in lumberjack shirts, exuding bearded gruffness. Songs crash past, their southern rock aided by the exploits of their particularly dishevelled looking one-man sax section, who plays two instruments at once to summon an eerily epic tone. Cherry Lips is loud and wonderfully coarse, but it’s the almost-cheap progression of Dart For My Sweetheart that is truly memorable. Left to brew until the chorus, counting verses build with internal rhyme, while a nagging riff underpins it all. It sounds simply huge in the shapeless confines of a student bar, keeping people away from the dirt cheap drinks for a full five minutes.

Clinic are up next, with their patented juxtaposition of serious musical exploration and cheesy dress-up draw childishness. Arriving onstage in trademark surgical masks, with matching Hawaii shirts more worthy of mockery than mystique, there's a lot not to like on first look. Luckily, they're an accomplished act who effortlessly switch between sub-genres, with clever chord changes leaving them as adept at delivering keys-driven mid-tempo as high-voltage marauding. Monkey Off My Back is a stomping centre to the set, and despite sometimes veering dangerously close to band-playing-in-the-background-in-an-OC-scene territory, they're worthy headliners.