"I LOVE being in this band," says Glasvegas singer James Allan to the crowd of hugging and hollering lads packing Glasgow's Garage.
And, despite having been unceremoniously dropped by Columbia Records after second album, Euphoric Heartbreak, failed to chart, well he should.
After a year out of the spotlight the band has self-recorded its third record, Later... When The TV Turns To Static, but Saturday night's gig was more a greatest hits run-down than a showcase of new material: Lots Sometime, Geraldine, Daddy's Gone. The one pity is that Go Square Go is turned into a cattle song live, the audience bellowing its final line, "Here we, here we, here we f****** go", and robbing it of its ambiguity.
Glasvegas writes songs for large spaces. Its solid blocks of guitars and thumping drums pushed against the walls, filling the room to make the small venue seem oddly less intimate.
The stand-out debut track was All I Want Is My Baby, a taster of the album to come and showing more of the same stadium-sized noises.
Allen commands the stage with the swagger of a man who knows he's in charge: there is nothing like the atmosphere created by a partisan crowd in a home town. We hear all the classics, perfectly performed, showing us what this band has done. But now, for a third album success, it needs to show us what it can do.
HHH
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