Three things contributed to this being such a tremendous evening.

The venue – The Hug & Pint, a vegan restaurant and bar with an intimate (by which it means very, very small), 120 capacity, basement live music venue. This is the smallest place I have ever seen a band play. Great if you want to see your bands up close and personal.

The band – Spaced, a five-piece band from Buffalo, New York who describe themselves as “far out hardcore”. This is the bands first visit to Scotland.

The audience – for the first time in a very long time at a gig I have been to, the audience does not consist mainly of middle-aged or elderly men! This audience is young, predominantly male but a lot of women as well, and every single one of them is up for this. In full flow the audience were quite a sight to behold, I can only describe it as imagine if you invited a sizeable crowd of MMA fighters to a party in your living room and a riot broke out! Arms were flailing, legs were kicking in a joyous celebration of the music that we were hearing.

The band were utterly tremendous. They were fun, loud and fast and played with such enthusiasm, led by frontwoman Lexi Reyngoudt who was very engaging, dynamic and charismatic. Throughout the set she kept exhorting the crowd to come closer to the stage, if they had got much closer they would have been sharing the stage with her! The music is intense and so are the crowd, but everything is good-natured and everyone’s having fun, the songs are short and very energetic, a real cauldron of noise. Spaced are delighted to be in Glasgow and Glasgow hardcore fans are ecstatic to see them, the place is absolutely bouncing. The band rip through 11 songs in 30 minutes with some amount of swagger, and suddenly it’s all over, no encore, as someone once said “always leave them wanting more”, Spaced certainly did.