Greyhound Day review – Glasgow’s loudest band come home to the Barrowland and tear it down
★★★★★ On the second of three sold-out nights, the Clydebank five-piece turned a decade of guitar anthems into the best gig this city has seen in years
There is a particular sound a Barrowland crowd makes in the five seconds before a band walks on, and on Friday night it was so loud that the first chord of Greyhound Day’s set was effectively inaudible. It did not matter. Two thousand people sang the riff instead.
The Clydebank band have been playing this ballroom since 2017, when they were the opening act for a band whose name I have mercifully forgotten, and this run of three sold-out nights marks 10 years since their first single. They are now, by any measure, one of the biggest guitar acts in the country, with two No 1 albums and a summer of festival headline slots behind them, and the question going in was whether a band that size could still fit in a room this size. The answer, emphatically, is that they were built for it.
The singer, Lorna Cassidy, has become a genuinely great frontwoman in the past two years, less a performer than a conductor, and she spent most of the 100-minute set with her back to the band and her arms out. Her voice, a rasp that goes somewhere unexpected on the high notes, was in frightening form on Shipyard, the slow one, which she sang almost unaccompanied while the ballroom’s famous sprung floor stopped moving for the only time all night.
The set was generous and shrewdly built: the new album, Castlemilk, which came out in September, got six songs, all of them already known by heart, and the back catalogue was threaded through in a way that made the night feel like a story rather than a greatest hits. The guitarist Ross McArdle, who writes most of the music and says nothing, played the solo in Clyde Tunnel on his knees. The drummer, Jamie Hendry, broke two sticks and a cymbal stand.
The band brought out a 20-piece choir from a Drumchapel secondary school for the encore, and the sound of 20 teenagers and 2,000 adults singing the chorus of Last Bus Home, a song about getting stranded in the city centre at 1am, in a room that smelled of lager and damp coats, is one I will not forget quickly. Cassidy, who had been dry-eyed and formidable all night, had to stop and turn away.
Bigger rooms await. They will play arenas next year, and they will be good in them. But there is a version of this band that only exists in the Barrowland, with the stars on the ceiling and the floor moving, and anyone who was there on Friday knows it.
Greyhound Day tour the UK in February.
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