Glasgow does not give itself up easily. On the night of Storm Amy — trains cancelled, rain lashing, the first named tempest of the season — something had to be truly extraordinary to drag the faithful into the city. That something was The Duke Spirit, arriving at Stereo to celebrate twenty years of Cuts Across the Land. It wasn’t nostalgia, not really. It was time travel, and it was resurrection.

Support came from Scrounge, who ripped through their set like a haunted fairground ride gone wrong: a two-piece fury of guitar and drums, the singer spitting bile and anguish into the mic while the rhythms churned beneath like belly acid. A Benefits T-shirt on the drummer’s back nodded to Kingsley Hall’s spirit of spoken-word rebellion. Duos have no right to make such a racket, but Scrounge did, and the noise was exhilarating — like catching your breath after running from a ghost.

Then the storm inside matched the one outside. Liela Moss took the stage with the kind of cheekbones that still look chiselled from glass, her presence commanding without needing to demand. Luke B. Ford and Toby Butler flanked her with guitars that scythed and shimmered, while Olly “The Kid” Betts drove the set forward with a drumbeat that throbbed like a warning siren. Together they did not just play Cuts Across the Land — they inhabited it. From the opening surge of the title track “Cuts Across the Land” through “Stubborn Stitches” and deep into the shadows of “Bottom of the Sea,” the room was bound into their spell.

This was music at once brutal and tender. Moss’s voice veered between Kim Deal’s acerbic bite and the gothic undertow of Nick Cave, yet there was always something restless and uncontained in her delivery, a refusal to be boxed in or neatly described. When she whirled the mic stand like a sabre, the crowd surged forward, transfixed, as though each song might slice the night clean in two, while Moss dedicated “Bottom of the Sea” to gay and trans men in “these terrible times.” The gesture was not a lecture; it was solidarity sung from the gut.

What struck hardest was not just the album delivered in its entirely a short stage exit brought — “Souvenir,” “Lassoo,” “The Step and Walk” closing the encore — but the feral energy the band still summon after two decades. Moss called the Glasgow crowd beautiful, thanked them for braving the weather, and confessed they hadn’t expected anyone to come. But the room was packed, heaving, alive. The applause wasn’t polite nostalgia; it was rapture, a wave of energy meeting the storm outside and refusing to be drowned by it.

The Duke Spirit have always been the Velvet Underground for the Kate Moss generation: glamorous and jagged, dangerous yet impossibly stylish. Twenty years on, they still cut across the land — and through the heart — with an undimmed ferocity. This wasn’t just an anniversary gig. It was a reminder that some storms don’t fade; they simply wait for their moment to rise again.

Words: Angela Canavan

Images: Dale Harvey