You aren’t allowed to enjoy metal in colour, though you can accent your darkness with appropriately aggressive tones, say, blood red or belligerent blue. These are rules that the gods of metal scrawled onto skin parchment in the long ago, a time before pop and shutter shades. The Globe plays by these rules with unspoken reverence, and while the bar may be lit in the amber hued wash of faded art deco, the stage space is a literal pit of darkness that would make any basement feel tall.

Standing in a bed of limp fog, The Terror Parade looked borderline sheepish in the beginning, a sacrificial band propped before a big canvas flag promoting The Wrath, but from the very first chord their coyness evaporated. Playing a pretty traditional type of hard edged rock, like Paramore by way of Red Kross, lead singer Miss Rampage toured the stage with a dominance that defied her five-feet of corset stuffed femininity. The songs themselves were as tight and catchy as anything you might find in the ‘dark charts’, unfortunately they were also routinely punctured with pantomimist monologues delivered in distractingly seditious whisper screams. In the end, the theatrics of their performance slightly undercut the professionalism of their sound, still, as a new band with only a handful of shows under their belts, they’ve got plenty of room to grow into their potential.

The Wrath is what you might get if someone brought The Living End back from the dead, the dying end, so to say. They dwell in a genre miasma that’s a little punk, a little rockabilly, a whole lotta dark and more fun than you’d imagine. Their last album Disillusions and Resolutions had a sinister vibrancy to it, with feel good hits like Blood On Your Hands and Cold Asphyxiation that could make even the happiest soul enjoy some misery, but the energy and nuance is only truly apparent in the flesh.

Frontman Tommy Creeper covered the stage like rot on a corpse, leaving no space unexplored, pacing routinely through instrumental breaks with the mic cord dangling from his teeth like a pensive doberman. Though memorable, it was two other members that dominated audience attention. Looking like a Bram Stoker fantasy standing behind a zebra clad double bass, The Count attacked his instrument with speed, flexibility and a dexterous digital manipulation that made the female contingent stand up and take note of his supple fingering. However, the men of the night couldn’t look beyond guitarist Carina Acquarola, clad only in a mane of red hair and a light white slip. The room was full of wistful sighs, stillborn fantasies and the furtive mutterings of futile testosterone, as every guy considered the irony of desire.

Regardless of their proclivities and the dank uniform blackness, every face in the fifty strong crowd had a glow of riotous contentment, the satisfied look of a person nestled snugly inside their ideal scene, and every note, good bad or metal, was absorbed, appreciated and applauded.

- Nic Addenbrooke