LIVE REVIEW: HARD LIFE @ SWG3 04.11.2025

The walk from Partick Station to SWG3 is a solid twenty minutes. It’s the only option for the carless (my people) so whenever you see a gig in SWG3, you want it to be worth the trek.

The gig I trekked for was Hard Life, supported by Woody. After hearing that lineup, I had to fight my initial urge to make jokes of a certain genre, but the first few songs of Woody’s set gave me more to think about.

The three-piece kept their set short and sweet, sticking primarily to soft indiepop with occasional ventures into harder, more funky beats. They had the earnest charm of an older sibling’s garage band, exacerbated by the concrete square garage-ness of the Galvanizers yard and the titular lead singer’s shuffling choreography.

Woody’s songs about drinking beer with friends left the crowd in a relatively chill state, which gave me some time to think about the oncoming headliner - or listen to other people’s conversations about the oncoming headliner, which is how I learned the story behind the band name.

Originally called Easy Life, they were forced to change their name after facing legal action from Easy Jet, who claimed the rights to the use of the word “Easy”. I wasn’t actually sure if this was true or not, until the lights went down and an audio of the band members’ radio interview about the case began to play. Creative, informative and tongue-in-cheek, I was won over pretty quick.

There’s something special about a band that knows their target market, and it was pretty clear that Hard Life were appealing to the (chaotic) tastes of a Glaswegian audience. In addition to being bagpiped on, lead singer Murray Matravers was swigging out a bottle of Buckfast from minute one. Not including a brief cover of The Proclaimers 500 Miles, their set took the best of both band names - full of hard-hitting lyrics paired with easy-listening beats in tracks such as Tears, Y3llow Bike, ojpl. A stripped back instrumental version of Crickets juxtaposed the mosh-pit-causing Skeletons. And of course, the revisited their classic hit Nightmares.

Clearly not their first time playing Glasgow, the focus of the night seemed to be on connecting with the crowd. If they hadn’t already done that with their songs, they would’ve managed through the passion and engagement of the performance alone. From drummer David Cassidy’s kilt to End Credits being their answer to the chants of “One More Tune”, the gig felt like a sweaty, unhinged love-letter to the SWG3 crowd. One that was definitely worth the twenty-minute trek from the station.