IT'S easy to know when a Glasgow crowd loves you.

For Charli XCX, who opened the first night of her tour in Glasgow's SGW3 Galvanizers on Sunday, that love must have been glaringly apparent.

The sold out show was packed for Charlotte Aitchison , who came on sharp at 9pm to promptly tell the crowd, "tonight is going to be the best night of your life! It's Charli baby, and I'm going to take you to heaven".

It's a big promise that she did not fail to deliver.

Touring her newly released self-titled album, Charli, the show was poised to have an interesting dichotomy: was it to be a set studded with her biggest, most gleaming hits, or a rendition of her more avant-garde mixtape back catalogue?

SWG3 is an interesting venue that hosts even more interesting acts, the most recent two being Charli XCX and Slowthai. It is big enough to bridge the gap between Glasgow's smaller venues, like King Tuts, or the commercial venues like the O2 Academy, or the stratospheric and hulking SSE Hydro.

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Similarly, it matches avant-garde acts with avant-garde stage craft and Charli's show was a rocket-launch of multi-coloured strobes and smoke cannisters. The crowd was mad for Charli but with it all being on one level, some of the younger (and smaller) audience members struggled to see.

This did not phase a crowd that deftly fell in love if they were not already with Charli XCX, who excelled in a red two piece overlain with white chiffon. In a show such as Charli's, that brought on some of Glasgow's most popular Queens for 'Shake It', these details are important.

Her show in Glasgow was a thank you to her fans and the collaborators on the new album, which she duly reeled out in a homily-style fashion. With Charli sometimes the only figure on stage, she felt big enough for it and the crowd-pleasers of '1999' 'I Love It' among others were collected for the encore. I witnessed fans even at the back shrieking with sheer joy in the last four songs.

The peak of Charli's set was arguably her rendition of new song, 'Official'. It's brutal honesty and vulnerability speaks to a crowd of young people, among many of whom are champions for the next wave of LGBTQ+ representation and who are not ashamed of this fact - and have never been. This was the moment where many of the crowd stopped, phones down, to gaze at the star on our stage. CARLA JENKINS