Thirty years on from Never Mind the Bollocks, it is inevitable that the music press should be on the hunt for a band sufficiently imbued with the spirit of '77. The chosen ones are Gallows, a fledgling Watford quintet whose pugilistic punk has already earned them a £1m deal with Warners. They recently threw a boat party in homage to the Sex Pistols' famous Thames jaunt, even if their music owes more to the 80s US hardcore of Black Flag.

Gallows' fearsome live reputation rests largely on frontman Frank Carter, a wiry knot of red hair, tattoos and scowling. He likes to stand with his feet on the monitors and his hands clutching the lighting rig above his head, tilted over the violently adoring throng, while wearing the volatile expression of a man considering whether to stab you in the neck with a screwdriver.

Instead, he dedicates a song to his mother. Between songs, he turns into a gruff sentimentalist. Within them, it's a different story. Thomas Hobbes would recognise Carter's bleak view of human interaction: men hurt women, women hurt men and, on the Betjeman-citing Come Friendly Bombs, men hurt other men. He scathingly addresses one song to "fucking cunts". One suspects that in Gallows' world, that is an expansive category.

This stuff seems like hard-boiled wisdom when you're in your teens; less so once you're out of them. Unfortunately, this being a Kerrang!-sponsored one-off, only half the Barfly belongs to the moshpit faithful, while older industry types stand soberly at the back, muting the atmosphere. Even Carter seems relatively subdued, leaving his shirt on for once despite a spirited request to "get your tits out". The set-closing Orchestra of Wolves, though, is hair-raisingly good. During the climactic chant, which takes unlikely inspiration from Nat King Cole's Nature Boy, Carter plunges into the crowd, limbs flail, and the fervour of Gallows' cult following makes perfect sense.