Being in a fledgling band can be tough sometimes. No matter how far your ambitions stretch, you inevitably end up playing the odd back-room of a pub or treading the boards of a makeshift stage in a student bar on your journey to greatness.

This is perhaps why The Naked & Famous’ much-anticipated gig at Anglia Ruskin (ARU) came across as a bit incongruous. The band has enough musical charisma to fill a stadium, and far too much collective energy for the undersized hall at ARU to accommodate.

The same can be said of their support act, Wolf Gang, whose classically-influenced name belies their on-trend brand of indie pop. In fact, Wolf Gang’s musical performance was slightly too well-executed for the small, university-based venue. The school-disco style lighting - complete with swaying red lights and half-hearted strobe effects – was a slightly sad accompaniment to the bands’ professionalism and verve.

Front man Max McElligott managed to inject some excitement into the skinny-jean clad crowd with his highly strung, new-romantic anthems, but the support band were unfortunately under-publicised; they performed to a half-empty room for at least 30 minutes before The Naked & Famous’ bulky fan-based arrived.

Luckily, The Naked & Famous know how to spark an electric atmosphere in the smallest of venues. After strutting on stage, the band catapulted into the immensely infectious ‘All of This’, followed by their crowd-pleasing, synth-laden single, ‘Punching in a Dream’. Thom Powers, one of the founding members of the group, kept an ice-cool persona throughout, leading clap-alongs and thrilling the crowd with his terse addresses in between songs.

From my tiny spot at the side of the stage it would have been easy to forget that The Naked and Famous were playing a Thursday-night slot at a student union bar. Halfway through their hour-long set, some off-balanced teenagers in the front row alerted me to the presence of a mosh pit, a phenomenon which I haven’t come across since I was 14 years old. The attempts of some hyperactive boys to crowd-surf and grope the arms of lead singer Alissa made me feel like I was at the Carling Academy in London, and not crammed against a newly-built stage at ARU.

But all of this was the result of one undeniable truth: this band have a stage presence which marks them out as something special. Their epic performance of ‘Young Blood’ - the release which earned them instant transatlantic success - drove everybody in the room into a frenzy, and suggested to me that The Naked & Famous are capable of transforming grubby pubs and student bars into thriving stadiums on their way to greatness.