Breaks & Hip-Hop

There's beats and breaks aplenty locally, if you look carefully, with Freakmenoovers' Thursday residency at the Art School and Cabaret Voltaire's midweek cheapo, Split, doing consistently cheap and fun business. Retro/ old skool hip-hop fiends Bankrupt Europeans bore the old men in The Halt 2 (Glasgow) most Sundays, make it past the swanky door staff at Bar 10 on occasional Thursdays and generally turn up unexpectedly across the city to unleash fun and funky remixes of De La Soul, Tribe called Quest and the like. Glasgow local Boom Monk Ben hangs on the coat tails of bigger names, and in November, spins pre-show bizness for Fingathing and Fiends at the Arches (17th) and the almighty Pharcyde at the Liquid Rooms (7th). Making a choice between the high-priced, high gloss of the Carling Academy and sitting under the bands' feet in King Tuts seems pretty easy, except Chamillionaire bombs the former on the 12th, whilst Ty whips up the latter on the same night. One half of The Colour Changin' Click, Chamillionaire has put his crisp, whiplash vocals to use under names such as The Mixtape Messiah, King Koopa and Colour-Changin' Lizard. Remarkably crammed into King Tut's, Ty's operated for years, balancing monster party tunes with offbeat extravagance and the social message of operations like Ghetto Grammar. [Liam Arnold]