Hip-Hop Highlights

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when it comes to gigs featuring hip-hop legends, you just never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s an unforgettable show of musical skill and professionalism that will leave you weeping with joy. At the other end of the scale it's a set of mumbled hits from an alternately obese or wizened old survivor going through the motions in order to pay the retirement home bills.

So, hold your breath and cross your fingers for 27 May (7pm, £22), when Public Enemy appear at the ABC in Glasgow, performing their seminal album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in its entirety. Second on the bill, and likely to be the strangest thing you’ll see all year, is Kool Keith (aka Dr Octagon), who doesn’t so much rap as break out of the dressing room and lyricise until someone fetches a nurse. Also featuring Kutmaster Kurt, Anti Pop Consortium, Edan + MC Dagha.

Or perhaps go see the legend to be, Big Dada's Cadence Weapon, dropping his Afterparty Babies world tour at The Ivy Bar, Glasgow (20 May, 8pm, £5 adv). Check out heartfelt Canadian hip-hop at its freshest! Meanwhile in Edinburgh, The Wee Red Bar at Edinburgh College of Art has a treat for us this May, with Riddim Tuffa Sound on Friday 23 May, featuring DJs Ruben Da Silva and G-Flex the General giving us a night of reggae, ragga, dancehall and dub (10.30pm-3am, £3 b4 12am/£5). [Robin Black]