Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip

Perhaps still best known for their cracking underground hit 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' (since rereleased with vocals from De La Soul’s Posdnous) Scroobius Pip and Dan le Sac were supported by scarily young three-piece Sound of Rum and New Yorker B Dolan. Sound of Rum were an assault on the senses – teenage female rap artist/performance poet Kate Tempest (with backing from live drums and guitar/lap-top) filled the stage with raw talent and joy at the opportunity they'd been given.

B Dolan had a lot of work to do as one man to follow that, but by the end of the second track – a witty call-and-response banger about agoraphobia ('Is the kitchen in-tha-house!? Is the living room in-tha-house!?') Dolan and his hardcore East Coast boom bap had made its own mark. Like the other two acts, he blurs the line between rap and spoken word, but Dolan’s dark lyrical power and deathly-black humour hit as hard as his sampled bass drums – like Bill Hicks to Kate Tempest’s Josie Long. Shaving his beard off and performing as Evel Knieval on stage were just added-value.

By the time the headline act hit the stage, the crowd were as hyped as if they’d already seen a full gig. Scroobius’s unique mix of hip-hop, spoken word, techno and grimy electronic sounds – a clash of brash noise with a self-effacing delivery – went over massively. The stage set was an armchair and a set of old-fashioned school blackboards (covered in strange collages) – so visually the impression was somewhere between being round a friend’s house, at school and at a rave – and that pretty much sums up the act – humour, consciousness and noisy, body-shaking beats. Finishing with 'Get Better' brought all of these elements together perfectly – buoyant, uplifting and thought-provoking stuff – proof that Dan and Scroob are more than 'just a band'.