“The dollar-to-pound-slash-euro ratio… it’s not particularly wonderful right now. Basically, I go to the UK and I just sit in my hotel room and drink water.” So said El-Producto over the phone a few weeks before he got here, sounding a little jaded by the economics of touring.

The Brooklyn MC shrugs off the financial pitfalls and heaves himself over to this side of the pond regardless, to sip on Evian and sample some real life Fawlty Towers, perhaps; but poised on representing his sleeper success I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead to great effect in these northerly parts tonight, most definitely.

It's been almost five years since Jaime Meline last played up this way and the sold-out upper deck of King Tut’s is mobbed to greet the man, yet the gig starts so late that half of the crowd look hammered and the mantra bouncing off the walls is more B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E than R-E-S-P-E-C-T by the time he hits the stage; bottles are smashed under angry feet and broken shards of glass are willingly booted across the floor at imaginary adversaries while scraps break out between a few crazies who think of Glasgow as the Wild West and Tut’s as their brawling turf. The stoners in the corner shake their heads in disbelief.

“Oh, it’s gonna be one of those shows tonight?” El-P cracks a satisfied grin in the general direction of the carnage. With fake blood trickling from his brow, he surveys the damage already on the ground, ignores the quickly peeling masking tape which seems to hold the sound monitor above his head together and instead chooses to focus on the horizon of flailing arms and ranting faces placed somewhere in-between. Might this all go tits up? The choice of ‘Mad World’ done Donnie Darko-style as intro tune fits this frenzy almost perfectly, bettered only by his own opener - ‘Tasmanian Pain Coaster’ - with all its paranoia inducing intent: “This is the sound of what you don’t know, killing you.”

Ugly motifs aside, the hard-hitting soundscapes behind these leftfield lyrical ethics are colossal; from the rugged b-boy charms of ‘EMG’, the mecha-industrial clang of ‘Stepfather Factory’ and the sharp reminder of the B.D.P.-meets-RZA production prowess of Company Flow classic ‘Vital Nerve’. For the full hour, hype man Quin, Chin Chin keyboardist Wilder Zoby and part-time cLOUDDEAD scratch maestro Mr Dibbs provide El-P with a compelling translation of the hefty backdrop he designed to craft his hard and heady words around.

And they go for the jugular with ‘Smithereens’, as it explodes into a fit of red alert sirens jacked straight from Kirk’s original Enterprise while, front and centre, our wild-eyed protagonist spits about the relative fruitlessness of combing his provocative hyper-real riddles for answers: “I keep my meaning tucked deep so y’all creepers give me some privacy / don’t ask for something literal from a child of secret society.”

It’s this smirking, assumed upper hand that keeps El-P’s ball in the air as much as it provides his detractors with a key card to play against him, although there's a moment tonight when he throws away the cipher, reveals his biggest deceit and blows his own self assuredness out of the water when he wryly states: “I’m not judging you, I am you, motherfucker.”