Dizzee Rascal - We Want Bass 2026 UK Tour

Dizzee Rascal plays O2 Academy Leeds on Friday 30 October, as part of his We Want Bass 2026 UK Tour. It's a career-spanning live show built around his distinctive delivery, his uncompromising early material and his festival-sized anthems.

If you're coming to him from the later, chart-topping years, it's worth remembering where he started. He emerged from East London's early grime scene, and his 2003 debut album, Boy in da Corner, won the Mercury Prize and helped push grime from London's underground youth culture to mainstream British and international audiences. Since then, he's moved between grime, hip-hop, electronic and pop, picking up major chart success along the way. This tour pulls from that whole run, so you'll hear the early, raw stuff alongside the bigger songs that worked on the festival circuit.

That early sound is a good place to start if you're not fully across his work. Grime started as a fast, stripped-back sound coming out of London's pirate radio and youth clubs, and Rascal was one of its first real stars. Boy in da Corner was a landmark for that scene, and much of what he's done since—the shift into pop and the dancefloor hits—still carries the same conversational, clipped flow that made the early records stand out. The tour title, We Want Bass, points back to that grime foundation: heavy low-end and a focus on the MC.

The Leeds date falls on the penultimate night of Black History Month, so it's one of the last big events in the city's calendar for the month. Doors open at 18:30 and the curfew is 22:30, giving you plenty of time to get in and settle before he takes the stage. It's O2 Academy Leeds, 55 Cookridge Street, LS2 3AW.