Dizzee Rascal, Academy, Glasgow

With more than a year having now elapsed since the 19-year-old east-London wonderkid Dizzee Rascal grasped the Mercury prize in his eager paws, the incumbent's baton that makes each winner all but bulletproof for 12 months has been well and truly passed.

With more than a year having now elapsed since the 19-year-old east-London wonderkid Dizzee Rascal grasped the Mercury prize in his eager paws, the incumbent's baton that makes each winner all but bulletproof for 12 months has been well and truly passed. As with Miss World and Footballer of the Year, the second year of post-award life means having to prove your worth all over again.

If there's any justice, of course, Dizzee's debut album, Boy in da Corner (source of the very award which brought him to widespread attention), will go down as one of the defining moments of popular music in the 21st century's inaugural decade. It drew from all arenas of in-vogue urban music - hip hop, garage, drum'n'bass - and infused the collage with the distinctive London wide-boy persona that quite possibly only Dizzee can pull off with both humour and staunch sentiment, as opposed to boring, baggy-jeaned machismo. Not only that, but an element of truly creative production and Dizzee's distinctive nasal MCing combined to inspire those other musical magpies Basement Jaxx to request a collaboration.

So how did Dylan Mills (the prodigy otherwise known as Dizzee) celebrate the one-year anniversary of his greatest achievement? Admirably, he wasn't still trading on the success of his debut. Instead, the hot-iron strike that had eluded the earlier Mercury-winner Ms Dynamite had already been made - Mills's follow-up album, Showtime, is a record that meets, if not exceeds, the expectation level set by the first.

Clearly, Dizzee takes to heart the work ethic drummed into so many breakthrough British artists. That's why he has kicked off this national tour in such an unheralded outpost of hip-hop culture as the Southside of Glasgow (Dizzee freely admits to never having visited Scotland), pacing the boards where so many bigger-name US rappers have cancelled in recent months because of poor ticket sales. Perhaps, then, the surprise shouldn't be that the city's Carling Academy was half-empty, but that the crowd partitioned off on the venue's ground floor went so unreservedly nuts for him.

The fact is, there's a connection between artist and audience that even the vagaries of a different city's culture can't obscure. Dizzee himself puts the finger on it when he points out: "We ain't middle class; we're working class... we live on the council estate, yeah? Just like you." It's the shared heritage that makes Dizzee a true British artist of the people, and the crowd can feel it in the playground impudence of "Jus' a Rascal", the chest-swelling confidence of "Fix up Look Sharp" and even the swirling escapism of his new single, "Dream".

So his scaled-down two-MCs-and-one-DJ show may have been finding its feet a little here, but you can tell that, as the tour draws closer to its London finale, he'll once more be punching cockily above his weight.

Touring to 4 November