The visionary techno producer Carl Craig and I don’t have all that much in common, but we do share inauspicious musical beginnings.

Every musician – from the rotund pub singer to the festival-headlining megastar – remembers their first gig. Mine was on a wet Sunday night in the old Barfly on Clyde Street. To give you some context, the build-up to it was dogged by concerns that I wouldn’t be back from my Higher Physics study weekend in Ardentinny in time for the soundcheck.

My band, The Scruffs (at 15-and-a-half I was our elder statesman), had one song that we’d written ourselves and a handful of Muse and Jet covers. We fumbled our way through Time is Running Out and Are You Gonna Be My Girl, our parents watching from the back of the room, and I remember vividly the well-documented addictive feeling that followed our performance.

Craig’s first gig was similarly lacking in hipster credibility, which is making me feel better about the whole thing. The Detroit producer made his first public turn aged 15, stumbling through a set of Prince covers at a family reunion. He soon decided that the guitar wasn’t for him. He invested in a synth, set about trying to be Kraftwerk, and the rest is history.

He’ll play at the Sub Club for the first time in a decade on Sunday, after delivering a Red Bull Music Academy lecture at the Barras Art and Design centre. It’s a chance for budding artists and producers to pick the brains of this relentlessly innovative musician, before seeing him in his element. His subtlety, his attention to detail, and his extreme soulfulness are all traits that have made him an all-time legend. If you’re an aspiring dance music head or even if you just love techno, make sure you’re there.

• Red Bull Music Academy presents Carl Craig and Courtesy, Sunday, Sub Club, 11pm – 3am, £10

Awesome Tapes From Africa

New Yorker Brian Shimkovitz is perhaps the world’s favourite African ethnomusicologist. As the man behind the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa, he started collecting tapes from his travels around the continent as a way of documenting and cataloguing his fascination with the cassette-based culture he found there. As a DJ, his cassette-only sets incorporate the woozy, hypnotic likes of Ethiopian jazzman Hailu Mergia, the tight Somalian funk of the Dur-Dur Band, and the more mainstream disco grooves of South Africa’s Brenda and the Big Dudes. Arrive with an open mind, and you’ll come away with a whole new idea of what dance music can sound like. Support comes from Sarra of Subcity’s OH-141, while on Saturday Billy Woods, the city’s sultan of sleaze, lays down decadent, psychedelic disco at the ever-popular Supermax.

• Awesome Tapes From Africa, tomorrow, The Berkeley Suite, 11pm – 3am, £5

• Supermax, Saturday, The Berkeley Suite, 11pm – 3am, £8

We Should Hang Out More

Get the old gang back together and get to La Cheetah on Saturday night for We Should Hang out More’s third birthday. The Glaswegian party crew have displayed a knack for booking glorious guests for their parties since they launched in 2014 (last time out they were joined by the celebrated Aussie producer Late Night Tuff Guy), but this celebration is all in the hands of residents Shahaa Tops and Peter Panther as they lay down Balearic beats, sun-bleached house and lush disco edits.

• We Should Hang Out More is Three, Saturday, La Cheetah, 11pm – 3am, £5

Pretty Ugly

Seventeen years ago, Queens of the Stone Age’s storming single Feel Good Hit of the Summer was banned from radio playlists across the western world for its refrain, which is basically the names of several legal and illegal substances shouted repeatedly. You won’t find any of that kind of louche behaviour at Pretty Ugly on Saturday, but you will encounter summertime daiquiris, dancing, and lots of tuneful indie-pop to boot. Much preferable, of course.

• Pretty Ugly: Feel Good Hit of the Summer, Saturday, The Admiral, 11pm – 3am, £6/£5

Not3s

The baby-faced east London artist Not3s is barely old enough to have passed his driving test, so he writes songs about picking up girls in taxis (“A peng ting called Madison/I tell her come jump in my Addison Lee,” he raps on Addison Lee) and compares himself to Disney characters (“I am so fly, like Aladdin,” goes Aladdin). Fans of this incredibly wholesome approach – and there are many: Addison Lee has over 6.5 million YouTube plays alone – can catch this breath of fresh air at Sugar Cube tomorrow, where the Hackney lad will be dropping in to perform “all his club bangers” on his first-ever appearance in Glasgow. Support comes from Ransom FA, while resident DJs Naeem and Nojan will be spinning fresh hip-hop and urban classics until late.

• Not3s, tomorrow, Sugar Cube, 11pm – 3am, £8