Throughout December 2017, Boiler Room celebrated 20 Years of Garage: the sound that dominated UK clubs & culture from the late 1990s onwards.
From highflying MCs and pirate radio DJs, to club promoters and avid ravers — a huge array of contributors that made up the scene came together to pay tribute to the legacy of UK Garage.
This is our homage to UKG: the sound and scene that rapidly snowballed from a club phenomenon to everlasting global fame, now firmly part of British pop music history. The season built a more wholesome picture of what UKG truly meant to artists and garage heads alike — despite conservative voices trying to discredit it at the time.
From London to Ayia Napa, we collected the inside stories, secrets and anecdotes from big names of garage’s golden age. The result is an original Boiler Room documentary (embedded above) on how Ayia Napa became the sun-soaked Mecca of UKG in the late 1990s; and an original Boiler Room podcast celebrating the history and cultural impact of UKG Garage.
Our celebratory season culminated in a classic Boiler Room party UKG’s spiritual hometown of South London. We went back to the scene’s roots with an all-star lineup and plenty of cameos for a night of nostalgic glitz and glamour. Up on the bill was — So Solid Crew, Heartless Crew, Norris Da Boss Windross & MC Creed (aka Godfathers of Garage), Mike Ruff Cut Lloyd & MC PSG, El-B and Foundation (aka Sticky & Scott Garcia).
We also created an hourlong original podcast (embedded below). UKG Reloaded traced the evolution of the UKG sound, from Sunday after-parties to mainstream chart success, through 4x4 beats and two-step. It explored the feeling of opportunity and aspiration that London in the 1990s had, setting the scene for inner city revellers to take over the charts with this infectious underground music.
Full UKG campaign available to view at: ukg.boilerroom.tv