Dance UK is the half of the Dance Radio UK network that never chased the charts. While its commercial sister station Box UK grew into the home of 80s, 90s, 00s and today's hits, Dance UK held onto the original identity the whole network was built around, old skool, house and trance, played the way it sounded when the founder first fell for it.
That founder is DJ Matt Jay, who grew up glued to Exile Radio, one of the pirate stations that filled UK airwaves before the internet made broadcasting available to anyone with a login. The pirate energy stuck with him, and in 2011 it pushed him to launch a fully licensed alternative rather than an illegal one. The station started as a single channel built mostly around Old Skool sets, chasing the same raw feeling as the FM pirates he grew up on, before splitting into two channels after its first birthday so neither the club crowd nor the chart-pop crowd had to compromise.
Dance UK, based out of Birmingham, kept the club, house and trance sets that built the original audience, and the DJ lineup reflects that lineage. According to the station's own listings, its sets carry the influence of names like Above & Beyond, Judge Jules, Paul Oakenfold and the veteran hardcore and old skool DJ Slipmatt, alongside residents like PaulyPaul, who plays a mix of house, old skool classics, drum and bass and mashups with a particular soft spot for trance built around big, uplifting vocals.
The schedule keeps that identity consistent around the clock, with regular fixtures like Stigwood's Inside Our House giving the deeper house side of the station a dedicated home every other week. Like the rest of the Dance Radio UK network, Dance UK runs on volunteer DJs rather than a commercial sales team, and the station's live chat room stays busy through every set, filled with listeners who show up as much for each other as for the next drop.
For anyone who wants their house and trance played by people who grew up on pirate radio rather than programmed by an algorithm, Dance UK offers exactly that, the older, rawer half of a network built by a fan who just wanted to keep that pirate sound legally on air.