Glasgow Underground

Kevin McKay founded Glasgow Underground in Glasgow, Scotland in 1997, most sources agree, though a Mixmag piece from 2017 gives 1996, a small discrepancy we're flagging rather than picking silently. early collaborators included Omid 16B, Kenny Inglis, DJ Q, Harri and Andy Carrick. the label went quiet in the early 2000s while McKay worked on Breastfed Records and the Mylo project, then relaunched in 2011. it's based in London now, though McKay still runs it, with Beatportal naming Sam Dexter and Tom Caruso as additional A&R as of 2020.

the earliest catalogue entry we can pin is GU19, Romanthony's "Do You Think You Can Love Me" from 1998. Romanthony's "Floorpiece" and McKay's own "Summer of Love" LP, billed by the label as its 500th release, both followed. the label's own about page describes its sound as deep house, minimal, tech house, nu-disco and deep/melodic afro house, broader than the plain "house" tag some directories give it. McKay told Mixmag in 2017, "a lot of the time, records that went off in those cities didn't work in Glasgow and I wanted the label to be about the records that worked in our city."

not to be confused with Global Underground, an unrelated and much bigger UK mix-series label that also goes by "GU", running since 1996 with John Digweed among its residents, a real namesake risk given the shared shorthand. the label runs a weekly guest-mix series called GU Radio on SoundCloud and Mixcloud. 13 artists we track have released on it, a confirmed floor from a partial sweep of a catalogue that runs past 500 releases across 7 pages of Discogs listings, not the full roster: Andrew Meller, Angelo Ferreri, CamelPhat, Claptone, David Penn, Groove Delight, Joshwa, Kevin McKay, N.O.Y, N2N, Piem, Sllash & Doppe, Solardo