It all started with a phone call. I was working from home in London Colney—a small village in Hertfordshire, famous for where the Arsenal FC team train—when I looked down at my phone to see who was ringing. It was my mate, Venom. “Yo mate, what you doing this evening? Chip’s got an event called Grime Scene Saviours tonight at Outernet and I can get you on the guestlist.” I didn’t take much convincing.

In truth, I hadn’t been to a grime rave for almost a decade; work, the kids, general life kicked in. If you’ve ever seen that meme that says “one day you play out with your mates for the last time but nobody knows it’s the last time”, it was a bit like that for me. Grime music was truly my first love. I was transfixed with the gully sounds that were emanating out of London in the early 2000s, and I instantly felt more connected to it than I did the rap coming out of the States—you know, the stuff you still hear being pumped out on British mainstream radio all day (every day), an issue that has been expertly highlighted by UK music stalwart Elijah.

Back in the day, if you weren’t within the vicinity of pirate radio in inner-city London, you had to work hard to keep abreast of what was going on. I’d discovered a lot via RWD Forum, and when that eventually disappeared from the ‘net, I created GrimeForum.com to plug the gap and keep that vital online community going. I was fortunate enough to often exchange ad space on the site for guestlist entry to raves across the capital, and yes: many Sunday mornings were spent sleeping on benches in St. Pancras waiting for the first trains to start so I could get home.

The day is Thursday 20th February, 2025. I manage to navigate through a busy Elizabeth Line to get to Tottenham Court Road, and now I’m standing in Outernet’s guestlist queue with Venom as the legendary DJ Mak 10 joins the queue behind us. As I enter the VIP mezzanine, set above the expansive dancefloor with the stage in front of it, what immediately strikes me is the size of the crowd. The place was packed! A lot of the events I used to attend would be in the basement of a London bar, or a smaller side room in a nightclub, whereas this whole venue was exclusively for Chip, and for grime.

The format of the night was reminiscent of the ones I used to attend all those years ago, where a large part was spent waiting for the main event to begin. Everyone there knew what they were waiting for: Chip, and whomever would stand alongside him on stage. After reminiscing over the classic grime tracks that were being spun—suddenly, it was time: DJ Mak 10, DJ Maximum and Sir Spyro all clamber up the steps to the stage to take over from DJ Ness, when Dexplicit’s thunderous “Roll Wid Us” remix echoes round the room. The lift in atmosphere and anticipation was tangible.

Then Chip runs out, and the party officially starts! One after the other, a plethora of MCs enter the stage and at this point, it’s largely a who’s who of grime. The energy in the room is electric as Chip passed the mic to Jme, who passed it to P Money, who then passed it to ad-lib king D Double E. As you can imagine: it’s straight-up reload central, with every MC spitting their iconic one-liners and whipping the crowd into a frenzy. I felt 16 all over again. Then, just when you thought it had reached its apex and settled into a more formulaic stageshow—as if by magic, Skepta suddenly appears; he grabs the mic and blasts off his “God forgive me” Hall of Fame bars, and the reaction goes up another level. Complete mayhem. The dance could have stopped right there in all honesty, but there was much more to come.

More Fire Crew’s Neeko and Ozzie B were next to make their presence known, taking us back to before ‘grime’ was properly in the lexicon as they spat their lyrics from “Oi” (2001). Double S, who has been close friends with Chip since the very beginning, also showed up to perform. In amongst it all, cockney rhymer Bruza took time out to pay his respects to the late, great Terror Danjah, the beloved grime producer who sadly passed away earlier this month. “When I say Terror, you say Danjah!” Having been in the same crew with Terror (Aftershock) and worked closely with him for two decades, you could see the sadness in Bruza’s eyes, and those of us who encountered Terror personally or through his epic productions, we felt it too. Knowing Rodney Pryce, he would have had a big smile on his face from seeing all what was happening that night.

My personal favourite moment of the night was when RB touched mic. I leant into Venom and shouted over the music: “This guy probably won’t get much reaction from the crowd. He’s new; not many will know him.” It kinda felt unfair that RB was standing up there with a load of legends that everyone came out to see, with years of heavily-tested material behind them. And clearly, I wasn’t the only one thinking this: Chip took the other mic and told the DJ to wheel-up the riddim that was playing so that he could talk to the room. He then announced RB—who has been rolling deep with Scorcher and doing the rounds on the underground—to the crowd as an up-and-coming, 16-year-old MC, which had some lovely parallels to when Wiley brought Chip (fka Chipmunk) to BBC Radio 1 at 16 years old.

I rated this because there was a nostalgic air about the evening, and Chip didn’t want RB’s moment to dissipate. There is still a new direction for grime to go in, new paths to be forged. RB took to the mic again to appreciative whistles and cheers and would spray much later in the set with more confidence, and would receive a reload to a round of applause.

As the night went on, I remarked to Venom how much a promoter who wasn’t Chip would’ve had to fork out to assemble this cast of grime stars to perform. It would have been in the hundreds of thousands. Joining the aforementioned MCs later on were the likes of Sharky Major, Flirta D, Big Narstie, Slix, Frisco, Jammer, Jamakabi, Jendor, Novelist, Duppy, Desperado, Kruz Leone and Rapid. The selection from the DJs was exemplary, but that’s Mak 10, Maximum and Sir Spyro for you.

As the set reached its conclusion, the backdrop to the stage had tributes to the late Terror Danjah, Black The Ripper, Jamal Edwards and Luke Biggins—but that wasn’t an invitation for the essence of grime to end. Firstly, the MCs who were left on stage moved to an 8-bar spray and pass with reloads much harder to attain, and then Chip went through his bars for Tinie Tempah to sign off the evening. “We could go all night,” Chip said to the crowd, “but we’ve reached curfew time.”

Everyone filters out of the venue and after some time spent outside the greenroom exit with Venom, Jamakabi, Ozzie B, Bruza and Chip, I disappeared off into the cold London night to head for home, certain that I wouldn’t leave it as long to attend a grime shindig like this again.