S omehow, phrases like ‘the end of an era’ seem too melodramatic for Optimo (Espacio), a club which just cut the crap and got on with defining Glasgow’s Sunday night. For the past thirteen years, its residents JD Twitch and JG Wilkes (aka Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes) have set benchmarks in dance music, both locally and internationally, through their Sub Club residency. Optimo is, make no mistake, one of the most important musical contributions Scotland has made to this century.
And very soon it’ll all be over as the pair are giving up their weekly night to pursue other personal and Optimo projects. Twitch kindly gives up two hours of a coffee-soaked afternoon in Charing Cross’ Black Sparrow to talk us through ten seminal nights which made Optimo and explain to us why the night is finishing (although the DJ brand and label will continue, with the pair unleashing prestigious mix compilation Fabric 52 next month). ‘It still blows my mind that Optimo became so popular,’ he says. ‘We definitely, never for a minute, would have expected it to last almost thirteen years, but it’s always drawn the kind of people who are just looking for a little bit more, and that’s what made it. Whatever Jonnie and I did, it’s the people who came that made Optimo so great.’
THE FIRST OPTIMO Sun 30 Nov 1997 I’d been running Pure [seminal Edinburgh techno club housed at The Venue] for seven years, and I was getting bored. At that point house, techno, or whatever, had become very masculine, so when I was offered Sundays at the Sub Club I decided to start my perfect night, where I had complete musical freedom. I asked Jonnie to get involved because I knew we had similar interests outside of clubs. The first night had maybe seventy people in, but when the club’s owner Mike Grieve got on the mic at the end, he was telling everyone ‘this is going to be a revolution.’ We just laughed. The Sub Club always had more faith in Optimo than we did.
THE FIRST BANDS Dec 1997/Jan 1998 My friend Natasha [Noramly, also of Ganger and Fuck-Off Machete] had a band called Fukyama with my then-flatmate Craig B [of Aereogramme and The Unwinding Hours], and they played this chaotic, haphazard set in the DJ booth. After that we realised this club should be about live music. We weren’t excited by what was happening in DJ culture at the time – the disgusting ‘superstar DJ’ thing. Shortly after that we had Op:l Bastards from
Finland play live, and there’s a nice symmetry that they’ll also be our last guests, under the name KXP [on Sun 18 Apr]. THE NIGHT THE LIGHTBULB WENT ON May 1999 For a year and a half we had no more than a hundred people in. Then one week there were about four hundred people. Then the next week it was the same, and the next. It was like a lightbulb had switched on in people’s heads – suddenly they got it. It might have been something to do with our advertising. We put up all these photocopied posters around the city which started with the slogan ‘Optimo says’, kind of like ‘Frankie says’. That helped. That captured people’s imagination. Jonnie has designed all our posters and flyers ever since.
THE SUB CLUB BURNS DOWN Nov 1999 We got there on Sunday to set up, and there were fire engines all over the place. The head fire guy said there was a minor fire in the block next door, but ‘not to worry, you’ll be in by midnight.’ So we went for a drink, came back, and the whole building had gone up. For the next three years we used Planet Peach at the bottom of Queen Street and then Mas on Royal Exchange Square.
As legendary Glasgow Sunday club night Optimo winds down after 13 years,i David Pollock speaks to founder JD Twitch about the nights that made the brandi 26 THE LIST 15–29 Apr 2010