‘I DECIDED TO STARTI MY PERFECT NIGHT,I
WHERE I HADI MUSICAL FREEDOM’I
THE FIRST OPTIMO HOGMANAY PARTY Fri 31 Dec 1999 It was our friend Paul Fagan, who founded the Triptych festival, that suggested it. He thought the word ‘millennium’ like ‘linoleum’, so he had this bizarre idea to have a Happy New Linoleum party at the Art School. Why not, we thought? It moved to the Old Fruitmarket in 2007 and it’s something we want to continue. sounded
WHITEHOUSE Sun 24 Nov 2002/Sun 20 Apr 2004 One of my favourite bands to have played. I was expecting loads of abuse afterwards, but people were coming up to me to say it was amazing. It’s nice to rub people up the wrong way, but not to the point where you’re just being self-indulgent. I think our biggest achievement has been
opening people’s minds to things they wouldn’t have listened to otherwise, and by putting on bands like The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, Liquid Liquid, whose song we named the club after, Sons & Daughters and Gareth Sager from The Pop Group. BACK AT THE SUBBIE Sun 1 Dec 2002 It felt good to go back to a purpose-built club – the old Sub Club was very gaudy, and it had the same carpet for about twenty-five years. It opened in the late 60s as a jazz dance club and it still had that ad hoc feeling, but now it was very stripped-back and minimally designed. We weren’t sure about it at first, but then we heard the sound system and we knew it was the place.
OPTIMO (ESPOOKIO) Every Hallowe’en since 2003 I think the first one might have been the year after we went back to the Sub Club. It wasn’t official, it’s just that about two thirds of the crowd were dressed up. A few days later someone on our message board coined the term ‘Optimo (Espookio)’ and the tradition’s stuck ever since. People go to so much effort – this year one of our regulars and her boyfriend came as John and Yoko, carrying a double bed about on their backs.
APOCALYPSE OPTIMO! Sun 7 Oct 2007 We have a very talented friend who does production design, so we let him do what he wanted, and he turned the club into Apocalypse Now! There was smoke billowing out the door, a GI slumped at the bar, live actors covered in camouflage paint in cages. He’d gone to the parks department for all this chopped-down vegetation and we’d stop the music for pyrotechnic effects every so often. People said, ‘but why are you doing this?’ Because it’s fun! OPTIMOGEDDON: THE END OF OPTIMO Sun 25 Apr 2010 It’s a huge amount of work to run the club weekly, and there are other things we want to do: production for ourselves and other artists, DJ gigs around the world, be with our family in Jonnie’s case. So we decided it was time to end Optimo before it felt like we were just going through the motions. In its place will be a night so new it doesn’t even have a name yet. We’ll still be involved, there will still be a live element, and we might even play there every so often, but it will mainly be for the amazing new DJs of Glasgow to make their own.
Weekly Sundays at the Sub Club, Glasgow, until Sun 25 Apr. www.optimo.co.uk
15–29 Apr 2010 THE LIST 27