Do You Come Here Often? – Vitamins

Night: Vitamins

Where: A forest, a club...it really does vary

When: Sporadic so keep your eye on their Facebook or these pages

Looking to give a little boost to your weekends? In the presence of the Vitamins gang it’ll be impossible not to enjoy the energy radiating from one of Glasgow’s most unique nights. Ensuring that no event is ever the same, these guys consider all the stuff that makes clubbing fun, which can sometimes be forgotten when the priority is the music alone. That's not to say the music isn't given its due, especially since they have hosted the likes of West Norwood Cassette Library and, most recently, a heaving roster of artists from the Unknown to the Unknown label. You’ll probably end up meeting some new pals too, as it’s a seriously friendly crowd and you are always guaranteed a variety of sweet, sweet sounds.

The DJs: Shaun Murphy & Sam Murray

Shaun: There are four of us who run Vitamins, but myself and Sam are the resident DJs. We’re both into playing a fairly broad selection of music. I started out as a hiphop DJ with a love of happy hardcore and Paradise Garage records, and I think some of the genre hopping aesthetic of scratch DJing has stuck with me.

Sam: Similar to Shaun really, although I don’t think my cuts are quite as tight.

How did it all begin?

Shaun: We all met at Subcity Radio whilst working on the station’s events, where we got to put on some amazing parties. But there are limits when you have as broad a schedule as Subcity and our ideas were outgrowing these limits.

What is the ethos of the night?

Sam: There isn’t really a Vitamins ‘sound.’  At the beginning, I had aspirations to have each event musically completely different, disco one month and grime the next. The plan was to try and bring together crowds from different ‘scenes’ who wouldn’t normally see each other. Instead we get a really mixed crowd, which I’m happy about. At Vitamins 7 we had West Norwood Cassette Library playing jacking house and techno, and then El-B & Rolla MC doing a classic UKG set.

Shaun: Visually we like something memorable, bold and unusual, and I like to avoid just using the lights and visuals as wallpaper. They should be poking you in the eye in harmony with the music! Some of the stuff we’ve built includes an eight-foot high pyramid, a giant robot skull made of copper tubing, and a twenty-foot black cube containing a mini-club in a forest.

What makes people come back?

Shaun: Vitamins wouldn’t work as a weekly residency somewhere, each event we do is a stand alone concept and, because each event is distinct, they are more memorable. People are always asking us what we’re doing for the next one.

Sam: There will always be a few characteristics, such as a space that you’ve never been in before or, if it’s in a club, then it’s going to be the first time you’ve seen it set out that way. The emphasis is on the crowd having a good time. Vitamins parties aren’t about standing about showing off your new trainers, it’s about getting on your mates or a stranger’s shoulders and getting a bounce. People get excited for our parties because they are interested to see what we do, which puts quite a lot of pressure on us. If you hype people up and they aren’t impressed then it’s much more disappointing. It’s gone pretty well on the whole so far though.

What would be three Vitamins anthems?

Thomas Bangalter’s What To Do, Never Too Much by Luther Vandross, and S-Type's You Da Best. 

A funny thing happened one night... 

Sam: I’ll never forget when we went to pick up the generator to power Vitamins 2 [held in a forest]. We booked a 4x4 but it turned out that the owner’s son had decided to take it to Rothsey with his girlfriend. The only other vehicle with a tow bar was an old clapped out Vauxhall people carrier, but when we turned up in Hamilton to collect the generator it broke down in the middle of the road. We did get it started, and Chris Casey set off to the forest while I went to Glasgow to get the crowd on buses. The thing is, Chris hadn’t driven since he passed his test six years before, but he was the only person would could get insured for the car. The Vauxhall couldn’t do more than 45mph without the generator swinging about, so we had to delay the buses and Chris raced them there. The power got activated about 60 seconds before the crowd arrived. Thankfully it went off from the word go!