Optimo: Eleven Years of Loving Your Ears

Think you've had a busy Christmas? Spare a thought for JD Twitch and JG Wilkes. Any self-respecting hedonist will no doubt have attended at least one of their festive offerings, the Christmas party, Hogmanay at the Old Fruitmarket, or perhaps the obligatory 'afterparty' the following Sunday. But as the party people are binning the last of the bottles and sweeping away the signs of festive indulgence, the duo are still hard at work running a night that never seems to stop. In a year beginning with the slide into worldwide recession, with not even a Woollies pick 'n' mix to lift the spirits, it seems that Twitch and Wilkes may well remain the resilient light at the end of the tunnel for the city's club scene.

Now into its eleventh year, Optimo has always been about charging the least amount possible in order to entertain those who don't have wads of cash to spend on getting well and truly spangled. Twitch is happy that they've stuck by the club's original ethos.

“High entry fees are the antithesis of what we're about. We like to treat everyone that comes to the night with respect. We're aware that the sort of people we get in are usually students, or people in low paid jobs. The costs only ever cover the expenses.”

One of the club's biggest nights recently, the Simian Mobile Disco gig, saw a noticeable jump in ticket prices, and caused some grumbling amongst faithful regulars. Should the crowd be worried?

“We've had huge acts before [Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem, and The Rapture to name but a few] and managed to keep prices akin to a normal band night. The higher ticket prices came about because Simian were only going to do about four dates, including a big show in London, but the venue pulled out, and then the rest of the tour got cancelled. So basically, it was going to be about £9-8 first, but then we had to pay them an enormous amount to make up for the money they would've been getting. And,” he adds with a grin, “we make sure you get what you pay for.”

“We're in a very fortunate position that we can get bigger acts when we want them.”

It's yet another example of the Optimo brand's Midas touch: SMD had pulled out of all the other dates on the tour but Optimo had decided they were having them anyway, and have them they did, to a sell-out crowd and throbbing queues, with fans making special trips from Inverness and Aberdeen. There's a sense that now the name is so firmly established, they can do whatever they like in terms of bookings and prices because the crowds would still come anyway. However, Twitch seems genuinely averse to abusing his crowd in this way. The only way the duo are willing to mess with their crowds is in confounding certain expectations, more for their own entertainment than any malicious intention.

The Optimo crowd still remains a hybrid of crusted regulars, loyally heading down every Sunday night, and the latest wave of wide-eyed glittered-up scenesters looking for something new. I ask if they find themselves changing their sets to cater to the different crowds each act attracts.

“Not really, no. What changes it is the fact that there's a band playing, and we have to set up the right atmosphere depending on who it is. With the bigger acts, we're never going to make it too easy and play lots of huge records.”

It's just not their style. Optimo is renowned for being more challenging than the average club night, and the pair are renowned for throwing in snippets of tunes which you'd never expect to hear in a club. Do they use the bigger bookings, and the new crowds they bring in, as a chance to experiment?

Twitch laughs heartily. “Well, that's a part of everything we do, yes. I suppose it's a given that we're always going to try to mess with your head a little.”

I tell him that I have a theory. When I've been there to see 'classic' acts like the Bush Tetras or ESG, there's a sense that the crowd is rewarded for their good taste, and given a set geared to please even the most determinedly nonchalant post-punk fan. He laughs again, coyly. Have I exposed his guilty secret?

“Ahh, maybe! When you DJ you never really know if its going to affect what you play, it's never planned in advance. Maybe, though...”

He trails off, lost in thought, leaving me speculating over the glint in his eye. It seems a shame to ruin the atmosphere, but there's an elephant in the room that, somehow, never fails to get mentioned in any interview about the club. The night's been going for over ten years now, a night which was all but set to end after its tenth birthday in November 2007, “and here we are, still going”, smiles Twitch. He takes the clichés in good-hearted jest. But then, when he talks about “his baby”, you can see why there's no way they could have ended it in full flow. The enthusiasm is still there. I ask if he still feels the same about the night as he did all those years ago.

“Absolutely. I'm amazed it's lasted this long. I still feel exactly the same amount of excitement, and when that goes, then it stops.”

He is emphatic over the last point, and rightly so; it doesn't seem to need any explanation or justification. What about constantly being asked when it's going to end, does that get tiring?

“Not really, it's been going for so long, you expect people to ask about that element of it. Especially as we said we'd be stopping after the 10th birthday. But here we are, still going. People are bound to be curious; 11 years is an awfully long time to do something.

“What's nice is when you get someone [interviewing you] who genuinely knows the club, or who's actually done some research. Many people have just been sent to us and they don't seem to know what the night's really about.”

You can't really talk about Optimo unless you've been; to extend the clichés further, it's less a club than a state of mind. The crowd, veterans and casuals together, still never fails to climax each week with the heady chant of “one more tune”, fired at the grinning DJs with emphatic pointing arms, there's even a club night named after the infamous routine. It's hard to say where they'd go without this, especially those experiencing the Optimo honeymoon period – where weekly commitments and the daily grind become simply the run-up to Sunday night. But Twitch has noticed a change in the crowd.

“The current type of people who come out are a lot less hedonistic than they were when we started, noticeably so. They're a bit more sensible... Does this bother me? Not really, no!” He seems bemused. “In the early days, whenever I got to speak to people in the crowd after I'd played I'd always ask them what they did on a Monday. Most said university, a job, something like that. Then I'd stop and chat to them a few months later, and found that they'd dropped out. I'm glad I don't have to feel guilty for that any more!”

Of course, Twitch himself dropped out of university before the final push, but for more viable reasons. “I got my ordinary degree and then left, and had to beg to get back into Honours. But that meant I had to do a dissertation, which happened to coincide with Pure [Edinburgh techno club where Twitch and 'Brainstorm', aka Wilkes, were resident] going mental. So, I never finished it, no.”

So you don't think dropping out is just part of the whole Optimo aesthetic? “Not at all, as we've seen now. You can enjoy it and still go to work, have a good job. We've always encouraged people involved with the club to go on and do creative projects. Glasgow's an extremely creative city.”

Do you still find it easy to generate ideas?

“I suppose it must reach a limit at some point. But at the moment, it just seems to be flowing. I spend an awful lot of time just daydreaming about things, especially as I travel a lot and spend a lot of time on planes staring out of the window. I think up these ridiculous ideas and see if we can get away with it. And, naturally, sometimes they're completely unworkable. But we do always try to make them work.”

For its fans, though, these “ridiculous ideas” are what it's all about; they want to be challenged, shown new things and given new sounds, often years before they reach the mass public's ears. Is it hard having to be constantly ahead of the game?

“It's a lot harder now to know about things before everyone else - I'm not so sure we'd be two steps ahead on everything. The internet's made it a lot more equal, everyone's got the chance to look things up and get in the know.”

I mention a time when, years ago, the duo dropped Zombie Nation at a Hogmanay show, riling the crowd into a frenzy. This was around two years before the tune actually came out and became a dance floor stormer.

He screws his eyes up, trying to shift back through the many years, the many exclusive drops, the many tasters which sent the crowd mental. “That was maybe a time when we were a bit more arrogant. I'd be afraid of being like that now, because I think it's definitely equaled.

“But then, I am in a very privileged position. You'd expect it to be easier for me because this is my job – I can go and investigate something I like. And we know so many people involved in music, we're constantly being given things, shown things. It's not all luck though – it's about being the sort of person who never stops, you're always searching for the next thing and basically you devote every minute of your time to it.”

I can't imagine that Twitch has much spare time - the club, the remixes, compilations and his own record label are amongst a few of his projects, as well as constant touring.

“Luckily, everything seems to melt into the one thing. Most of the bands I've met whose records I've put out have been through the club. It's this one synergistic kind of thing.”

Whilst he's happy to chat about his latest work and ideas, there's still a mystery surrounding the Optimo duo that just can't be tapped into. The posters, which appear overnight, freshly taped onto select railings, are evasive, coy, and still oh so cooler-than-thou. Is this all part of the act?

“The posters are like that because it's our aesthetic. That's all it is. It's our look, our philosophy. With the Simian gig we've never had so many people email about a night before – mainly people emailing because they've never been, and they've seen the poster and it's like a gig, but it gives nothing away. They want to know what time the band's on, what time they should get down, that sort of thing.

“In terms of interviews, it's maybe just that we're not very good at giving ourselves away. I'm not sure why it tends to be me doing them rather than Wilkes, especially because I'm probably the least outgoing of the two of us. There's an element of the club originally being my baby, so maybe he's worried that he'll say something and I'll be like, “What?!”. As if I would...”