OPTIMO (ESPACIO)

Optimo (Espacio) started in Glasgow in 1997 to inject fun and diversity to a then stagnating UK club scene. Over a decade on, the night started by JG Wilkes and Keith McIvor (JD Twitch) has become legendary both for its eclectic music policy, flamboyant theme parties and a knack for booking upcoming bands right before they explode. Past guest performers have included Grace Jones, LCD Soundsystem, Cut Copy, Franz Ferdinand and Liquid Liquid – whose heavily sampled track Optimo they take their name from. As well as maintaining their weekly Sunday night residency at Glasgow’s Sub Club and travelling the world the duo also remixed the likes of Simian Mobile Disco, Gossip, The Presets and Franz Ferdinand among others under various monikers. Winston Reed interviews Optimo’s JG Wilkes, who begins the interview by asking Winston a question.

You’re from Adelaide. Is that where that guy HMC is from?
Yeah. He is going to be the support DJ actually.
He used to make some great techno records that I used to play a lot. I heard the just the best things about Sugar.

You guys both originally came from a techno background, what was the early scene like that in Scotland before you started doing Optimo?
Well it changed very quickly, literally in the space of a few weeks these kinds of indie dance clubs changed to acid house clubs. All of a sudden no one was drinking pints of lager and was taking ecstasy and acid and dancing about to house music. It was a really exciting because it was one of those times when people on a huge scale embraced it and started doing their own parties here, there and everywhere. They were doing it in their houses, in disused spaces and then real nightclubs. There was a great spirit to it. I don’t know, it really sounds ridiculous but it really united a lot of people which was apparent when you went to a lot of clubs. It was a really energetic time and it felt like something changed.

It didn’t stay that way and I guess that why you decided to start Optimo?
Well yeah, it stayed that way through the late '80s and into the mid '90s. There definitely was a point in the mid '90s (where the) UK scene was heading into a corner, kind of monotonous musically with a pretty much male audience. It wasn’t much fun going to clubs; there was a kind of atmosphere of tension and aggression. We didn’t want to be involved in that, it wasn’t not much fun to play at. That was kind of a catalyst for Optimo, where the emphasis was on fun.



It didn’t start with some plan to make a hedonistic environment like Paradise Garage and the Loft or did you just really want to dig deeper into your music collection and see what happened from there?
Honestly Winston, we didn’t have a big game plan. We had a chance to do a Sunday night party, it was important that it was a Sunday night. We don’t have a passing trade on a Sunday night, the streets are deserted. Optimo is the destination; we don’t really have people rolling in from bars. I think for that reason we have quite a committed and faithful following. We were going to have a party that was fun to play at and be at. We also had live music which was not really a big feature in nightclubs. It had always been about the sort of culture of the DJ for so long, we were trying to break that down a little. We wanted to have a party where we could play some music, stop things, have a band then play some records again. It was all about having fun; we didn’t have any bigger plans than that. We didn’t have a big marketing plan, after a year we had a couple of hundred people and we thought it wouldn’t last. To be fair it was the club owner who was like, “look I think this is really exciting if you can develop it and I would like you to keep on doing it".

I was reading an interview with Andrew Weatherall and he was saying how his original plan was to quit DJing after the summer of ‘88, and he has continued to do it forever and later produce Screamadelica. I guess what I’m trying to say is things work out best when they happen organically without an overall marketing plan...
We really put all our energy into and I think it was good energy. We were determined to find a way to play lots of different music in clubs. We could experiment and have fun, some sense came through that people came to enjoy. It grew out a lot of hard work and quite strict quality control.



How do you differ when you play as the headline act at completely different nightclub and audience when you are on tour?
Optimo in Glasgow is probably the most extreme version of what we might do, for the first hour we play records that aren’t for the dancefloor that could be from any genre of music. We could also have some quite difficult or experimental live performances on the same night and then we could be playing dancing music in whatever form after that. I think when we go to play elsewhere, we aren’t selfish DJs. We have to kind of look at the audience and find some way that we can push things a little bit and make sure things are a party for that crowd, sometime it gets really wild and can be full of surprises. Sometimes you may be booked into a club where the audience isn’t in the mood for that kind of experience so we make it something that people can find more accessible. It’s our third tour of Australia, we know some of the parties and we can take chances. We aren’t the type of DJs that can storm into a club and stick our head up our own arses. We see ourselves as entertainer with a responsibility for the people that come to party. We have our own creative fulfillment, we bring whatever ideas we can sometimes it’s wilder than other times.

How does DJing as a duo work, I think two people really have to be in synch with each other or the set goes nowhere cause you each pull in a different direction?
We don’t play record like ping pong style. I will play 30 minutes and he will play 30 minutes and then I will play 30 minutes that can go on for hours. Maybe by the end of the party we will play together. That wouldn’t work if we had a fixed selfish idea of where to go. If Keith takes it somewhere I’m going to try and connect with what he is doing and work with that. Maybe it will go in the direction that I think it should and he will play off that. We have a really I think … we won’t talk about it but we have some other way of communicating.

Optimo plays Sugar on Fri Mar 5 with HMC.

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