DJ duo Jonnie Wilkes and Keith McIvor have never had much truck with convention. Anyone that attended their long-standing Optimo night or has caught one of their DJ sets would recognise that. But it’s not just clubbing customs the pair pay little heed to. Matters of time are also regarded with admirable flexibility. So as Optimo celebrate their 25th birthday in their 27th year, John Burgess hears about their remarkable run of Sunday night parties and how they’ve kept the Optimo story going since. “There always was a lot of oddballs that went to our night” they reveal…

Released in February this year ‘Optimo 25’ is a compilation that marks 25 birthdays since the primo alternative Sunday club was born. Except it’s two years late so should, in truth, be called ‘Optimo 27’, a birth year when many rock luminaries – Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and co - checked out and which Kurt Cobain’s mother called “the stupid club” when her son joined it. Yet despite having an old habit for playing ‘Duelling Banjos’ from the film ‘Deliverance’ Optimo (Espacio) – to give it its full name – was a club that was always fun, but anything but stupid. 

From 30 November 1997, it ran every Sunday at Glasgow’s Sub Club; a platform for bands and a different kind of club music in a city that had become pedestrian with bloke-heavy house and techno clubs. Their alternative option attracted alternative people and the night stayed beautiful for its decade-plus tenure. Despite ending in 2010 the two DJs and operators – Jonnie Wilkes and Keith McIvor – had established the Optimo spirit and carried it forward as a touring entity and at festivals. 

Prior to a trip to Asia, Wilkes and McIvor joined us to discuss the club’s history and influence and the event side of their work (their Optimo music releases and multiple label offshoots is a whole other story entirely) which includes their newest project, the 500-strong outdoor shindig Watching Trees. 

In 1997 you started Optimo because the club scene was boring. 25 years on how does the scene feel now? 

Keith: “I think it’s very mixed. There’s a lot of great things going on. There will always be things about the scene we don’t like, a commercial side, business side, the focus on social media… I have a lot of friends who say it was so much better back in the day. It wasn’t, it was just different. Sound systems are better now, clubs are safer places to be, young people’s knowledge of music is amazing, they are very open-minded. The age range is different. We do a night in Glasgow every two months; four months ago someone came up and said: ‘I’m so excited to be here - it’s my 18th birthday’. Then, half-an-hour later this guy came up: ‘I’m so excited to be here it’s - my 70th birthday!’ You wouldn’t have had that back in the day.”     

Jonnie: “When Keith refers to the ‘better back in the day’ lot – I imagine most of them are talking about the late-80s/early-90s when house and techno was brand new and like he says it was just ‘new’ and they were young! I’d say a sentimental yearning for a time like that in one’s life is natural, but it doesn’t mean it was better and it didn’t stay that good. By 1997, when we started the club – we were definitely a bit bored with what was going on.”

‍Keith: “In 1997 things had got pretty dull: the musical soundtrack, the lack of diversity, it was the dawn of the superstar DJ, big beat was happening and not landing here, drum’n’bass was an exciting new movement, but it never really landed in Glasgow. People wanted something different. Two friends of mine were doing a Sunday night at the Sub Club and I’d be an occasional guest DJ. They went on holiday to Barcelona, thought it was amazing and moved there. So, the Sunday was suddenly available. The owner asked me if I was interested in taking it over to try something different.”

Jonnie, where were you DJing at the time?

Jonnie: “I was DJing at a weekly party called My Machines at the Art School in Glasgow which was a fairly straight ahead house and techno night. I had a background in art (I’d studied at Glasgow School of Art), and I liked making things. So, when Keith approached me and told me about the kind of idea he had, I saw an opportunity where I could do both the things I loved and not separate my playing records and being an artist. On the musical side, getting out of that hole I was in as a DJ felt very liberating. To play what we liked but play it in a way that it worked in a club was the challenge and it remains the challenge.”

Did you do the artwork and that side of things?

Jonnie: “Well, yeah. Between us we just did pretty much everything that needed to be done to run the weekly club.”  

Keith: “We’d go round putting up the posters ourselves. We were often being chased by the police as it was illegal. We couldn’t even put the name of the Sub Club on it as they’d get fined. We’d put slogans on instead and people would be like: ‘What is this?’ It captured people’s imaginations.”

Did you set out to change the perception of what club music was and could be?

Keith: “Very much so. My sister was living in New York at the time and I was going over a lot and became very obsessed with the 80s downtown scene where the hip hop and graffiti scenes had collided with the punk, no wave and disco scenes and it felt all very open. I was going out to see lots of bands at this time, not DJs, so we were trying to bring live music into clubs. There were probably ravers who had never seen a live band before. Or a gig-going audience who didn’t usually go clubbing, so we were trying to bring these disparate strands together. There’d never been a drum kit set up in the Sub Club ever.”

Similar clubs like Trash in London were happening at the time too with resident DJs and bands…

Keith: “We had no idea. I didn’t start using the internet until around 2000, so it was then we could find out what other like-minded people were doing. Ivan Smagghe and his crew (Kill The DJ) in France discovered us and they started inviting us over. That’s how it really blew up for
us as they asked us to do a mix (‘How to Kill The DJ Pt 2’, released in 2004).”

Jonnie: “I felt we were closer to what they were doing than some of the London clubs.”

Keith: “No disrespect to Erol, who we love, but we were decidedly not indie. We were anti-indie in a weird way. It was band-orientated but not indie. We were playing Stooges as a band but not Placebo or whatever.”

Jonnie: “Because we had a very diverse crowd that looked different too. The house and techno purists would be quick to lump us in with fashionable London nights that were more focused on fashion than the music.”

Keith: “I had a lot of flak as I’d run Pure for a long time and it had been quite pioneering, bringing over Jeff Mills to the UK for the first time, so a lot of people thought I was a traitor to techno for playing Joy Division in the hallowed Sub Club. When I first started DJing in 1987, people often came up and said: ‘Why are you playing this drum machine shit?’. When we started Optimo people got angry we weren’t playing ‘drum machine shit’! That fuelled me even further.”

Whenever I met you guys, Erol Alkan, Andrew Weatherall you all looked alternative unlike, say, John Digweed in a nice jumper. There was a spirit about you.

Jonnie: “Expression feels vital to me. Asserting some sort of unique identity and hopefully establishing a sense of autonomy through what you do, what you play, what you say, what you wear. There always was a lot of oddballs that went to our night which was brilliant and it was great fun to always be around these people.”

Keith: “That’s key – it was fun. Fun had gone missing. You can be deadly serious about music but still want to have fun.”

Apart from the time you did an aural 9/11 tribute. What happened there?

Keith: “Ok, so it was the Sunday after 9/11. I felt I had to mark what had happened as everyone had been in such a weird head space all week, watching all the coverage relentlessly, so I put this two-minute sound collage together to try to reflect what we’d been through. So, there was Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with a line from ‘O Superman’: ‘Here come the planes’ et cetera, et cetera. I came off from playing and this guy just started on me: ‘How dare you disrespect the dead?’ and started punching me. People were very emotional and he took it completely the wrong way. It was about the only violent incident we had in 12-and-a-half years of doing the club.”

Is there a space for political statements like that in clubs? Or are they about escapism?

Keith: “They’re both. They’re for escaping the shit realities of every day but also a space for reflection. We are political people so it’s something Optimo does do. We raise money for food banks in our local community for example, but we don’t virtue signal about it.”

Jonnie: “It’s just about being who you are and if you feel compelled to give some space to something important to you, amplify a voice that needs to be heard then why the fuck not? But yeah, it’s personal whether or not you do it. I can’t speak for other DJs but if you can be yourself while being a DJ you’re going to be a better DJ anyhow. It feeds into the way you play, what you want to use that space for.”

What planning went into Optimo every Sunday?

Keith: “It would literally take up our whole week. We wanted every Optimo night to be unique. We’d have crazy concepts, have projections and find new content all the time. I’d spend days thinking about the music for the following week. We’d find ways to engage using posters which we’d put up around the city.”

Jonnie: “On a Tuesday, when we’d recovered, Keith would phone me and say: ‘We’ve got this band on live’ or ‘Why don’t we decorate the club like this or like that?’ for the night. I can work to a brief, so it was something new to do every week and I kind of liked that. We’d maybe run a poster campaign around something we’d been chatting or having a laugh about at the afterparty the previous week. It was cool to actually have a presence in the streets around Glasgow. Posters in shop doorways, in all the pubs and cafés, on hoardings and bill poster sites. The stuff was all litho printed back then, no digital printing so it was a lot of messing about with plates, film, cash deals with the printer to get the stuff run on time. We’d get the flyers and posters turned around quick, get out round the town, book the lights, any backline for the bands and cobble it together on the hop.”

Keith: “I don’t think the amount of energy dissipated as the years went on, but I could sense if we continued it might. That’s why the club stopped after 12-and-a-half years because we were away so much and the club needed energy putting into it for it to be amazing. We were DJing all weekend and were tired. We sensed it might slide, so the only way was to end it.”

Jonnie: “I was more reluctant to let go of it. I found the change a bit terrifying. Then when we announced the last six parties, it became a reality and easier to cope with. But aye, the anticipation of this thing terminating brought up a lot of feelings and I was very reflective over what we’d had for so long, how far we’d come and how it was about to end. 650 parties.”

Keith: “It had taken about a year-and-a-half for the club to take off, but then it was sold out every week and it got very frenzied as we reached the end. People lived for Sunday nights. One guy, Darren, had actually been at the club more often than I had. It became intrinsic to their lives so it may have also been a relief for them when we decided to stop. Within six weeks of it finishing I knew about 20 people who had moved to London. It was like: ‘Thank fuck, now we can get on with our lives’.”

What’s your fondest memory from the final night?

Keith: “We arrived about an hour before and there was a queue of what looked like 1,500 people and the club takes 600. Everyone started applauding as we walked up which was emotional. We’d bought another sound system in for the night too and half way through the night we turned it on so there was this massive volume boost and people lost their minds. A lot of people were crying at the end of the final night. It was emotional realising many of these people you’d seen every week you probably weren’t going to see again. People who were part of this community and then this community has stopped. Some I’ve never seen again since.”

Jonnie: “I remember more about the penultimate one. The last one is a blur – apart from the sight of that massive queue going round the block outside when we arrived and the cheer that went up. I know there’s a seven-hour recording of it doing the rounds, but I’ve never listened to and probably won’t ever. Another memory is the stillness at the end of the night and thinking: ‘Well, it’s done now.’ I definitely did grieve for it for a time, but I began to enjoy the time I had during the week and I had a young family to take care of, so in many respects it was a relief. You see the afterparties that would happen after the Sunday were deranged and – to my shame – I embraced them like nobody’s business. Jaysus, that was the thing that saved me – not partying anymore until Monday night!”

By the time you’d finished you’d toured enough for people to know what Optimo was outside of the club. After playing for hours in a club how do you approach a 75-minute festival set?

Keith: “That’s something that’s changed. Ten years ago 20% of our annual gigs were festivals and now it’s more like 60-70%. I like playing at festivals: that short, sharp shock. It’s a different way of playing.”

Jonnie: “I’d never been to a festival until I started playing at them.”

Keith: “When we do club gigs a lot of people come up to say they first saw us at such-and-such festival.”

Jonnie: “It’s been brilliant exposure for us and you usually get an early night too.”

‍You started your own festival Watching Trees in 2022. What prompted you to do it?

Jonnie: “We wanted to take some of our ideas of what a party outdoors can be and do that in the spirit of Optimo. We met Wil from Ransom Note and he’d had some experience of what’s involved with site plans and infrastructure et cetera and then in 2022 we did something really great in the Forest of Dean over a weekend.”

Keith: “When you take profit out of the equation you look at it in a different way. Sadly, we lost the location so we couldn’t do it last year. We have found an amazing location for this year and are doing a one-day 24-hour event.”

Jonnie: “We sensed there was an awful lot of people wanting us to do the second one and when we found this new site we put it on sale on Friday without a line-up and it’s sold out. It’s where we want to be. The alternative to that is being in that festival industry situation…”

Keith: “Where you have to book X, Y and Z and tick off the boxes. I hate the phrase a musical journey, but it will be that; it won’t be a full-on rave for 24 hours. We can’t have high volume at 5am so it’ll change at that point and then come back stronger later.” 

Did the idea come out of lockdown. Did you find that a creative period?

Keith: “Absolutely. We had to be creative as we had to hustle with ideas to try and generate some income. Weirdly before lockdown I wanted to take a year out to work on some creative projects and then it was forced on me. But then I ended up not doing the things I thought I wanted to do. A lot of the talk about Watching Trees did come out of that. There was a lot of utopian thinking during that time, things can be different to how it was before and we tried to carry some of that into Watching Trees.”

Jonnie: “In lockdown I really liked being outside more and working with my hands again. I have a little garden and a workshop. Building things and seeing nature in a different way for the first time in my life. Then with Watching Trees we found ourselves outside building stages, composting toilets et cetera by hand, spending all day outside and pulling an event together in the countryside. It was a brilliant experience for me, an important one.”

How could you make the 25 years compilation definitive?

Keith: “You couldn’t. Dan who runs Above Board asked us if we’d do it and we felt we couldn’t do a ‘Greatest Hits’ of Optimo, because if you came to the club in 1998 your greatest hits would be completely different to someone who came later on. The track ‘Optimo’ (by Liquid Liquid) is on there and that’s a track we have played consistently. We wanted a reflection of what an Optimo set might be, so the first hour is music we love that isn’t necessarily to dance to when the volume of the night is lower. Side One reflects that. Then Side Two and onwards are tracks we love that hopefully reflect the ethos of what we may play.”

Jonnie: “We had a list of hundreds and we had to see what came back that we could license.”

Keith: “It took over two years which is why it’s come out in our 27th year.”

It would be definitive if ‘Duelling Banjos’ was on it. When did you last play that?

Keith: “I used to love playing it, every time we’d play it for the first two minutes everyone
would be looking at you like: ‘What the fuck?’ Without fail it would always go off by the end. The Sub Club told us to stop playing it because there were so many smashed glasses.” 

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