Yes! Fab & Kinky
Yes! Optimo truly was.
Seriously, who has a party on a Sunday night. WTF.
I was insanely tired. I didn’t want to go out, not really. Twitch and Wilkes are in Australia, how good could this really be? I thought I was going for an hour or so just to get a feel for Optimo and what it was, to go home and tell my grandchildren one day “yeah, I did Optimo…”, and not loose face with my travel buddies.
I was wrong.
Optimo is held at Sub Club in Glasgow every Sunday… yeah, Sunday. Apparently it has got so out of hand that several employers around Glasgow have banned their employees from attending. More than 400 people showed up last night, including us.
I have to preface what I am about to say with the fact that in general, Optimo is not strictly my kind of scene. I am a drum and bass DJ. But seriously, Optimo rocked… a lot.
The line up for the night went something like this:
- A DJ (possibly two, there were several standing around)
- Desmond and the Tutus
- Some more DJs
I seriously wish that I could remember/knew what the DJs names were. They were all awesome.
Things started out pretty slow with the first DJ(s?) playing slow, atmospheric tunes, including (among other things) jungle noises, and a Tom Waits remix. This slowly built up a dance floor of Glasweigens that relished the challenge of dancing to this obscure concoction.
Desmond and the Tutus fired up next on the stage opposite the DJ booth. While not really my cup of tea, these guys were super tight, and put in a performance that had the 400 strong crowd rocking for a solid hour.
Following that the DJ(s) fired up again, with a pretty eclectic mix of stuff, loosely fitting into the house genre. Plenty of hip hop bootlegs and other weird stuff thrown in there for good measure.
The aweseomeness went way beyond the music though…
- The crowd was awesome. What were 400+ people doing on a Sunday night/Monday morning at 4am mashed in a club?
- People watching was incredible. The crowd was full of weirdos, arty types, fashion heads, clean shirts and everything in between. We felt right at home.
- The genre mash up totally worked. It was just 400 people there to be challenged by the music, and have a great time. It didn’t matter what was played, the music was almost incidental, people were there to party.
- All the beer came in cans. For real.
All these things conspired to keep me underground, in the club, until well after 3am (on a Sunday!). Optimo was like nothing else I have ever seen. Getting people out on a Wednesday or Thursday is hard enough in Auckland. Optimo do it every Sunday, without fail.
I wish that we had caught Twitch and Wilkes, the residents that started it all. Alas, I will just have to come back again some time.
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No emos in the UK
Right, so I’m not really one for clubbing, but went along to Optimo last night because it’s the place to be on a Sunday night. The other guys on the team who love that sort of thing will no doubt give a detailed breakdown, but I just wanted to point out one thing: There were [...]
Jilkes and Twitch Optimo
I’m really keen to go to Optimo in Glasgow to see Jilkes and Twitch. Check out this video of the boys in action.
