1) Where is Optimo?

Optimo is at The Sub Club on 22 Jamaica Street Glasgow (0141 248 4600). There is a map here.

2) When is Optimo on and how much will it cost me?

Optimo runs every Sunday from 11pm until 3am. Occasionally we open slightly earlier or have a 4am license. If this is the case it will be listed as such on the news page. Usually it is 7 pounds (6 pounds concessions) to get in but may be more if we have a band playing.

3) How do I get a gig at Optimo?

Usually we invite people to play but if you know of a band / act that you would love to see at Optimo or are in a band / act that you think would go down well, then send us an email.

Please note that we are currently overwhelmed by requests to play Optimo and cannot reply to all the offers or listen to all the demos and still have time to do all the other things we need to do. So, please understand that we are not being rude when we reply with a standard pre written response.

4) How can I get to dj at Optimo?

The simple answer is, you can't. We don't book djs, only live acts (although we would happily have Henry Rollins come and play his favourite records). The main reason being that we book what excites us and it's very rare that we get excited by djs. When we first started Optimo, we had a few djs play and let them know that they could play whatever they wanted, yet they mostly played very conservative sets (an honourable exception here must go to Mr. Ashley Beedle). So, we decided that was it and funnily enough our 'Kill All DJs' slogan from 1998 seems to have been appropriated left, right and centre. Also, we are total control freaks who are loathe to relinquish our time behind the decks to anyone else and we perhaps arrogantly feel that we have been djing long enough (30 years between us!) to be able to know how to both rock a crowd and mess with their heads as well as anyone else. Very occasionally we have to miss a Sunday (so far, there has only been a couple of times when we have both been away) and then we will invite someone we trust to take over. We also from time to time invite someone we know has a deep love of music to play at the beginning of the night but this will almost always be someone from Glasgow or a friend who is visiting town. So, if yr a dj and you want to play at Optimo, we suggest you start a band!

5) Why is the club called Optimo (Espacio)?

The 'Optimo' part is named after the song by Liquid Liquid which is about as amazing as a dancefloor song could ever hope to be. Having Liquid Liquid play at Optimo on July 13th 2003 was one of the greatest nights of our lives! The '(Espacio)' was tagged on because a) we didn't want a club with a one word name (although everyone including ourselves just call the night 'Optimo'), b) If you ever watched 'The Fast Show' on BBC2, maybe you'll get the joke? and c) It sounded suitably ridiculous. Initially, almost everyone we know hated the name! Funnily enough, it turns out that Optimo Espacio means 'optimum space' in Spanish. We are stupid and didn't know this at the time.

6) Who are the Optimo djs?

7) When did Optimo start?

Optimo was founded on Sunday November 28th 1997. It has always been at the Sub Club except for the half of its life when the Sub Club burned down! Then we were very briefly at The 13th Note on Clyde Street, at Planet Peach on Queen Street for a year or so and at Mas on Royal Exchange Square for a year or so. Now we are back home at the Sub Club.

8) How can we book you?

Our bookings are now handled by the lovely Rachel - you can email her here. Or, if you prefer, you can contact us directly here. You can either book us as a duo or individually. We prefer to do it together but we're big boys and will happily travel alone. We will turn up with a box of records and a laptop and attempt to rock your dancefloor into oblivion (statistically, there is an 87.2% chance that we will succeed in this task, although if yr soundsystem is top notch, you provide good monitors and yr crowd is great, this rises to 98.7%). If you are booking us, please give us as much information as possible about your club as we like to know what we can get away with playing and want you to be happy.

9) Do you do remixes?

Indeed we do, though let us first state that we are NOT the Optimo who remixed Playgroup amongst others. They have very gentlemanly agreed to change their name and are now known as Optimus. We tend to work separately and both have a long history in recording, remixing and production. Jonnie has recently recorded for the mighty Kompakt label under the name Naum while Twitch's first solo record - a cover of James White and The Blacks 'Contort Yourself' is out on the recently reactivated Ze Records. Twitch was also half of the band Mount Florida who released three eps and an album on Matador Records. He has done several remixes and has also done sound design for theatre. Both have also recorded scores of tracks and re edits that they use exclusively for their own dj sets. If you want us to do a remix, get in touch and we will decide who is more suitable for the project. Please bear in mind that we will only agree to remix songs that we have a genuine liking for to begin with.

9) Do you have a record label?

Yes, we have a label called Oscarr. Oscarr stands for Optimo Singles Club And Related Recordings. Originally the plan was for the records to only be available at the club but we soon scrapped that. So far we have released a paltry 5 records in 3 years, including eps by Bis, Creme De Menthe, Pro Forma and Electronicat. This is all set to change as we have handed over the running of Oscarr to the very wonderful Tigersushi people. We will a&r the label while they will do all the stuff that we are crap at. We are hoping to get back to our original plan to have a release a month but if it doesn't happen, rest assured that the fault will be at our end! If you have a demo, you'd like to send, email us and we'll give you an address to send it to. Oscarr, like Optimo doesn't follow any musical ideology, we will release music we love no matter what genre it may fit into.

10) What music do you play?

Our core belief with regard to music is that if you are a music freak, then music is a continuum and thus genres and especially the dreaded eclectic (yuk!) word are misleading. To put it simply, we believe almost every type of music in existence contains something of worth (yes, even country and western!) and we could never think along the lines of saying what our favourite type of music is. This frequently leads to awkward conversations with taxi drivers who pick us up with our records and ask 'so, what sort of stuff do you play?'. Our response is usually 'er, dance music...' and we hope that they leave it there (which they never do). Anyway, for us, dance music is anything that can be danced to which gives us a whole century of recorded music to delve into and helps ensure that unlike other clubs, built in obsolescence shouldn't be a problem - we can always explore other areas of music (we are musical sluts!). It could be argued that not following a formula becomes a formula in itself, and from time to time, we would readily agree that the club gets 'stuck' somewhere. Thankfully, we are always prepared to give it a kick in the arse and make it a bit more interesting again and always know when to put played out records back on the shelf. We frequently find ourselves written about and referred to as a {insert genre de jour here} club. Anyone who has been to the club will know this is nonsense and while there will be sections of the night when the dancefloor is being rocked by the latest disposable dance / pop hit, you are also likely to hear music that you are unlikely to ever hear in any club anywhere. Fundamentally though it is about musical risk taking, trying to pull off insane mixes and most importantly Fun. We could go on about this for ever so we'll leave it with this - before judging, passing comment or trying to fit Optimo in with anything else that is happening anywhere else, we feel you have to have been at least two or three times before you can even begin to understand it. Or if you are too far away, check the playlists.

11) Twitch, why don't you play nights of banging techno anymore?

Contrary to popular belief, I never did. Sure Pure was renowned as a techno club, but even then we played many variants on the 4/4 sound. Pure was perhaps the first club in Scotland to play really mental techno and thus seems to be forever associated with this sound. To anyone who attended, you will know that there was a whole lot more to it than that. I will still play a techno set, if asked nicely, but really, my heart (and brain) isn't into whole nights of banging music anymore. Firstly, I guess I got old and secondly, I love music (and not just one tiny sub genre of music) and want to play anything and everything that touches my soul. I think one legacy of the techno / rave days remains with me - whatever I'm playing, I'll still try to play it with the energy of those past, carefree days.