• 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 often 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.

• How can I get to dj at Optimo?

The simple answer is, you can't. Our policy is to book live acts. Very occasionally we have to miss a Sunday due to taking a rare holiday or because we are playing in a part of the world that is impossible to get back from to do the club 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.

• Who are the Optimo djs?



Twitch and Wilkes (or JD Twitch and JG Wilkes to give us our full titles) are the Optimo djs.

• When did Optimo start??

Optimo was founded on Sunday November 28th 1997. It has always been at the Sub Club except for the 3 or so years 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.

• How can we book you?

Our bookings are now handled by the lovely Caroline - you can email her 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.

• Do you do remixes?

Indeed we do. We have done many, many remixes between us. We work separately and both have a long history in recording, remixing and production. Twitch remixes using the Optimo (Espacio) name and sometimes his own name. Jonnie remixes under the name Naum Gabo. If you want us to do a remix, get in touch.

• Do you have a record label?

Yes. Twitch runs Optimo's label which is imaginatively called Optimo Music - www.optimo.co.uk/music. It is distributed by Cargo and available from all good online and digital retailers. We used to have a label called Oscarr. Oscarr stood for Optimo Singles Club And Related Recordings.

• 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 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. 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.

• Who does your website?

Originally the site was put together by Twitch's old, old friend Frenchbloke and was later revamped and maintained by Twitch himself. It was quite a ramshackle affair all cobbled together in HTML. As the end of the first decade of the 21st century approached, we decided it needed brought up to date and needed some added bells and whistles. We thus called in the professionals and had the lovely Haus Of Vanitas slave over a laptop to bring you the current incarnation.