SCOTTISH clubbing legends Optimo are to stage a unique one-day festival with acts from all over the world to celebrate their 20th birthday.

Twenty artists including The Black Madonna, recently voted the world’s number one DJ, are to play at SWG3’s new venue beside its existing Glasgow complex.

It will be the first dance event at the Galvanizers’ Yard in Finnieston and will use three stages – one outside and two indoors.

Confirmed acts are Adult “Official”, Aurora Halal, Avalon Emerson and The Black Madonna, all from the US; Apeiron Crew from Denmark; Carla dal Forno from Australia; Equiknoxx Music from Jamaica; King Ayisoba from Ghana; K-X-P from Finland; errorsmith from Germany; Ben UFO, Midland, Nurse With Wound Official and Miss Red + The Bug from England,and Scotland’s own Ribecca Mrshall, Happy Meals, Optimo (Espacio) and Sofay.

“It’s a really eclectic line-up and nothing in the UK matches it,” said Jonathan Dawson of SWG3.

A portion of the profits from the event will be donated to the city’s Coalition For Racial Equality and Rights and to various Glasgow food banks.

The National:

The Black Madonna

IS THIS A DEPARTURE?

THE festival on August 6 is the first ever to be staged by Optimo, but JD Twitch and JG Wilkes wanted to mark their 20th anniversary in style.

“We could never have imagined that what started out as a small gathering of like-minded freaks on Sunday nights at the Sub Club back in 1997 would flourish and endure two decades later," said Keith Mcivor, aka JD Twitch. "We felt this was something that deserved celebrating."

Mcivor and Johnny Wilkes are now renowned for their memorable DJ sets and disregard for genres and musical restrictions, but the pair didn’t deliberately set out to start a clubbing revolution, merely taking over the Sunday night slot at Glasgow’s Sub Club after a DJ friend went on holiday to Barcelona and had such a good time he decided to live there.

“The Sub Club asked if I wanted to take the night over and I saw it as an opportunity to do something a little bit different,” said Mcivor. He knew Wilkes had a similar outlook, asked him to be involved, and Optimo was born.

WHY DID IT TAKE OFF?

AT the time the clubbing scene had become a bit stale so the ground-breaking approach of Optimo soon attracted a following.

“It had got very boring with monotonous music and no fun element,” explained Mcivor. “We wanted to do something where people felt excited again. We had a wider pool of music to delve into as we’re not stuck in any genre of music, so we just went on from there. We didn’t really expect it to turn into anything. We would mix up soul and things like Joy Division with electronic music, for example, and have a live band. We put a lot of time and effort into how the club looked. Everything was different to the status quo and that is why it took off. People find it hard to pigeonhole us as our music can vary so much depending on the event and the circumstances.”

Optimo became so popular that it soon sat at the epicentre of the Scottish clubbing scene and is widely regarded as one of the most important and ground-breaking clubs of the past 20 years, at one point earning the prestigious title of Mixmag Club of the Year.

The National:

Aurora Halal

WHAT HAPPENED THEN?

INTERNATIONAL recognition was triggered by the release of How to Kill The Dj (part 2) in 2004. This mix, and the critical acclaim that followed, catapulted the duo onto the worldwide gigging circuit. The next few years saw them travel to 50 different countries including the US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Japan and Australia.

Subsequent mix releases raised the benchmark for what is expected from a DJ mix and what musical ingredients could be used to create it. These titles include Psyche-Out (Eskimo Recordings), 20 Years Underground (Soma), Walkabout (Endless Flight), In Order To Edit (R&S), Sleepwalk (Domino Recordings), a tour-de-force mix for the Fabric Series with Fabric 52, Optimo (Espacio) and the early-2014 release Dark Was The Night (Endless Flight).

Mcivor also mixed the cornerstone compilation from fellow local label Glasgow Underground for their Underground Sound Of Glasgow release, showcasing the best in new electronic music from Glasgow.

The Optimo duo debuted on the famed Boiler Room mix series in Dec 2012 with a B2B set alongside innovative Germany techno artist Move D (also one half of Deep Space Network).

Since then they have followed up with a back-to-back with fellow long-running Sub Club residents Harri & Dominic, and also completed two Boiler Room Collections interviews.

The National:

The new Galvanisers' Yard at SWG3

WHY A FESTIVAL NOW?

IT’S an impressive body of work and Mcivor says they are both astonished they have come so far.

“When we first started at the Sub Club we had no plans, no ambitions but it has turned into this and we’ve loved every minute of it,” he said.

“Late last year I realised it would be our 20th birthday and I thought we should do something on a bigger scale to celebrate.

At first thought we thought a festival was too big an undertaking, but we wanted to do something different that would appeal to the people that originally came when we first started at the Sub Club as well as the new generation.”

When they found out about SWG3’s expansion the venue seemed perfect.

“We always like to do something no one else has ever done before and this is their very first music event so we are very excited about it,” Mcivor said.

“We’ve invited people we have a close connection with or people we have seen when travelling who range from the well known to the unknown. It will be a great day.”

Optimo 20 is on Sunday August 6 from 2pm to 11pm at SWG3