MELTING Pot, which celebrates its 16th birthday on Saturday, has been a reassuring constant on Glasgow’s clubbing scene since the turn of the century. Heavily inspired by New York in more ways than one, the night’s foundations have always been in disco, but as resident Andrew Pirie explains, there’s a lot more to the night than looking back. “It’s always been important to us that Melting Pot takes disco as a jumping-off point to go and explore other areas of music,” he says, “whether it’s house, techno, soul, jazz or whatever. That’s the basis we founded the night on in the first place, and I think we’ve managed to make a success out of it.”

The idea for Melting Pot was born out of Traxx, a night Pirie co-ran alongside his Melting Pot co-resident Simon Cordiner at Glasgow’s Soundhaus club alongside former Melting Pot resident Billy Woods and two others. Pirie would DJ in the bar area, and found himself more and more drawn to the sounds of New York disco as the years went on, even as the main room at Traxx continued to be heavily house and techno-focused. Uncertainty about the future of a venue that perpetually seemed to be on a shoogly peg led Pirie and his cohorts to look to the city's dearly departed Riverside Club to start a new regular night that would blend their growing love of disco and soul with electronic music and a host of other styles.

“Around the time we started Melting Pot, Glasgow’s nightlife, with a few exceptions, was very much stratified into ‘this is a house night, this is a techno night’, and whatever else, with very little variation in the course of an evening,” Pirie tells me. “Visiting New York in the 1990s and 2000s really inspired me, because you could go out to places like Shelter or Body & Soul, and also to the midweek parties there – at that time you could go out on a Tuesday night in New York and there’d be 200 people dancing in a little club with a great sound system – and they’d play stuff from across the board, and I thought there was no reason we couldn’t take that ethos back to Glasgow.”

The great sound systems that Pirie found in New York were as much of an inspiration as the city’s music, and Pirie duly invested in a Urei 1620 rotary mixer – the foundation stone of just about every great New York club since the early 1980s – soon after Melting Pot started. “The systems you would find even in record shops there, never mind in clubs, were just so far ahead of anything here, and realising that and buying the right equipment gave us a competitive advantage, I think. And in 16 years we’ve always continued to put everything into the sound, and trying to make it that bit better.

"The majority of people won't come out of the night saying 'that was an incredible sound system', but they will have enjoyed the night a lot more, whether consciously or subconsciously. There is less distortion and more detail in the sound, which makes it easier to hear the lyrics of songs and the different instruments in the tracks, and they'll usually have far less ear fatigue that you might get with a poorer system.”

Pirie and Cordiner’s connections with New York have enabled them to bring a virtual A to Z of the city’s finest DJs over as guests, as well as feted disco scholars from closer to home such as Bill Brewster and Floating Points. “It’s just been a case of just trying to do something unique really. I think reading about (recently departed New York disco legend) David Mancuso and his club The Loft, permeated subconsciously with us, and in line with him and others like him we’ve always just tried to give our customers something better.

“If you look at Mancuso, you learn that it’s not about ego and not about doing something for yourself, it’s about doing something for everyone who wants to be involved. And as a result I think we’ve always attracted a crowd that’s really open-minded and friendly and easy to play for. People have a freedom here because of that – our guests know they can really delve into their collections and play stuff they wouldn’t be able to get away with elsewhere. It’s inclusive and diverse, and as long as we can carry on creating that kind of atmosphere then we’ll keep doing it. And that’s really the only reason to do this these days,” he laughs. “Because doing underground clubbing to try to make money is a fool’s errand – there’s just no way you can do it. So any money we make from it just goes straight back into upgrading our equipment and making the night better.

Perhaps surprisingly for a night that has always been based on the importance of a night’s residents in forging and maintaining an identity, the 16th birthday party will be Pirie and Cordiner’s first residents-only party in some time after a long run of booking guests.

“As great as it is to have your heroes come and play all the time it can get a little frustrating having this amazing setup and only getting to play warm-up sets on it,” he laughs. “Nobody knows a night like its residents, and at Melting Pot we’ve had a lot of the same people coming month-in month-out for 16 years now. It’s so nice as a DJ to look out and see a familiar face and to think to yourself, for example, ‘they love Stevie Wonder’, and to be able to pull out what you know is that person’s favourite Stevie Wonder record and watch them go crazy.”

Andrew Pirie and Simon Cordiner play Sneaky Pete’s in Edinburgh tomorrow, 11pm to 3am, £5. The pair then play all night at Melting Pot’s 16th birthday at The Admiral in Glasgow on Saturday, 25 February, 11pm to 3am, £8