J.D Twitch (Optimo)

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

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.

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.

J.D Twitch (Optimo) also played at...

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