A personal salute to the profoundly influential Scottish DJ...

One half of legendary Glaswegian DJ duo Optimo, Keith McIvor tragically passed away due to a brain tumour on the 19th of September 2025.

What follows is a hazy and lysergic love letter to Twitch (and Optimo & Glasgow in general), penned metaphysically from their wild, wild dancefloor, paying homage to just some of the wisdom and teachings Twitch gifted me. 

“Nausea!” we all scream invitingly, and in unison. It’s 2am somewhere in the year 2000. And I’m sweatily hugging a skinny dude with strange affection. This was a surprise to both of us. Until just this very moment I always previously thought he was a prick. 

The dancefloor just went up in smoke as JD Twitch, my favourite DJ of all-time drops a rabid slab of electro pop forged by a couple from Detroit, called Adult., doing their best to sound like angry Germans. “You don’t even know… how I feel…”

Welcome to Optimo Espacio – the best club night in the world. For 12-and-a-half remarkable years, Sunday nights in Glasgow became a sweat-drenched utopian history lesson, a musical ritual that transformed my tastes, career, friendships and how I discovered music – more than anything else ever could.

Optimo were a duo. Twitch’s partner in rhythm is JG Wilkes, also known as Jonnie Wilkes, who will now carry on the Optimo Espacio legacy on his own. I’m sure he’ll keep digging and mixing lost and new music with the same energy and passion as always – continually blending tracks in ways that makes us hear them in a completely new light. 

“The damn thing gone wild, bam-ba-lam” It’s 2.30am somewhere in 2004. The dancefloor has self-organised into a mutant line-dance as Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’ mows us down, twisted together with an industrial techno evil twin. “The damn thing gone blind, bam-ba-lam / I said, oh, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam” 

Dancefloor epiphany #344. Despite the UK’s abundance of DJs and talent, Optimo Espacio could never have happened anywhere else but right here. It was the meeting of Keith and Jonnie as individuals, the fusion of their record collections, beliefs, and values, all coming together in Glasgow in 1997 at the Sub Club – a patient and nurturing institution. And the crowd in Glasgow is a rare substance: ready to dive into a singular moment of joy and communal, primal expression. A jumble of people eager to learn, grow and, basically, go completely mental at the drop of a hat.

I worked at the Sub Club on and off between 1996 and 2009. From being a terrible barman, to bored cloakroom and toilet attendant, doing endless PR and postering, then later a mesmeric being operating by the lights at Subculture (the Saturday night residency with Harri and Domenic) for five years – right up to hosting and playing at my own monthly club night, Kinky Afro for 10 years. 

Twitch over time evolved to be many things for me, what follows are just the facets that I personally encountered and became inspired by: he was my greatest musical teacher, my north star DJ, an ad hoc specialist writer for Clash (where I had the pleasure of commissioning a few fine articles from him), a catalyst of uncountable friendships in the club, a healer of foes, an urgent patron of local causes, curator of sublime forestry festivals… and a gracious saviour who once rescued me from a disastrous rave fiasco. 

“I can’t seem to face up to the facts….” It’s 2.45am in the Subbie. Twitch has dropped Talking Heads. Myself and my friends are hastily organising ourselves into a kind of desperately clenched, arms-around-a-nexus-of-mismatched-shoulders-mini-mosh pit just in time to be physically safe as the inevitable dancefloor ruckus slams into us. As the chorus crashes in with a heavy techno record still in the mix we howl – “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?” Then bounce together, limbs enmeshed, in an ecstasy of faux Francophile lyrics and raw techno delirium.

“I just want to say …” It’s 10.25pm. It’s super early. The club is still almost empty. We’re holed up in a corner booth letting the music and idle conversation revive our bodies ahead of what’s to come. Tuxedomoon’s ‘In a Manner of Speaking’ soothes “I just want to say, That I could never forget the way, You told me everything”. 

Because of Twitch I’ve met so many great friends on this dancefloor, and greatly improved many existing friendships; losing our minds together as we hang on every beat of his radical DJ mixes. The dancefloor WAS Optimo. Keith told The Skinny: “Something we always get asked at every interview, is like ‘Where’s the best place to play?’ and people say something like ‘New York’. The best place to play is in Scotland, maybe Ireland as well. There’s something about those peoples when they go for a night out, they just give it everything and we get the best atmosphere, and we really miss playing at home.”

In order to understand why Optimo worked on my particular arrangement of brain pathways – we need to zoom out and study Glasgow’s teaming club culture in the early noughties from higher above. 

Everyone goes out. All the time. There are SHITLOADS of clubs – from massive ones like The Arches where Slam held their epic residency, to medium-sized spots like Rub a Dub’s Club 69 in Paisley, The Soundhaus, The Art School, The Tunnel – plus an abundance of tiny 100-cap clubs (nae, rave cellars). These smaller spaces were filled by crews and their mates, who would then book some outrageously niche underground burnishing act to headline. It’s a small city, so you’re constantly meeting people and reaffirming connections.

All the pubs shut at midnight. Almost everyone gets “on it”. Yet all the clubs close at 3am, meaning our club nights were fast-paced, densely programmed affairs that always felt WAY too short. Many clubbers lived in the West End; in high tenement blocks that hugely increased the density of party heads located in one area, meaning bouncing around the streets to the next party often meant a walk of just a few minutes. Most of these flats could fit 75 – 150 people in their vast high ceilinged lounges. And the vast sandstone walls meant sound complaints were weirdly quite rare, despite the bedlam. 

The weather is grim. 11 months of the year it’s likely raining – the grey, flat skies deploying varying degrees of precipitation from vicious downpour to eternal perma-drizzle. It once rained non-stop for OVER 40 days and 40 nights. I remember the Daily Record, the local Glasgow city paper had an amusing front cover calling Noah a lightweight. So no one wanted to go outside. But most people didn’t want to go to bed either. 

Perfect conditions then for the ultimate Sunday session, a Faustian mix of techno, punk, Italo, dancehall, poetry, German noise, 70s rock, film soundtracks, New York disco, Chicago acid, and more. Plus the seductive vocoded missives from their sampler – aka ‘Lady Miss Roland’ – who handled all the outbound comms from their DJ booth. 

“I bet you’re wonderin’ how I knew, ‘Bout your plans to make me blue”. It’s only 12.30am. Cheekily 30 mins into a new Monday and The Slits ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ has just smashed its way into my wonky consciousness. “Honey, honey yeah.” I shout as if I’ve known these lyrics for years. 

Bands like E.S.G., The Stooges, The Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem were staples in Twitch’s sets. Their loose, funky, bass-driven riffs sounded perfect by the time Sunday rolled around. These grooves were unifying and hedonistic, carrying the 500 revellers who poured down the basement steps into a space ready to be flooded with bawdy sonic frequencies, rhythms and basslines. The music Twitch served often felt gloriously tarnished – filthy, in just the right way to strip away decorum and let you step into another version of yourself.

But despite working at the Sub Club – and knowing Keith in passing – I did not understand Optimo Espacio to start with. My tiny 19-year-old music brain would not accept the vision. I didn’t like some of the music. It wasn’t that busy. Going out on Sunday just wasn’t fashionable or remotely normal. 

“Is it all over my face?” I sing badly as I wiggle. It’s 1am, and Arthur Russell’s ‘Loose Joints’ is flying into my ears. I’m in a club called the 13th Note – Optimo’s new emergency base after a fire next to the Sub Club shut it down for three years. It’s here, just around the corner from their smouldering home in 1999, that I start to really understand what Twitch and J’ilkes have been trying to communicate. My neural pathways are sparking; suddenly, it’s as if I’ve inherited a new pair of ears. I’m losing it with brand new friends I only ever see here, the looseness and expansive pleasures of the record bags are opening me up. “You got me love dancing.” Dancefloor epiphany #214. New York disco is actually awesome. “Tell me baby how does it taste?” Fucking damn good. I need more.

Before Optimo, I had no real sense of eclecticism. Living near Manchester, I was immersed in a monoculture of house and techno, raised on a searing but narrow diet of acid house through clubs like Bugged Out at Sankeys Soap. Then I moved to Glasgow in 1996, just a year before Optimo began. Like many at the time, I was unknowingly trapped within a niche, loyal to one tribe of music while missing out on countless others. iPods were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs eye, our record collections yet to be disrupted through a cheeky shuffle. Whilst DJ Alfredo was yet to wander into my mind for many more years. 

This ensured that Twitch’s DJing was like a bomb going off in my imagination. His mixing scintillated. His record bag seemed bottomless. His choices of blends were beyond brave. His pace and aggression dropping into a new mix was audacious. Despite queuing up to be willfully surprised, week in and week out, it always blew my mind how his curveballs of selection and mixes came and smashed me in the ears. He kicked the doors of my musical perception off its hinges then let a wide flowing river of sounds, anthems, artists, legends and lore flood in. He revealed vast deltas of music I’d go on to navigate myself, and with friends, triggering a thirst to work in music my whole adult life. 

“Here are we, one magical moment, Such is the stuff, from where dreams are woven.” David Bowie’s Thin White Duke is crooning to us. It’s 11:45pm, sometime in the year 2000. Peaches is about to go on stage to play live – or maybe it was Chicks on Speed. Optimo kept a rock-solid policy of never booking guest DJs, which suited us fine; nobody else could walk into the Sub Club and even try to do what they did every Sunday night. Instead they booked bands to kick off the night. Odd bands. Underground bands. Bands on the rise – never truly famous, at least not yet. They picked winners, though: Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture, Isolée, Liquid Liquid, LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, TV on the Radio, The Go! Team, The Kills, and Sons & Daughters.

“It’s too late – to be grateful, It’s too late – to be late again.” As Bowie fires himself into the stratosphere, we are still waiting for Peaches to start her riotous, debauched, sensuous punk techno attack. I think I glimpse Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian, or maybe it was one of the members of Mogwai. Memories; hazy and unstable. Either way, because of the band bookings, Optimo brought all sorts of types of punter and mashed them up together. It was exotic to catch sight of Glasgow’s rock and indie royalty who were letting loose as much as we were too. And it made the afterparty scene even more curious. 

It’s definitely 4am. It might be 2001. We’re in a strangely quiet flat near Kelvingrove Park after the club. “Dance me in, Show me the first part” I’ve got a Sons and Daughters song doing circuits of my head, mainly as there’s currently no music playing.”I’ll pay close detail, To every note in every chart” We’ve come back the flat of various members of Arab Strap, who I suspect have all taken acid. The band are being highly insistent that they HAVE to stay in the bathroom. With their trousers rolled up, feet and ankles in a half full bath. Which is totally fine obviously, except it was one of those “party back at ours!” situations where only me and one friend accepted their loud invitation. We are sitting in the lounge chatting with their girlfriends. “I’m sat at the last table, My talk wearing thin.” After an hour we get asked to leave by the bathers. There must be better party options for us out here anyway. 

“War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” It’s 11:20pm and Edwin Starr is shining. I’m at the bar chatting to a rival promoter, worryingly mouthing off about all the new vinyl I thought I wanted to keep secret. “Life is much too short and precious, to spend fighting wars each day.”. With countless local club nights, overlapping friendship groups, and three absolutely livid and bantersome online dance music forums (Miscreat, Slam Board, and Subcity Radio), distinct music sects were in abundance.  

“Well, I did lots of traveling” It’s 2004. 8.05pm on a weeknight. “You gotta beat the clock, you gotta beat the clock” I’m trudging around the West End putting up hundreds of posters in an unrelenting miserly drizzle. On my headphones I’m hearing one of Optimo’s (now legendary) NYE Art School promo mixes for the first time. Either Keith or Jonnie has just mixed Console’s 14 ‘Zero Zero’ into Sparks ‘Beat the Clock’ before rolling up into Moodymann’s ‘Shades of Jae’ with such aplomb that the weight of all these fecking posters feels refreshingly lighter. 

I hit my next stop, a bar’s paper-drenched vestibule to assess where the fuck I can find room for my own posters. The city was a hot mess of parties and clubs, with fierce competition for every inch of dance floor and promo space. Sometimes, when out on poster runs you had to do unpleasant things, things that might rile the army of rival DJs and promoters. Like gently shuffling their posters to less optimal locations, or even dare I say it binning them – and maybe even recycling their Blu Tack (there, I said it out loud at last!).

Getting in first with a booking agent, or nabbing the next musical wonder, inevitably brewed more friction. But Optimo melted these county lines of internal rave politics and made us all one jostling, sweaty mass, celebrating music from every corner of recorded history – not just whatever was being pumped out of Cologne or Berlin. One week, I’d butt heads with a rival promoter over nicking my flyer staff or trashing my posters; the next, we’d be bonding at Optimo over Einstürzende Neubauten tracks, a band I’d never even heard of weeks before.

“Life is short filled of stuff, Don’t know what for.” It’s 12:50am, a bleary Sunday night in late 2002. The Cramps are blasting – “If I could only find, some new kind of kick!” Another huge thank you I owe Twitch: for delivering me lovers, and resilient ones at that.

A stunning brunette floats past and, once I recover from my awestruck pause, I chase after her. Summoning all my Sunday-night courage, I skip the small talk and blurt out: “You’re beautiful! What’s your name?”

She instantly looks both angry and even more attractive than before.

“Matt? Fuck off!” she snaps, disappearing into the crowd.

Thrown, I rush to catch up: “Wait – how do you know my name?”

She fixes me with a glare. “This is the third week you’ve come up to me,” she says, putting on an exaggerated version of my voice: “‘Ooooh, you’re beautiful… What’s your name?’ If you can’t remember me or my name, then just fuck right off!”

Wow. Embarrassing. A little too much wind in my sails recently, perhaps.

“Well…”  squirming … “…. I must really like you then” I mutter through my eyebrows “That’s remarkably consistent considering how little sleep I’ve been getting….! Fancy a drink?” 

It’s 7pm, I’m nowhere near Optimo. Silence abounds. It’s Friday, 30th January 2009 – and Twitch is about to save my rave bacon.

I was worryingly trapped in a widely predicted Hardcore Hype Spiral of my own making. Not only had I been seduced by a young musician called Zomby’s second-hand, fractalised rave homage. But I – against various missives of advice – had bloody booked him to play at the Subbie that night.

Unofficial Zomby herder and underground legend Actress, (along with other Numbers related youngsters) had even warned against the booking. “He might not get on the train”, they warned. “Too much weed,” they sighed.

Yet I blazed forth like an idiot. Trapped in my own music industry shite-geist, trying to stand up and surf a second-wave rave revival because I’d narrowly missed the first one – being so utterly born in 1978. 

“You’re getting high, wondering why you can’t fly”

So. 

The muses were proved correct. Zomby did not fancy boarding the train to Glasgow that Friday evening. Apparently, he did not even stray close to Euston. 

The thirsty dance floor of Kinky Afro would not be bouncing to his freshly minted tracks on his album – ‘Where Were You In 92?’

“Total Confusion!, Total Confusion!” 

Suddenly the ironic subtext of Zomby’s album title pulled into focus. 

Where exactly was master Zomby in 1992?

In that hallowed year Zomby was aged 12. So a bit like me, presumably safely tucked up at home playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Mibbee Final Fantasy V at a push. 

And where exactly was Twitch? 

While I was still begging my parents for another hour before bed, Twitch was already a key resident at Edinburgh’s PURE, unleashing white-hot slabs of hardcore, breakbeat, and jungle on swarming dancefloors across Scotland.

Plus, another humbling titbit floated into my memory: I’d recently read that Twitch had just completed all the research for a R&S rave compilation, specifically focussed on dance floor melters from 1992. 

Time to puncture the shame. I pulled up his number in my phone and desperately pressed the green wee phone. 

Eternally long dialling tones. 

What were the fucking chances of the best DJ in the world, sitting waiting for his phone to ring at 7pm on a Friday, just on the off chance some young snapper would ask him to come and save his naivety? 

Eternally long dialling tones. 

Keith answered. No dafty, he predicted exactly why I was calling. 

My hero, he graciously accepted the invitation. 

“Yes. We can do it, seen? ‘Cause we rule, see” It’s 3.05am. I’m hugging Keith in thanks. My own tee-shirt drenched in half the dance- floor’s own sweat. I hear 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Bombscare’ reverberating as tinnitus. Twitch just smashed his hardcore set, giving us all an epic hardcore hiding. It was truly a master class of dance, a real time lecture in rave, a time capsule of so many great tracks most of us had never been acquainted with. 

The Zomby had been vanquished.

You can hear his mix below. Whilst fighting off the thanks and high fives, he humbly mentions that he hadn’t played nearly all of those records SINCE 1992. That’s a wide record bag. 

“Each step is moving, it’s moving me up, moving, it’s moving me up” Fuck! No. It’s Saturday 20th of September. I’m in Optimo. But only in my mind, for the first time in a bittersweet way. I’ve just read of Keith’s passing. He’s been taken way too soon. So many more exquisite musical moments paused, forever unfound, so many records only he would rescue from oblivion likely now remaining lost in second hand record shops. 

Arthur Russell’s ‘This is How We Walk On the Moon’ has tiptoed melancholically into my sadness. 

One tiny, tiny,

tiny move

It’s all I need

And I jump over … 

So thank you, JD Twitch, for everything. You and Jonnie always said, “We love your ears” but I’m forever grateful that mine were downstream of yours – happily swept up in your torrents of influence, knowledge and audacity. You opened my world to new music and so many more possibilities. My life would have been much duller, less musical, less social and far less hedonistic without the blessings you brought me. Safe travels to your next cosmic gig.