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One of the Scottish music scene’s great quirks is its wealth of down-to-earth heroes – and one of the most heroic was Keith McIvor, AKA JD Twitch, who died yesterday after a short, terminal illness. In life and in death, Twitch’s aura was well earned; as Optimo (Espacio), with his DJ partner JG Wilkes, Twitch’s irreverent humour, political action and renegade attitude shifted the axis of good taste on to a broader, wilder plain and inspired generations of clubbers.
In the early 1990s, Twitch co-founded the Edinburgh club night Pure. With Jeff Mills’ first UK gig, he effectively (alongside Glasgow’s Rubadub) brought Detroit to Scotland, side-stepping the decade’s Madchester obsession in favour of a weirder palette of acid house and techno. When Pure ran its course, Twitch switched to Glasgow and formed Optimo (Espacio) with Wilkes in 1997 – and having had a decade of techno dominance, they decided they had other ideas.
They stencilled “Optimo Sundays. You won’t like it, sugar” and “Optimo says it’s not as good as it used to be” on to flyers, positioning themselves as a honeypot for freaks. Optimo (Espacio) shoved an elbow into the club scene’s ribs, eschewing Detroit and Chicago worship for a ferociously agnostic take on genre. DJ sets had ESG’s avant-pop woven into Parliament-Funkadelic’s righteous jams, Nitzer Ebb’s EBM stompers into Donna Summer’s sensual drum machine riffs.
Twitch roared through blends like a Mustang through a hot desert, fearless and determined. “It’ll work, surely it’ll work – yes, it fucking worked,” you’d think when he pulled it off, and he rarely fumbled. You can hear that skill and vision on countless mixes. Today, multigenre DJ mixes are familiar to the point of being standard, but when Optimo’s double CD How to Kill the DJ (Part 2) dropped in 2004, in a scene dominated by seamless European minimal house, its influence was a mushroom cloud. Barring 2manydj’s As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2, How to Kill the DJ (Part 2) – which blended Nurse with Wound into Blondie, for example – stands out as that era’s boldest DJ effort to bring rockers and ravers together.
Their most impactful trick, though, was how they structured their Glasgow parties, with DJ sets before and after live acts. The Rapture played in 2002, which fuelled an appetite for DFA Records and gave clubbers permission to dance to indie bands, sparking possibilities; Alex Kapranos was often in the crowd, and has spoken about Optimo’s influence on his band, Franz Ferdinand. LCD Soundsystem’s performances and Twitch’s push of their music came full circle with the news of Twitch’s illness: DFA printed a run of T-shirts to raise money for his hospice care that read “No DFA without Optimo”, and rightly so.
McIvor had a bear-hug that made everything all right, a reassuring bellow and a natural inquisitiveness that made you feel remembered. The latter extended beyond his close circle, as he weaved his politics unabashedly in his work. Pure was founded in the shadow of rampant football violence, and he made great efforts to cultivate an anti-sectarian atmosphere at the party.
He campaigned for anti-racist causes and Scottish independence. Optimo’s own record label released compilations such as Against Fascism Trax and Anarcho Disco, which funded donations to groups such as Hope Not Hate, and his DJ fees and label funds were often given to food banks. In a dance music culture obsessed with statement-making career moves, with showboating flourishes designed to do numbers on social media or live streams, McIvor built his own rep on playing thousands of sets, and by being a sincere champion of the underdog until the end.
When grieving for someone, hearing a piece of music can whip you back into a particular time and place with them, and it will be McIvor’s legacy that so many songs will do that. On the final Optimo (Espacio) Sunday in 2010, the duo blasted Dinosaur’s Kiss Me Again, the Joubert Singers’ Stand on the Word and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit with equal fervour.
When they closed Sónar By Day in 2017 with Slayer’s Reign in Blood, the sangria-soaked masses leapt up in astonishment, and whenever they dropped Motörhead’s Ace of Spades they sent ravers into headbanger mode.
On the 20th anniversary of Optimo (Espacio) in Glasgow, they played the 12-inch extended version of Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy and, when it built to crescendo, they made the tender power of Jimmy Somerville’s voice feel like a 10-ton truck rolling through the room.
In Fran Lebowitz’s 2021 TV series Pretend It’s a City, the New York writer argued that her job was to somehow justify artists to the public; that there must be a reason, a root, for why someone comes along and is more brilliant than others. But sometimes, she says, talent just falls out of the sky and lands on someone – it’s what they want to do with it that counts. In his wild, big-hearted life, McIvor made it count.
