Chapter

01

In Residence

Sub Club, Glasgow

Celebrating 12 of the world's best dance floors

In 2016, RA's In Residence series is celebrating club culture by throwing a month of parties at 12 of the world's best clubs. Clubs are the beating heart of dance music, and these are the venues that keep their local scenes thriving. Week-in, week-out, they open their doors to play the music we love.

As we settle in for a month at each of the clubs, we'll be running features that, through a combination of different media, aim to provide lasting documents of these iconic spaces.

Our home for September is Sub Club in Glasgow. Even mentioning this place's name tends to get people excited—"Ooooh," and a broad smile is a typical response. Their minds inevitably jump to nights spent on Sub Club's cauldron of a dance floor, the low ceiling and unruly crowd making for one of the scene's most intense clubbing experiences. It's an experience Sub Club has been providing for almost 30 years, an incredible feat in the fragile world of UK nightlife.

Sep 18 RA In Residence, Sub Club, Glasgow feat. Sasha, Hammer

Sep 23 RA In Residence, Sub Club, Glasgow feat. Audion, Junior & Barry Price

Sep 24 RA In Residence, Sub Club, Glasgow feat. Barnt, Virginia, Harri & Domenic

Sep 30 RA In Residence, Sub Club, Glasgow feat. Optimo, Selvagem

Chapter

02

Key info

Sub Club at a glance

01
Address
22 Jamaica Street, Glasgow, G1 4QD, Scotland
02
Club opened
1987
03
Soundsystem
Martin Audio
04
Dance floors
1
05
Capacity
410
06
Resident DJs
Harri, Domenic, Telford, JD Twitch, JG Wilkes, Beta, Kappa, Slam, Barry Price, Junior, Iggie, Cesco Ferri, Alan Belshaw, Spencer, Jackmaster, Animal Farm, Bigfoot’s Tea Party, Hammer, Jube, Stay Fresh
07
Music policy
Quality, cutting-edge electronica

Chapter

03

History

Community spirit

When explaining the popularity of electronic music in Glasgow, local DJs and promoters tend to reach for a boxing metaphor. Despite an oft-recited history of post-industrial decline and a relatively small population of around 600,000, Scotland's largest city "punches above its weight" when compared to other scenes in the UK and Europe. Sub Club, which turns 30 next year, is the city's heavyweight champion. It owes its longevity to a rigorous maintenance of the basics—a great soundsystem, world-class residents and an inspired roster of guest DJs. The community gathered around it spans generations.

Before Sub Club was a club, it was a club night. Set up by Graham Wilson, Sam Piagentini and Alan Campbell in the mid-'80s, Sub Club—originally called the Gang Hut—occupied several venues, including the Cotton Club, now a bar and cafe on Scott Street, and Mardi Gras, which was demolished in the early '90s. It moved to 22 Jamaica Street to preside over Friday and Saturday nights at Jamaica Inn, where funk, soul, jazz and rare groove records were played alongside pop. "The first time I ever came to a Sub Club night, I got knocked back," says James Harrigan, "and I think that was the experience of a lot of people. They had an exclusivity door policy—it was a bit trendy, and you just kept coming back until, eventually, you'd get in." Harrigan, better known as Subculture resident Harri, had been co-running a night called Beatbox at the Jamaica Street venue—renamed Lucifer's—when he began to play occasional slots for Sub Club.

In April 1987, Lucifer's became Sub Club after Wilson and Greg McLeod, a local publican, bought the premises. It was a short-lived arrangement. Within a year, Wilson opened a rival club, The Champion, after falling out with McLeod. It was during this time that Sub Club was phasing out James Brown and Planet Patrol records for house from the US Midwest, a transition that went hand-in-hand with the arrival of ecstasy. The drug doused the tensions that gangs and football casuals created, and, as Harrigan remembers, it helped persuade sceptical clubbers of house music's power. "At first, a lot of your soul boys, or whatever, went, 'Oh, it's a fucking nightmare.' Once they had a couple of pills, they were all up for it. 'Actually, it's alright, this shit.'"

A Friday night called Joy, established in the summer of '89, was Sub Club's first serious house music event. The next year, Harrigan was invited to launch the venue's new Saturday night, Atlantis, alongside Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle, AKA Slam. The first few parties were quiet, but a warm-up gig for The Stone Roses at Glasgow Green packed Atlantis every Saturday night after that, which remained the case for nearly four years. Domenic Cappello was one of many Atlantis regulars. At 17, he began spinning records at a bar in Hamilton, where he learned an early lesson about compromise. "It got too wild," he says. "Acid house kicked in, and basically everybody was coming to this boozer and nobody was drinking. Everybody was just getting mad with it, dancing to acid house. And the guy's like, 'I'm selling no booze. Either change the music, or leave.' And I left."

Some years later, Cappello was a resident at an after-hours party called Desert Storm Soundsystem, which began in derelict warehouse spaces in Glasgow and expanded into fields, barns and stately homes. Harrigan met Cappello at a DSS party in a mansion in the west of Scotland. "He was playing in the wee courtyard," says Harrigan. "I thought, this guy's great, man. He played loads of records I really liked. And I just got talking with him."

Domenic (Subculture), Ricky Scoular (Operations director), Harri (Subculture), Barry Price (Creative director)

Harrigan was less enthused with Atlantis, whose numbers were ebbing. McMillan and Meikle had introduced a tougher techno sound, and had launched a Friday night at The Arches to play more of that music. "It was a bit too ladsy," says Harrigan, who was struggling to complement the intensity and speed of Slam's selections. "It was too much." They eventually went their separate ways, which gave Harrigan an opportunity to reset the Saturday. He brought in Cappello and another DJ, Oscar Fullone, to play at what became Subculture. "From the first week, it was really good," says Harrigan. "It was an enormous sigh of relief. I remember Dawn Penn's "No, No, No" had just come out... I remember playing it as the last record and going, 'Thank fuck, people get it,' because it was so against the grain of what was happening with techno."

By this time, the club had been sold to the MacCrimmon family. Kenny MacCrimmon, a former boxer and a semi-retired engineer, had bought Sub Club as a nest egg for his sons, Michael, who had DJ'd at the Sub Club night, and the younger Tony, a "cheeky chappie" and a doorman by trade who later took over the day-to-day operations. The MacCrimmons are revered by Sub Club staff, though Michael had left the business early on after a fallout with Tony. "Tony wasn't built for business," says Sub Club managing director Michael Grieve, who became general manager in 1994. "It was difficult for him. His personality didn't lend itself to what he was doing, and he found it all really stressful." Meanwhile, the club had become a "lead weight" around Kenny's neck. Months after Sub Club was forced to shut in late November 1999, when an electrical fire destroyed the neighbouring building, he died. "I still miss him," says Grieve. His son, Tony, passed away in 2014.

Michael Grieve

Sub Club had sustained water damage after the blaze—some of the panels had popped up, creating a wooden wave along the floor. Days later, a demolition company were drafted in to tear down what remained of the charred facade. "I was marvelling at how accurate they could be with these huge grabbing machines, unaware of the fact they were destroying the building," says Grieve. "That's what shut the Sub Club." Grieve was told the work to repair the gable end of the building would take weeks, then months. In the interim, the nights moved to Planet Peach, a basement club on Queen Street, and then to Mas in Royal Exchange Square. Sub Club was without a permanent home for three years. Had Grieve known that from the outset, he would have walked away.

On a recent Saturday, I visited Sub Club to see Harri & Domenic play. The entrance sits in a gauntlet of late-night venues overflowing with smokers. A rock band's rendition of Queen's "Tie Your Mother Down" blared from the entrance of MacSorleys, one of several nearby pubs. To the left of Sub Club is a busy 24-hour McDonald's and another club, The Classic Grand, which plays pop and rock. Once you pass the bouncers and descend the stairs, the second thing you notice—after the warm, bassy sound—is the lighting. The room has a fleshy red glow, the kind you get when you shine a torch on your fingers.

Sub Club has several pockets—leather booths, the back bar—where people socialise or take a breather. "You don't want to walk into a place and not be able to escape things," says Sean Watson, the club's sound engineer. Once the night gets going, the dance floor, naturally, becomes the focal point. Not long after 1 AM, Cappello was playing a house track with razor edges and waves of acid. Most clubbers were gathered on the Bodysonic dance floor, a space that gives the sound a physical dimension. 18 low-frequency effects transducers—one brand is known as The ButtKicker—transmit a sub-bass oscillation through the panels whenever a bass signal is sent to the system. "If you're on the floor," explains Watson, "your body becomes a speaker. You're feeling it—it's passing through you."

Nights at Sub Club are famously intense. Scottish licensing laws force clubs to shut at 3 AM, which shapes the party in a few distinct ways. From about 12:30 AM onwards, the music tends to accelerate, though it's not a sprint, exactly. "When I was younger," says Cappello, "I used to blast right through it, and then I'd notice that I was going higher and higher, but I wasn't getting the same reaction. People were like, 'Fucking give us a break,' because it was just too much. Too intense, too hot. So you need to move people, especially when it's busy. Bring them up, bring them down, give them a break." The last hour at Subculture was more sensual than usual, ending with disco. Earlier in the night, Cappello had played a harder track. He wanted to test his suspicion that the room needed something gentler. Once he did, "I could sense the room go cold."

Sean Watson

Most of Sub Club's regular parties play house, but there's room for other sounds. Return To Mono, run by Slam, and Animal Farm are techno nights. Other promoters have brought drum & bass, jazz, soul and hip-hop to Jamaica Street over the years. Some of these experiments had been a matter of conviction, others the result of a "let's try it" approach. In Optimo's case, there was a belief from the outset that it could—and should—succeed. "It sounds crazy to say it now," says Grieve, "but it was so radical to do it at that time. So radical. By 1997 [when Optimo began], clubs did dance music. People were sniffy about anybody playing anything that could be perceived as 'white boy' music. Other people that did nights in the club never came near Optimo for a year after it opened, because they just didn't understand it."

Overseen by Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes, AKA JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, Optimo ran every Sunday for 13 years. It began as a club night for people who were fed up with clubbing. Optimo opposed virtually every dance music convention—the superstar DJ, guest lists, VIP areas and sometimes dance music itself. For the first hour, McIvor and Wilkes played records "that you couldn't dance to" so that early arrivals could socialise. They booked bands, not DJs. On a good night, Optimo brought in 80 or 90 people. This carried on for 18 months. Shortly after a Frankie Goes To Hollywood-inspired poster campaign, Chicks On Speed, the German band, had been booked to play. For reasons McIvor still doesn't understand, lots of people came to the night. "Even though no one had heard who Chicks On Speed were, we had a 1,000 people turn up to see this band. At one point during the night, they were pretty shambolic—there was a huge queue to get in, but there was also a huge queue to leave. People had come in, seen ten minutes of them, and they were then queueing to get back out the club."

On a given night, Optimo regulars might have heard Dinosaur L and Cajmere records alongside Suicide, The Stooges and Fleetwood Mac. There were the Espookio nights on Halloween, where people competed to dress in the most fucked-up outfits they could pull together. (One couple came dressed as Yoko Ono and John Lennon, with a double mattress strapped to their backs; at another Espookio, a Lego man in fetish gear took first prize.) On one particularly famous Sunday, McIvor and Wilkes hosted an Apocalypse Now-themed Optimo, piping gunfire and helicopter sounds into a dance floor decorated like a Vietnamese jungle.

"We made a poster, which said, 'We love the smell of napalm on a Monday morning,'" says Wilkes. "And that's as far as promoting that party went. Nobody knew there was a theme. From outside, nothing looked any different apart from some mustard-coloured smoke belching out the front of the Sub Club on Jamaica Street. Most of the budget went on film props. We got some help from the parks department—there were three or four flatbed trucks that arrived with lots of vegetation. You were actually clambering through foliage in the club. Even if we'd just done that one thing, it would've been a fucked up party. We were letting off real incendiary devices. We researched all the artillery that was used in the Vietnam War. We had actors from the music and drama school, who were lying mutilated in bamboo cages in corners around the club."

These days, Optimo do occasional Friday nights at the club, where the music has evolved into a more dance-focused format. As the sounds have changed, the context that Optimo once thrived in has changed, too. McIvor and Wilkes insisted on freedom of expression at Optimo—nothing was too extreme or offensive. Some outfits at Espookio would now, McIvor thinks, be considered out of bounds in the censorious climate of social media. "We had Whitehouse play a couple of times," says McIvor. "That would be more difficult to do now, because people would start questioning the content of their lyrics—'This is not acceptable,' or whatever. Is it questionable? I don't know. But it should be open to debate, it shouldn't be shot down. It creates interesting discussions, which now aren't happening because people don't have the balls to do that."

As dance music becomes more popular, Sub Club finds itself in a contradictory position. The foundation of its longevity—and its identity—has been the residents. But the majority of their nights, and many others in Glasgow, rely on guest DJs to pull a crowd. Redressing this tilt in the club's programming has been on Grieve's mind for some time. "I'm personally very focused on trying to drive the club back to a place where it's more about the community and less about the booked artists," he says. "What we have now is a scene that's very different from even five years ago. Almost everything is advanced ticket led. It's an event-led scene now. Sub Club has always been more than a venue… but if clubs get to the point where nobody's gonna get to the door and say, 'What's on tonight?' then, actually, all you have is a venue."

Ross Telford, the bar manager and a Subculture resident since 2012, says that thanks to this recent trend, clubbers are less open-minded than when he began glass collecting at the venue ten years ago. It's helped him appreciate the value of Sub Club's regular crowd, and the setup that has helped sustain it. "They're going because they know they're gonna have a good night. They're going because they trust the one guy or the two guys that play there every single week. The two guys that know the soundsystem, know the crowd, can work the dance floor there. You don't really see this in many other places."

When a business refers to itself as a family, the analogy can seem too convenient to be sincere. During my visit to Subculture, though, I saw evidence of that bond. Marie Thomson, a regular at the club since it opened, was idling in the DJ booth next to Watson after the club had been cleared out. As people gathered round, singing happy birthday, one of the staff presented her with a candle-topped chocolate cake. (When I mentioned Thomson to Cappello a few days later, he called her "Auntie Marie.") "There was probably a stage where I was in the club every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday," she says, though she only goes out on Saturdays now. "Anyone that's ever been to Sub Club, they always feel that they can come back down the stairs. They might've gone in the 1990s and not been for 10 or 15 years, but a bit of them feels like if they were just to get off their arse and come down the stairs, it would be like it was."

Marie Thomson

It's this sense of consistency that has helped Sub Club endure. Dance floors are fragile spaces. Sometimes, it takes much less than a fire or the death of the owner to shut them down. In the three years that Optimo, Subculture and others spent in Planet Peach and Mas, people like Thomson had figured out the elusive answer to a simple question: what makes a club? "And I thought, part of it is genuinely the space," she says. "It's that dark hole in the ground, and there's actually something in the walls. Because it's always been a dance club, even before it was Lucifer's, in the '50s and '60s. So there's something actually in the fabric of the building. But it's not just that, because when the fire happened—and it was Planet Peach and then it was Mas—it still felt the same. We weren't in that building, but we still had that feeling of, 'We're all in it together.'"

Chapter

04

Residents

...in pictures

Chapter

05

Character profile

Sobhan Sheikh

Lighting tech

Half an hour after hearing I wanted to speak with him for this feature, Sobhan Sheikh beckoned me over to the side of the booth, a few minutes before midnight. He tapped his iPhone, then showed me the screen. It was a list of things he thought we should discuss. Some of the suggestions included: "Tornado Wallace saying hello in Panorama Bar," "People say they enjoy watching me more," and "Being trusted to take DJs out to dinner."

Sheikh, who started working at the club when he was 20, has been at Sub Club for most of the last seven years, working in PR and artist liaison. For the last three years, he's operated the lighting desk in the DJ booth. He's an energetic performer, something that he's occasionally teased for (his nickname is "Strobhan").

Another item on the list: he's tried to leave Sub Club seven times. A civil engineering and architecture graduate at Glasgow University, Sheikh was considering a normal nine-to-five and a mortgage. But the support network at the club, he says, has drawn him back each time. "Sometimes I feel as if I've been given too much of a privilege here. Even when I broke up with my girlfriend, and I was unemployed, the way these guys treated me was pretty special. I always cry when I start talking about this stuff," he said with a slight tremor in his voice.

How did he get the lighting job? "I was sitting in MacSorleys one day. I was sitting beside Barry [Price, the club's creative director]. A-Trak was playing that night. And Barry said to someone, 'We don't have a lighting tech.' I don't really know why they didn't have one, and I just said, 'I'll do it.' Barry said, 'But you've not done it before, Sobhan.' And I was like, 'So? I'll go do it right now! Sean will give me a five-minute tutorial. I'll do it!'

"The lights were the first thing I wanted to do in the Sub Club. I was into Daft Punk, I was into visuals, the whole thing. But lights isn't my thing; my thing's people. My thing's being an ambassador. Sometimes, when I'm wearing my North Face jacket—it's black and red—I remember this girl, Déas, said, 'Sobhan, you actually look as if you are the Sub Club.' Just the way I was dressed. I said, 'Fuck's sake, am I getting too involved here?'"

Chapter

06

Soundsystem profile

Martin Audio

"I can remember Harri saying, 'First thing you need to get sorted out, make sure the soundsystem is amazing,'" says Michael Grieve of the months leading up to Sub Club's reopening in late 2002.

Grieve and Paul Crawford, who co-owned Sub Club with Grieve at the time, approached Richie Rowley, the head of Martin Audio, and Dave Parry, the head of tech at fabric, to install a soundsystem that would be "the best in Scotland." One of the few positives of the fire was that it allowed Sub Club to start from scratch. "It was [Rowley and Parry] that said you should put the soundsystem right on the floor," says Grieve, "create a wall of sound on the dance floor. So the rest of the design of the club was built around it."

The Martin Audio Blackline system—made of four S218+s subs and two H3+ top boxes—faces the dance floor at a 90-degree angle from the DJ booth. It also faces the entrance. "See the way the room's shaped? It's almost a horn shape," points out Watson. "The system is right there, and it opens right up, and you get everything managed together really well, and it amplifies right at you. Some nights, you could stand at the back all night."

"It's just got this body, this warmth about it," Watson continues. "It's a nice, solid, rounded sound across the whole spectrum. You get a lot of these new speakers with quite a lot of plastic parts, and you can kind of hear that, that harshness. The materials that are used in Martin boxes are very, very well picked out and very well built. It's an effortless, clean sound."

Chapter

07

Mixes

The sound of Sub Club

Some of the club's many residents deliver the goods

"Sub Club has some of the best nights and very long-standing residencies, world infamous in all the right places. This is, I suppose, what defines the club, an intimate place with a rich heritage that continues to set the bar for contemporary electronic music.

The mixes we are presenting are a snapshot of this past, present and future approach. Subculture has run every Saturday for 22 years. Optimo was born in 1997. Slam have played at the club since '89, and I AM are celebrating six years of Tuesdays this month. They all continue to define electronic music culture in our city and internationally.

The mixes are contextually diverse: JD Twitch's warmup is recorded live, Harri & Domenic capture Subculture as the club starts to build, while I AM's Beta & Kappa go broader, from open to close. We are delighted to share this representation of the club." -- Richard Phillips-Kerr, Nautilus Rising label manager

Still haven't got your Sub Club fix? You can visit its club profile here, and there's more information on the series via the dedicated In Residence page.