The most important nightclub in Scotland is a basement you could walk past without noticing: an unassuming door on Jamaica Street, a submarine logo, a steep flight of stairs, and 3,500 square feet of low-ceilinged room that holds barely 400 people. The Sub Club opened there on 1 April 1987 — April Fool’s Day, a detail the club enjoys — and is, by the settled verdict of the international dance-music press, the longest-running underground dance club in the world. This page is the story of how a room that small became a name spoken with reverence from Chicago to Berlin.
Before the Name
The basement had a life before the name. In the 1960s, by the club’s own history, 22 Jamaica Street was an after-hours speakeasy for Glasgow’s jazz circuit — ‘Le Cave’ — reputedly graced by visiting musicians of the calibre of Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong; the tale is the sort that hardens pleasantly in the retelling, and this site serves it as tradition rather than affidavit. By the early 1980s the same dancefloor was an indie venue called Lucifer’s, hosting the young Primal Scream; and it was as a club night within Lucifer’s that the Sub Club first existed at all — a roaming idea that finally took the basement’s lease and, on April Fool’s Day 1987, put its own name on the door. The current managing director, Mike Grieve, describes the room as haunted in the best sense: you walk in, he says, and it feels like the space remembers everything that has ever happened in it.
The House Revolution
What happened next was a revolution the club rode better than anyone. When DJ Harri — James Harrigan, still a resident today — moved in during 1986 with a record box of dub, hip-hop and soul, house music was an alien sound from the American Midwest that most of Britain thought too strange to dance to. Then ecstasy arrived in Glasgow, and everything changed at once: the acid-house explosion found in the Sub Club a room already primed for it. By 1989 Slam’s Friday night was a fixture; in 1990 Harri took the Saturday; and the two forces combined in a night called Atlantis that became the stuff of local legend when Harri and Slam’s Stuart McMillan warmed up for the Stone Roses at Glasgow Green and threw the afterparty downstairs. From that night, Harri remembers, the club was queued round the block every Saturday for the next four years.
Residents Over Guests
The club’s deepest idea — the one every serious observer credits for its survival — is that the residents, not the guest bookings, are the point. In 1994 Harri launched Subculture with Domenic Capello, and thirty years later it is still running every Saturday: reckoned the longest-running weekly house night on the planet, a residency of such constancy that Harri’s own unbroken Saturday nights in the building stretch back further still. A club built around visiting stars is different every week and has no character of its own; a club built around residents has an identity its crowd is loyal to for life. The Subbie chose residents, and the choice is why it is still here.
Optimo
The other half of the legend arrived on Sundays. From 1997 to 2010, JD Twitch and JG Wilkes ran Optimo (Espacio) — a gleefully unclassifiable night that threw punk, disco, techno, dub and anything else that worked into one room, and grew into one of the most influential club nights Britain has ever produced, name-checked across the world as proof that a dancefloor need obey no genre at all. Between Subculture on Saturdays and Optimo on Sundays, the Sub Club spent the turn of the millennium running two of the most important weekly nights in British dance music out of the same tiny basement — and its Friday history through Slam had already given Glasgow techno its first home.
Fire and Return
Disaster came in November 1999. A fire in the building next door spread into the club, and what everyone assumed would be a few days’ closure — the staff, famously, decamped to a nearby bar for a pint while the brigade worked — became a three-year exile as water damage, an accidental demolition of one of the club’s walls, and the death of a former owner tangled the recovery in complication. The crew kept the community alive at other venues and waited; and in late 2002 the Sub Club reopened, rebuilt around a new Martin Audio system that made an asset of the catastrophe. In 2006 it installed one of the UK’s first and largest bodysonic dancefloors — a floor you feel through your feet as much as hear — road-tested, the story goes, by the Chicago house legend Derrick Carter.
A World Reputation
The reputation is measurable as well as felt. Resident Advisor voted the Sub Club the tenth-best club in the world in 2008 — and fifth for atmosphere, which is the number the Subbie would frame — while DJ Magazine has ranked it among the best on earth more than once; the roll-call of DJs who count the room a favourite runs from Derrick Carter and Honey Dijon to a rotating cast of the finest house and techno players alive, many of whom, like Roy Davis Jr, have been so moved by the crowd that they did things there they had never done anywhere. The new generation kept coming too: the Numbers collective — Jackmaster, Hudson Mohawke and the rest, among Glasgow’s biggest recent musical exports — made the Subbie their home, as did Slam’s Return to Mono and a deep bench of resident nights.
The philosophy that holds it together is pure Glasgow, and the club states it with characteristic bluntness: the directors’ explanation for nearly four decades of survival is, reportedly, two words amounting to ‘work relentlessly’ — no mystique, no self-mythology, just graft and an absolute refusal to chase a trend or a quick pound. The crowd matches the ethos: knowledgeable, unpretentious, spanning every age and background, and — as this site’s Comedy page says of Glasgow audiences — impossible to fool. A DJ has to earn a Sub Club floor, and the ones who do never forget it.
Still Underground
So the Subbie endures where almost everything around it has closed: the Arches gone, the superclubs gone, the ships and the school-disco palaces of this site’s Nightclubs page all gone — and still, week in and week out, the finest sound system in Scotland plays underneath Jamaica Street to a room of 400 people who know exactly how lucky they are. It is the rarest thing in nightlife: an institution that got famous and stayed underground, that aged without softening, and that answered its own founding question — how long can a club last if it never sells out? — with the only reply that matters, which is: still counting.