JD Twitch on Acid House in Edinburgh

The recent passing of Keith McIvor, the pioneering DJ known as JD Twitch, came as such a shock to so many people in electronic dance music culture not only because it was so traumatic, but because Keith was such a lovely person: warm-hearted, deeply knowledgeable but ineffably modest, and always supportive of others’ efforts.

Keith was probably best known for championing left-field dance music at Optimo (Espacio), his long-running club with Jonnie Wilkes in Glasgow, but he had been active as a DJ since the 1980s in Edinburgh. It was there that he co-founded Pure, a club that raised the standard for cutting-edge electronic music in Scotland in the 1990s.

In April this year, I spoke to Keith on the phone about Pure, the early days of acid house in Edinburgh and what it all meant to him. I think his words go some way to conveying the emotional intelligence, sensitivity and sheer decency that made him so admired and beloved.

This interview’s going to be all about the acid house period, basically the time from ’88 to ’93 when it just felt like the world was vibrating all around you.

Yes, it really felt like utopia back then, like we were changing the world - of course we weren’t, but we were changing our world.

All that intensity and emotional commitment and belief - it was such a remarkable period. But of course there was life before acid house.

There was indeed.

In terms of house music, what was going on in Edinburgh back then?

In 1987, I joined up with some people who had actually started a house music night in Edinburgh in 1986, although it wasn't really reaching critical mass, there weren't really enough records to play. They would play the same records twice, and it wasn't really druggy. It was kind of pre the whole acid house thing. They were coming from a kind of gay perspective. It was like a hi-NRG night, but it was morphing into house music. I mean, by that time Farley Jackmaster Funk had already had a chart hit [‘Love Can’t Turn Around’]. ‘Jack Your Body’ [by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley] had already been a chart hit.

There was a good club scene in Edinburgh pre-acid house, playing all sorts of music, cutting-edge music as well, the ZTT stuff and a lot of proto-house stuff. I remember hearing ‘Blue Monday’ endlessly, and that's kind of like a house blueprint as well. So there was a very vibrant club scene in Edinburgh, and then there was this point where people started experimenting with playing house music. Then came the point where the drugs came in and it all completely changed.

People say this all the time, but it actually was true, wasn’t it.

It was true, because I was an evangelist for any form of electronic music, and I was trying to be a DJ playing electronic music, and the crowd was very resistant to it. Originally, people would come up to me angrily, saying ‘Why are you playing this drum machine shit?’ and get really frustrated with it. And then the same people, a few months later, were fully embracing it, but it was the drug that made them embrace it. And I was kind of frustrated they'd taken drugs to actually realise it was a great thing, but it did change everything.

How did you start out doing your own nights?

Well, so I was DJing at this club in 1987 and then started putting on my own nights in 1988, I tried various things. I took a year out of university, and then my nights just weren’t very successful. The first week would be successful, then the second week it would just dwindle away. I tried that twice, and then I was going to give up. And then in 1989, this promoter from Edinburgh approached me and said, ‘I've got another DJ, would you start a club? We’re going to have bands playing every week, and then it’ll be a free club to come to after that.’ And that was like the prototype for Pure and it was called UFO, and it kind of worked. We were having to play a lot of Happy Mondays and Manchester stuff, then we could play the music we really wanted to. And then every so often, we would have to go back to playing some Manchester tunes.

Then finally, there was a riot in the club. Football casuals from Hibs [Hibernian FC] had taken over the club. One night, [Manchester indie band] the Paris Angels played, and there must have been a lot of supporters of Hearts [Heart of Midlothian FC, Hibs’ Edinburgh rivals] in the club, and they literally kicked off a riot, it was a terrifying experience, chairs flying through the air and all that.

The police came and took away loads of people, and the chief of police said, ‘You cannot do this club anymore. Its time is up.’ We're like, ‘OK, right, that's, that's the end of that then.’ And then we kind of took a week or two out, and then we went back to the police and said, ‘We’ll start a new club with a membership scheme so we can control who comes in.’ And they were like, ‘OK, you can. We'll give you a month trial to do that.’

And that was actually the best thing that could have happened, because that new club was Pure. We [McIvor was playing under the name Twitch alongside DJ partner Andrew Watson, alias Brainstorm] could start again and we could control who came in - and actually by that time, all the football casuals were all on Ecstasy, and it was a whole change in the city because they ended up fully embracing Ecstasy. People who a month or two earlier would have had no bones about punching you were hugging you.

What was the place like?

It was a rock venue called The Venue and it was sold out every week right from day one. All sorts of people came - students, working class people, football casuals, gay people, a very diverse crowd, and then all these people were mixing and dancing with each other for the first time in their lives. So there was this cross-class interaction, and that was quite revolutionary at the time.

A colleague of mine at i-D magazine at the time, Avril Mair, was living in Edinburgh and she was so enthusiastic about Pure and would talk about how intense it was in there.

The sound system in the club was ridiculously loud and people were hearing electronic music amplified to that level for the first time, on Ecstasy, with the strobes flashing and smoke machines on full blast – it was like this sensory overload. At the end of the night, there’d be a group hug on the dancefloor; everyone just coming together, embracing each other.

It was so incredibly loud because it was a rock sound system, and we had so much sound in there with the monitors, I'm amazed I have got any hearing left. But that all fed into like people being absolutely out of their minds. And because it was so loud with the crowd noise on top of the PA, some DJs who would come and play for us would freak out because they'd never experienced anything like it.

I suppose for some people, this combination of music, drugs and this sense of communal openness must have been quite a profound experience.

It was life-changing for a lot of people. A lot of people were in very boring jobs, hated their jobs, and suddenly this opened up all sorts of possibilities. There was this utopian idea that everything was going to change, peace and love was coming in. I wasn't taking drugs at the time, so it was sometimes hard for me to deal with all these insane conversations all the time, but I was also tapped into it all too. And people's lives did change. Some in a good way, some not. There were several people that I know that lost their minds and never got them back.

How did you feel about all this at the time? People investing their emotions in you, the DJs , because you were providing the music and so you became some kind of focus for them.

On the one hand, it felt like I was part of something really powerful – people would tell me it had opened their minds, they were having these eureka moments, quitting their boring jobs, dropping out, realising they didn’t have to live their life the way that they’d been living it. On the other hand, I was quite shy and I found it quite hard to be the centre of so much intensity, although I was kind of feeling what they were feeling too, that everything was changing.

What also added to the intensity of it all was the rapid acceleration of the culture, how the music was changing from week to week, moving at this lightning-fast pace. And although I was quite reserved, obviously I liked it, because I'm still doing it.

Some people loved the club so much they even had the Pure logo done as a tattoo.

Yes, lots of people had the Optimo logo as a tattoo as well. Actually, there's a very active Facebook group for Pure and I find it fascinating to see what people post. Some people had life-changing experiences and they reminisce about the music and all that. 

A lot of older people are still going out clubbing, and daytime clubbing has become popular, but some people are like ‘it was so much better then and it’s just not the same now’. Actually it’s not the same now, but you do get great club nights now, and I think some people are a bit overly nostalgic - nostalgic for the drugs and the music. They think that in clubs now, it's all people with their phones out. I do a night in Glasgow and it's mainly younger people but nobody has their phone out. But I guess some people see videos of clubs in Ibiza where everyone’s just filming it on their phones, and they think that’s what it’s all like now.

I’m not a very nostalgic person, but I am nostalgic for how the music was was changing so fast back then. I can play a record from 1994 now, and it can still sound like it’s brand new. That's the one thing I miss. There's still great music, I still love the music, but there is not the same lightning-fast progression.

How did Edinburgh compare to Glasgow in that early period?

There was a brief period from 1992 when I think Pure was the most forward-looking club in Scotland. We would take coachloads of people from Glasgow to the club, and that’s mad - now, no one would get a coach to go to Edinburgh to go clubbing. We were booking people from Detroit like Jeff Mills, we were obsessed with getting to the music first. I was so determined to have the latest records, it was all about being upfront and new and having that thing nobody else had. There were obviously great clubs in Glasgow though, like Slam of course.

That initial period of acceleration and intensity at Pure - how long did it last?

I would say up to ’94, ’95, and then for me, the music just got too hard. And we kept Pure going for too long - I think we should have stopped in about ’96 but we went to 2000. By ’97 it had become very male crowds, loopy hard techno, which I didn't like as much, but I kind of felt that I had to play this music. But then another opportunity opened up, because about ’97 we started Optimo, which provided the freedom in music that I was missing by that point, and that fulfilled that need I had.

Probably ’94 was the absolute end of the peak of the first wave of it all, because a lot of people were getting burnt out by that point and moving on with their lives. And then maybe the next generation that came along didn't feel it quite in the same way, and the music wasn't changing quite as much, the drugs were getting heavier and not as euphoric. So there was a slight feeling of darkness. But before that, it had always been very light, very euphoric, very high. It was all about love, peace and euphoria.

Interview by Matthew Collin, April 2, 2025.

Photo: NTS website.