The 2010 general election ended 13 years of Labour government. And as Gordon Brown saw out his last days at No 10, another 13-year reign was coming to an end in Glasgow.

Since 1997, the club night Optimo (Espacio) had defined the musical landscape of Glasgow, and its influence spread far beyond the city. It exerted its own pull on flash-in-the-pan genres such as electroclash and punk-funk, before seeing them off; its wild and enduringly knowledgable eclecticism melded techno, electro, no-wave, post-punk, Afrobeat, psych-rock, cleverly curated pop classics and more. The final night fell on the last Sunday in April, just before the election; one fan in Glasgow caught the zeitgeist when he altered a David Cameron campaign poster to read: “Optimo (Espacio) 1997-2010: Getting out before the Tories get in.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We had complete musical freedom’ … Optimo. Photograph: (Moff@ Photography)/David Moffatt

Optimo (Espacio) was named after New York post-punks Liquid Liquid’s 1983 track Optimo, combined with a random word that reminded its creators of a Fast Show sketch; it turned out the title translated into Spanish as “Optimal Space”. It wasn’t a roaring success, at first. It launched as a Sunday nighter at the sticky-carpeted Sub Club – before it was rebuilt as one of the best clubs in the country, after a devastating fire in1999 – primarily to let residents JD Twitch and JG Wilkes (AKA Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes) do exactly what they wanted.

Both had experience running club nights. Belfast-born Wilkes held his techno night My Machines upstairs at Glasgow School of Art’s student union, while Twitch had already defined one era; from 1990 to 1997 he co-promoted Edinburgh’s eclectic techno rave Pure, regarded by tastemakers such as the Face as one of the country’s best nights. When Irvine Welsh describes the city’s 80s heroin explosion being supplanted by ecstasy and rave culture in Trainspotting, Pure is one of the clubs he’s talking about.

“At that point house and techno had become very masculine,” McIvor said in 2010. “When I was offered Sundays at the Sub Club I decided to start my perfect night, where I had complete musical freedom.” Optimo was shunned for the first two years by clubbers with Monday morning routines to worry about, and the 400-capacity “Subbie” was rarely even a quarter full. “But when the club’s owner Mike Grieve got on the mic at the end of the first night, he was telling everyone, ‘This is going to be a revolution.’ We just laughed. The Sub Club always had more faith in Optimo than we did.”

When the night clicked with the Glasgow scene in 1999, it was as if a lightbulb had been switched on. McIvor put this down to a new advertising campaign, masterminded by Wilkes, an artist as well as a DJ. Beginning with the first “Optimo says” effort (modelled on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Frankie say” T-shirts), their monochrome, sloganeering posters became collector’s items among Glasgow clubbers.

Franz Ferdinand is a band whose sound evolved from the dancefloor at Optimo, and their drummer Paul Thomson was an enthusiastic attendee. “I’d seen the posters around Glasgow, the Robert Mapplethorpe image where he’s holding the rifle, and already I wanted to know what it was,” he says. “DMX Krew were on the first time I went, and Keith and Jonnie were playing Joy Division and Starpower by Sonic Youth with a four-to-the-floor kick drum powering through it. There was no snobbery, they genuinely wanted to share information with as many people as possible. You went down with the intention of hearing something you’d never heard before, be it Green Velvet or Nancy & Lee or ESG or Underground Resistance. It broadened my understanding of what music could do to you physically and emotionally, and we brought a lot of that to Franz Ferdinand. Even lyrically, the characters in the songs were all of that world.”

Optimo decamped to other venues following the Sub Club fire, before returning to the old venue in 2002, but its odd scheduling became an advantage. Its audience became those without early starts on Monday – students, musicians, artists, the young unemployed, bar staff, those with less interest in pleasing their boss than showing loyalty to a club that they saw as theirs. The entire underground of Glasgow was here, and of Edinburgh and elsewhere, when they could afford hour-long taxi journeys early on Monday morning. Those who joined the infamous, block-long Optimo queue (there was no guestlist, everyone was equal) included future Turner prize nominees, celebrated authors, cultural leaders – and Calvin Harris.

“When Franz Ferdinand blew up we’d be playing in New York a fair bit, and there was a similar thing happening there,” Thomson says, “but everyone was really in awe of what was happening in Glasgow. The Rapture had a wild night at Optimo and reported back, and the next thing DFA was happening.” Twitch and Wilkes are friends and musical soulmates with James Murphy, and LCD Soundsystem played Optimo dates throughout their career, from the Sub Club to the Barrowland. Live guests were key, from inspirations such as Liquid Liquid, ESG and Gareth Sager of the Pop Group to the best cult bands in Scotland, including Franz Ferdinand, Bis and Edinburgh post-punks Fire Engines, who played their comeback show at Optimo in 2005.

Possessed of wide musical tastes that were unforced and passionate, and a mixing ability so fluent as to transform the music (only at an Optimo show would Gang of Four and Rachel Stevens both be highlights), the invariably black-clad Twitch and Wilkes were enigmatic, but always approachable. Fearing staleness and repetition, they closed the regular night, and it was a move that seems to have ensured their legacy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Optimo defined Glasgow nightlife’ … Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes

Together or separately, they still DJ in Glasgow and across the world as Optimo, and their Hogmanay party at the art school remains a fixture, although the Halloween night Espookio recently finished (McIvor’s favourite costume was two regulars dressed as John and Yoko, with a mattress tied to their backs). McIvor releases music by artists such as Factory Floor, Daniel Avery and Peter Zummo on his label Optimo Music, and the duo’s style can be heard on their own classic mixes such as How to Kill the DJ Part 2, Sleepwalk (released on Domino) and Fabric 52.

Optimo was a club, a sound and a way of a life that defined Glasgow nightlife in the 2000s, and its influence is felt now in labels from the city such as Numbers and LuckyMe, in DJs such as Jackmaster and Éclair Fifi, and producers such as Warp’s Rustie and Ross Birchard, AKA Kanye West and Anohni producer Hudson Mohawke. “Their musical policy had a huge influence on my DJing and my taste in music,” says Birchard, who worked the Sub Club bar in Optimo’s heyday. “The way they crafted their sets opened me up to so many things. Their influence spreads far, but they don’t often get the credit they deserve – there are plenty of people out there now doing pretend versions of Optimo sets to huge festival crowds.”