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Glasgow Live
Glasgow Live
National
Christina O'Neill

1990s footage shows Glasgow Hogmanay rave in full swing

Some of you might be able to cast your minds back to the days when nights out were phone-free, no one cared what they looked like dancing and your questionable antics stayed firmly offline.

Footage from that golden era has been unearthed by one of our Glasgow Live colleagues – and it's safe to say it's a real nostalgia trip.

The 15 minute clip shows Glaswegians going crazy to JD Twitch and DJ Brainstorm at the Old Fruitmarket on Hogmanay in 1997 – dancing, smoking fags, cheering and soaking up the atmosphere to bring in the bells.

That was seven years on since the birth of Pure in Edinburgh, widely hailed as Scotland's greatest club night of the 90s.

The brainchild of Optimo co-founder Keith McIvor – aka JD Twitch – and Andy Watson, DJ Brainstorm, the events began at The Venue in 1990 after the acid house explosion and, not incidentally, coincided with the arrival of Ecstasy in Scotland.

The weekly nights served up a genre-busting fusion of deep New York and Chicago house, Detroit techno and funk and jazz, with DJs such as Richie Hawtin, Derrick May and Jeff Mills getting behind the decks over the years.

Each party was a production in itself; a sensory overload of blinding lights and "terror strobes" cutting through a thick layer of fog from several smoke machines to fuel the delirium.

Their music mecca fast outgrew the capital and came to Glasgow for countless barn-storming nights at the Barrowlands and The Old Fruitmarket.

Twitch told The List in 1993: "What Pure has contributed is that you don‘t have to bother getting dressed up. You don’t have to care about how you look. It‘s like, if you‘re worried about how you look then it kind of detracts from the enjoyment of dancing."

DJ Brainstorm added: "I think we're successful because we don't try and follow trends. We just try and pull everyone together for pure enjoyment with as little pretension as possible. People are just getting down and having a good time."

Twitch has spoken out previously of being a "s*** archivist" – he didn't preserve many of his mixes and their nights were never officially filmed.

"We live in an era of over documentation. Sometimes live music and the club experience are best not preserved, as recordings can only document part of the story," he once said during an interview.

Be that as it may, this video is one of very few that give us a small taste of the Pure joy brought to Scotland's ravers in the 1990s.

You can also listen to one of JD Twitch's 1991 cuts on Soundcloud to get a feel for what Pure was like in its heyday.

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