Vitamins 3: Preview

Vitamins crew are officially in effect. If your one of the limited number being bundled into a bus this Saturday and whisked off to a rave den in a secret location somewhere in Glasgow's shady underbelly then count yourself lucky. With only 100 tickets available and now sold, your in for a very memorable experience....

And that's what Sam, Shaun, Cheesy & Luke, DJ's & promoters at Vitamins pride themselves on. Glasgow's club scene is fantastic, perhaps one of the best in Britain, but what do you do when it's so ramified with big, quality nights that unless your a direct descendant of The Royal Family then any party you put on is either going to be a trademark of monotony or send you into bankruptcy. The answer? Do the exact opposite.


Vitamins crew: Cheesy, Luke, Shaun & Sam

Launching in June this year Vitamins has already seen close to 500 people cram in to Sam's flat for what has to be the party of the decade (yes, it was just that good) and only two months later they were taking it back to 89' with a not so secret rave in a forestry somewhere out in the sticks. These are the type of parties which you'll tell your grand children about, everyone likes to go to a good club and see your favourite DJ, but you'll see your favourite DJ again; you perhaps won't find yourself dancing in a forest on a summer's night with a mile-wide grin and a new best friend who is infact a squirrel.

And this Saturday the saga continues with a line up which includes such prevalent homegrown quality as Jackmaster, S-Type, Mia Dora & Bamboo Palace live - all of course set in a sweatbox no bigger in size then your own livingroom. As I said at the start, if you have a ticket, count yourself lucky.....

To get a better idea of the Vitamins flex we recently caught up with Shaun, Cheesy, Sam & Luke for one of our most interesting interviews yet:

S: It’s fair to say that Vitamins is perhaps one of the more unorthodox club factions in Glasgow, with two highly successful parties under your belt, one in a West End flat & the other in a remote lowlands forestry, you’re yet to see the inside of a club. Can you explain a little about the concept behind Vitamins and why you started it?

[Shaun]: We're trying to avoid anywhere that's too regular. Vitamins is about a few things it's primarily about putting on good memorable parties but that's a fairly standard aim. The four of us who run it have been involved in putting on nights for a fair few years now as promoters or as VJs, sound engineers, PR staff etc etc, but Vitamins is where we get to experiment a bit more than you would be able to with any venue based night or something as official as a university radio station.

We like to put as much effort into the setting, the production and the people on the floor as we do into the people behind the decks. Of course we like clubs who book a DJ they like, stick them in a venue, put the name on the flyer and have a night that's just about the music, but it's not what turns us on as promoters. Take the same DJ and put them in a forest inside a mini club built from scaffolding with an open fire on one side and a tee-pee on the other and you'll probably find you get a better set out of it.

[Sam] We love putting on parties, but I didn’t want to start a clubnight. How could I? There’s just far too many exceptional club nights in the city that it would be pretty much pointless. I wasn’t a good enough DJ at the time to be a resident, I didn’t have much money and I really didn’t have time to do it regularly. So we basically decided to put our resources together and try to do something a bit different.

[Luke] I want to put on events which get people excited and that people remember. The kind of event you’d tell your mates stories about for a few years to come. With Vitamins we’re aiming to surprise people, do something no one else is doing, ultimately to put on the kind of parties we want to go to ourselves.

[Cheesy] I'm really excited by the concept of vitamins, we're not reinventing the wheel here, but I'd like to think there's not many folk trying to pull off some of the shit we've done. We're used to doing big production nights for other promoters and venues, so it's nice to keep challenging ourselves to come up with new concepts and ideas that keep the punters interested.

S: Obviously taking the party outside its traditional setting requires a lot of effort and carries potential risk. Can you give people an idea of the type of preparation that goes into these nights and what measures you take to ensure it all happens safely?

[Shaun] Within the Vitamins team there is a lot of professional knowledge, we spend a lot of time ensuring the parties go smoothly and with minimum risk, for Vitamins 2 (in the forest) for example, we had a crew doing the build and preparing the site then returning it to nature afterwards, there were guys camped out for 6 nights to make sure it all went ok.


Setting up at Vitamins 2

[Luke] Gmail, google docs, basecamp and ringing people. Over and over.

[Cheesy] There’s a risk involved with doing any party, vitamins 2 was a massive financial gamble for us, you don’t even want to know how much 3 buses to the arse end of nowhere cost... but we wouldn’t be doing this is it wasn’t worth it.


The police finally arrive at Vitamins 2

S: Are there any particular moments or anecdote’s you can share with us where you’ve simply thought ‘fuck, this is getting out of hand’ or something that sticks out in your mind which just sums up Vitamin’s as an event?

[Shaun] We've had vans stuck in the mud, scaffolding poles having to be angle grinded out of staging, 4x4 hires falling through, tractors racing coaches... but the number one whitey has to be when we realised the original island location for vitamins 2 was a no go. I won't go into much on that though because we've got a video of the trip to the island to put up soon.

[Sam] Definitely when we realised we couldn’t use the first location for Vitamins 2. We didn’t get back into Glasgow til 5.00am after one of the worst days of our lives and I had to go to work on a building site at 7.30am, pretty much in shock. As Shaun says, though, we’ll save it for the video.

I’ll never forget the first party in the flat though. Up to 500 people squeezed in over two floors and the garden. It’s lucky the police came at 3.30am, otherwise I reckon the floor would have caved in.


Packing them in at Vitamins 1

[Luke] Before the buses set off for the island fling, I had a frantic call from Cheesy asking us to stall the buses for half an hour. There were 200 odd people on the pavement of a normal Glasgow street who were all, in their minds ‘on holiday’, drinking, smoking up, having a good time of it. Right round the corner of this melee was a police van. Stalling the crew, avoiding the entire group getting busted before the buses had even left, and reassuring the 3 nervous bus drivers their coaches were going to survive the journey was memorable. Thank fuck we pulled it off.


Reassuring the bus drivers before Vitamins 2

S: This Saturday you’re taking 100 punters on a bus to a secret location somewhere in Glasgow. Obviously without giving too much away, how are feeling about this event and kind of reaction are you anticipating from the punters on arrival?

[Shaun] We've been down in the venue clearing it out, painting it up, making it inhabitable... I think it's going to be an intimate one - less than 100 cunts in a sweatbox with a top of the line PA and over specced light show with that lineup, plus all the usual small touches...fuck knows, but if Tuesday's radio show was anything to go by then it will musically be one of the strongest nights I've been to this year.

[Sam] It’s obviously not going to be as visually stimulating as the party in the forest. That place really was beautiful. The idea with this one is to really focus on the DJ’s and the party itself. The forest was cool because people could go and wander off and explore and sit out and look up at the stars and I think the actual dancing side of it was a little let down by this towards the end. The setup hopefully this time will encourage people to get straight in and dance from beginning to end.


On site at Vitamins 2

[Cheesy] Mother nature set the bar pretty high with the decor at the last vitamins party, obviously when you move indoors its a bit more difficult to create an interesting environment without reverting to the same shit everybody does at wee club nights, instead we're playing around with the scale of this party, it'll be a sweatbox like you've never seen before.

[Luke] The lineup for this one stands by itself. Getting a bus to go see Jackmaster, and you don’t know where you’re headed, then turning up to the tiny place we’ve got ready for this, with a bigger lightshow and soundsystem than most city-centre clubs will have that night? Kids will have fun.

S: Finally, we pretty much ask this in every interview, but as you’ve been involved with the Glasgow club scene for years, helping out with Mixed Bizness and also organising the legendary Subcity parties how do you see the current state of Glasgow clubbing? Do you feel doing something different like Vitamins is a good way of keeping it fresh and exciting in such a congested market?

[Shaun] I think Glasgow's club scene is doing well considering the recession. People seem to be picking and choosing their big nights out a bit more than a few years ago but it doesn't seem to be impacting the smaller nights too much. There's always going to be stuff that doesn't do anything for you and stuff you think is old hat or just shite but musically Glasgow’s output is probably only second to London right now world wide.

In terms of Vitamins, we wouldn't be doing this if we thought it was already being done better in the city - we wanted more events like the Vitamins ones but there didn’t seem to be any on the go so we had a shot ourselves. If you’re starting a new night then you have to be plugging a hole or sticking two fingers up to someone else’s ethos, otherwise it’s just copycat repetition.

[Sam] What I find strange about the Glasgow clubscene now is that the nights with supposedly big names, that should be drawing in 400+ people each time aren’t doing as well as they were a few years ago and even compared to other cities in Scotland like Aberdeen or Edinburgh. People are choosing to go to the smaller nights, or to nights who are putting on up and coming names rather than old favourites.

[Luke] When I first started going out I’d loose my mind if someone was doing an ‘AV set’- I’d expect the entire room to be a blanket of visuals and my entire night to be insane. I was pretty naive, but the hype is often painted with stratospheric hyperbole to get people through the door, and when they turn up they find just another night at venue X, everything is the same, only the DJ has a projector with his name flashing behind him.



With smaller nights it’s easier in a way to satisfy expectations and create something unique. That’s partly why so many smaller nights in Glasgow are doing so well. Throughout everything we’ve done over the years we’ve always been focused on giving people as exciting a time as possible, in clubs, flats, cities or the countryside. Vitamins just seems like the logical conclusion to that.

WHAT: Vitamins 3 @ a secret location
WHO: Jackmaster, Bamboo Palace (Live), Mia Dora, S-Type, Raksha & Masha b2b, Shaun Fae Solar & Sam Vitamins b2b
WHERE: Pre Party @ The Vic Bar, main event - heavy secret
WHEN: Saturday 27th Nov // 20.30pm - 06.00am
TAX: £15.00
FACEBOOK EVENT: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=123910087669539